Aaron
Ellison in one of his favorite environments--a local
bog.
By Aaron Ellison, Fisher Professor of Environmental Studies and director of MHC's Center for Environmental Literacy
On the first Earth Day thirty
years ago, I visited chemical plants spilling toxic waste into the
Delaware River and spewing toxic clouds into the air over Chester
County, Pennsylvania. I rode in bike races to learn how we could get
around without cars. I learned about solar energy and the new
technologies that could let us live more lightly on the planet. This
was a good introduction, at least for a ten-year-old, on how to
connect my life to the earth. In the years since,
environmentalism has emerged as an important social force. But, while
we have made great gains on any number of issues connected with the
environment, the environmental movement has been less successful in
changing the way our society thinks about how we can best live
lightly on the earth. Take the recent surge in
public concern over the price of gasoline as an example of the
environmental movement's failure to influence public policy and
debate. Filling up the car was a part of our "human environment" we
had taken for granted at least since the oil embargo of 1973. No
more. While skyrocketing gas prices are headline news, virtually all
discussion of this issue has focused on how we can get cheaper gas,
how the government can solve the problem, and how it will affect the
stock market. Few people ask why we are so
dependent on cars. Why has the fuel efficiency of the average car
actually declined since the mid-1980s, despite available technology
for increasing it? Why has investment in mass transit declined in the
same period? What are the connections between the price of gas and
how we choose to live--driving 15 mpg minivans and SUVs in exurban
developments with no sidewalks and no buses? Short-term fixes, like
releasing oil from the strategic petroleum reserve, restricting
exports of Alaskan oil, or drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge, are like putting Band-Aids on a hemorrhaging patient. They
also will lead to more problems: fewer reserves for the future, loss
of supply for those countries that buy our oil, further damage to the
fragile environment of the high Arctic. Systemic solutions, such as
reducing dependency on cars through careful urban planning,
increasing fuel efficiency, and investing in mass transit would not
only address the root causes of the problem, but also create fewer
new ones to solve. Yet, discussion of these
systemic solutions has no place in a national environmental dialogue
that all too often can not see the forest for the trees. Naturally, we have many
environmental accomplishments to be proud of. The Connecticut River,
on the banks of which I now live, no longer runs in all the colors of
the paper-dye rainbow, less sulfuric acid rains from the skies, and
we have arrested the depletion of the ozone layer. The spotted owl
has a small home, and dams are coming down to save the salmon.
Biodiversity, a term invented less than twenty years ago, is now
taught in elementary schools, and everyone knows that valuable
medicines come from the rain forest. Economists incorporate
externalities, those free services that the environment provides,
into their models and have valued the environment at more than 12
trillion dollars! Standard courses and textbooks in environmental
studies rehash this laundry list and identify new battles to fight
but also need to help us to focus our attention on the root causes of
environmental problems. We must start to pay
attention to our everyday environment--how we live, what we eat,
where we work-- lest all our recent successes be for naught. Buying
imported colored paper (and multicolored environmental studies
textbooks) means someone else lives on a chartreuse river. Removing
all the dams won't save the salmon if they're overfished to feed a
growing population. Driving low-efficiency sport utility vehicles
increases nitric acid in rainfall, smog, and gas prices. Living,
promoting, and exporting a lifestyle of aggressive consumption based
on extracting goods and services from economically external
"resources" like the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest or
the tropical rain forests places them, and their associated
biodiversity, on the fast track to extinction. For Earth Day 2000 we need to
expand our definition of environmentalism. Asking questions about
environmental consequences, recognizing connections, and living
consciously on the earth--all components of a basic "environmental
literacy"--should form the basis of how Americans think in this new
century.
photo by Fred
LeBlanc
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