Robert Hong -- Blog 2: Environmental Foundations

By Robert Hong

When the environment becomes the focus of a battle, a tug-of-war, people are forced to look at the consequences of each side. What will it take to irreversibly damage the environment? What will it take to protect it? In order to grasp the concepts that media and individuals throw out there, we have to learn the varying scales of attitudes that encompass their ideas. In this post, we focus on what is it that fuels an environmental activist to take action - the foundations upon which policies are created and changed. We need to shine a light on what influences people to take up arms against environmental damage.

Communicating Nature by Julia Corbett is an excellent source of information concerning the foundations of environmental ideas. Chapter 3 analyzes why people behave a certain way and how to predict it. Corbett gives us the context in which how a consumer would become an activist when they learn of a certain policy which they disagree with (such as disagreeing with meat products, or pollution, because of a personal belief). By this, we see how efficient important information sharing and education is toward a successful environmental campaign. The environment definitely needs consideration via discussion, which in return, can generate solutions.

Sometimes, even with the best wishes, people just can’t be bothered to walk away from their luxurious lifestyles. Corbett states that the economy has a very powerful link on our action (or inaction) when it comes to nature. In “The End of Nature”, Bill McKibben tells us that we are in effect killing nature because its survival requires us to give up unacceptable amounts of leisure. We tend to think of nature as this deity, this undestroyable thing which no matter how much we damage, it will never end. It is funny how apocalypse plotlines tell us that nature will take back the world - and some would find this an acceptable excuse to continue destroying it. Question: Who would be here to prove it, that nature does intend to reclaim earth, if we manage to cause our extinction? And still, there is a more abstract way to look at the end of nature: That if we continue on this track of controlling the world, eventually there will no longer be “nature” - that is relics of the natural world - untouched by humans. Think about it, would you consider a park “nature”? That’s pretty close isn't it? But is a strip mall? A factory?

We are in effect, unnatural, or as Wendell Berry puts it. The 20th century professor and writer turned farmer calls us “monsters”, created from our culture, and powerful beyond nature. What he means by power, is the ability to destroy nature - to “cause more damage than floods, storms, volcanoes, and earthquakes.” But even with such an awful imagery about the human race, it is his intent to shock us into becoming thinkers - to imagine a world where we actually cared for the world instead of stepped upon it. Are we in a time period, where we control so much of the world as a species, to be able to give up this “power” in favor of healing the planet? I think that Berry’s views are quite far from reality. However, it is true that he does make his readers much more accepting toward a farming lifestyle. Using beautiful images in the form of poems, he reaches to audiences in an attempt to captivate them with words of praise and direction - telling us that there is a more gentle way to live.

Henry David Thoreau was a writer, a transcendentalist, who implemented his ideas of how our world should work, in his journals. Even in the 1800s, this man created grand ideas of how he saw things being done, and how they would be better if the projects contained more thought for nature and less for human consumption. In his personal notes, one of the things that stood out was about a river in a town. He frowned upon the fact that some towns would have traded anything for a river, and yet this industrialized, wealthy town, took the river and enclosed it - not leaving its beauty, its use, for the townspeople to utilize. I believe that we can connect on his works on such a personal level because they are in the form of, you could even say, a diary. To have such emotional and private thoughts become public, we can empathize with their motives. These writings are the source by which individuals can be inspired by sense, and timeless ideas, and work to create a modern world, which even a 19th century man could envision.

We can start to see people taking action, such as in the documentary A Fierce Green Fire. Every act in the program centers around one major environmental hurdle in each decade, followed by activist solutions and the fights that they had to go through in order to obtain policies which protects the environment. The first part stood out very powerful to me, as an opening, to show us how people in the 60’s were able to mobilize and create so much pressure via ad campaigns that the government was forced to introduce acts to protect the Grand Canyon from being dammed. Had these people not done so, and had the IRS not entered the fight as an opponent, the movement would have had no widespread attention and one of our most famous landmarks might have turned out very different today.

In Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, she lures the audience with a story, telling us about a town which is a wonderful, productive neighborhood in the heartland of our country. With quick precision, she drowns us in information about DDT pesticide use and the way it poisoned the air and causes horrifying consequences - switching into a fictional state which perceives the future had the poisoning continued. This becomes effective to people who do not realise that they are actually part of the problem, and that they will be living in his desolate future if they do not take action and fast. Fear or doubt has always been one of the most powerful tools to counter inaction and rally support for a point of view.

Our society is very absorbed in our economy, our politics, and most people couldn’t give a minute to think about our future generations. How then, do agencies who want to counter global climate change go about getting people’s attentions? I do believe that we will always come back to this account of fear. According to a press release by the NSF, there is adequate data to show that if our global climate continues in this warming trend, we will continue to see growing intensities and frequencies of hurricanes in the American northeast. Targeting this area and causing concern will prove to be an effective one no doubt - as most of the nation’s populations live in high-density cities in this area. With a mix of historical data and trends, perhaps now people will finally take a minute to consider discussions about this dilemma.

Fighting a debate has two very distinct sides. This becomes a key idea because climate change in effect has two sides - the environment, and us humans. However, because we can relate to one side so well, we tend to forget that the other side requires representation. When there is no “real” opponent that can fight back, the debate becomes completely irrelevant. This is where the activists come in. They are able to paint on a visage of humanity upon nature itself, to explain to us how our actions impact our world, and how we can take countermeasures. Some will express their dismay at certain companies that are directly and indirectly responsible for climate change, giving us yet another opponent to levy against. Our current system of environmental change and the widespread desires to “make our world a better place” is because of these people - the ones writing wonderful stories of their past, the ones giving us ideas for the future. They give us the required foundation to support the changes we need, and with the right information and data, we can take steps toward bettering our policies. After those basic hurdles, maybe, then maybe, we can tackle saving the world.