Nov 15 2007
Why should I care about the environment?
I’ve been reading a lot of books on conservation lately, and even though I agree for the most part with their stated aims, I’m having a hard time getting excited about the various reasons people give for putting up with the cost, inconvenience, and in some cases rude awakening that a true commitment to conservation might require. Here are some of the reasons I’ve come across lately:
Preserve our natural heritage for our children and future generations.
The sad fact is that we are programmed almost down to the cellular level for short-term gain. The history of our country is based on the “use it up, move on” ethos. And we haven’t even started talking about money yet. The profit motive is what has powered most of the devastatingly efficient large scale environmental degradation efforts of the last 100 years.
There are economic advantages to going green.
John Lombard, in his book Saving Puget Sound, makes the point that reducing conservation efforts to just laws or just money won’t work. “Something that affects our lives in so many ways has to make sense in non-economic terms as well.”
If we put things back the way they were 100 years ago (or before the Europeans came) everything will be great again.
Sounds too much like empty nostalgia, wishful thinking. Doesn’t take into account one very big change that isn’t going away any time soon: three million people in the Puget Sound area, projected to double in the next 50 to 100 years.
When nature becomes degraded, something of what it means to be human is lost as well.
This is the main idea behind ecopsychology. I like this point of view, as it gets down to the fundamentals. I like it so much I’m taking it as the organizing principle for my own work. But it’s not effective as an argument for convincing other people about the importance of conservation. We don’t want to hear that we’re addicted to rampant materialism, and that everything we do supports the reduction of the natural world to an eventual theme park. We especially don’t want to be told that the only way we’ll be truly happy is to “get back to the garden.”
We’re losing valuable ecosystems.
This line of reasoning can be dramatic and somewhat effective. But that’s because I know what an ecosystem is. I have been told so many times by conservationists that this or that habitat is slowly disappearing. We haven’t done a good job, however, explaining why this is such a tragedy. We talk in hushed tones, nod gravely, try not to let despair overtake us–but who cares about eel grass beds anyway, and why should I lose sleep over the loss of a few sub-alpine meadows? It’s not enough just to say these things are disappearing, and then expect the people we are trying to convince to immediately get the whole picture and feel the same sense of impending doom we do. (By we, in case it isn’t obvious, I mean people working in conservation). Which brings me to my last point:
Everything’s connected.
Now, maybe it’s because I’ve been reading a lot of E. O. Wilson lately, but I think that with this approach we are finally getting somewhere. Certainly, as an organizing strategy for a concerted campaign to inform people and change their behavior, it has just as many problems as some of the other reasons to care that I have so cavalierly dismissed. But I like it because I think that of all the possible ways to approach conservation, this might be the explanation that is the easiest for people to understand. They won’t get it right off, for the same reason that “we’re losing valuable ecosystems” doesn’t connect.
But I’m just wondering: if we took “everything’s connected” as a theme, and just stayed on that message, piling up example after example of how the web of life works (or doesn’t work as the case may be)–without even saying anything about conservation or “you’ve made a mess now clean it up” or anything like that–I’m just wondering if that wouldn’t eventually give people a generated-from-within reason to care.