Environmental Events

I attended a few eco-events this semester. The first being the campus conversation on sustainability. We talked about making recycling simpler for students to participate in correctly. I was at the beginning of Bioneers and was able to listen to the beginning of the panel while everyone fretted about the technical difficulties.

Everything's Connected

Speth’s 6 transitions, which he outlines in his 8th chapter entitled “Attacking the Root Causes,”
causes one to ponder how the problems we are facing as a world today are all really connected and need to be approached as one issue. Population control, alternative fuel research, environmentally honest pricing, and eliminating mass poverty all, in some way, affect the other and it is certainly a daunting task to fix them all.
This being said, I believe one of the most pressing, and frightening problem we face today is the population. It is increasingly evident that we are reaching the earth’s carrying capacity and without change our planet will be unable to sustain us. The growing population will also exacerbate many of the other environmental problems we face, seemingly making it impossible to better our predicament. The road of empowering women does seem to provide hope that we can get out population under control. The continued education of developing nations about contraception and healthy sexual practices is a necessary step to ensure the progress noted by Speth does not reverse itself.
Creating environmentally honest prices is a great way to show the common citizen the environmental impact of the products they buy. People think with their wallets, and if someone has to pay $15 for a can of Lysol Disinfectant aerosol spray they may think twice and go with a product that is more environmentally friendly, and all the more important, cheaper. Same can go for gas guzzling cars. Families that don’t need that SUV will choose the more efficient sedan or hybrid if it costs them several thousand dollars less.
Moving from the previous example, the general population needs to have a basic education of environmental issues and practices. This is going to be the single most important aspect of the fight for the environment. Many humans, especially those pesky American ones, have grown accustomed to a comfortable lifestyle and enjoy not thinking about how their situation may very well drastically change in the near future. Making this change real for the common man will help to mobilize the public to call for environmental reform. Those who do have a base knowledge of environmental issues need to be vigilant in their pursuit of what is truly “green.” Businesses today all want to be “green” companies and many will lie to be considered so. Take ethanol for instance, there was a massive marketing campaign by fuel companies to promote it as an environmentally friendly product when in reality fuel derived from oil is the greener route. We cannot be accepting when companies tells us about their new green product or practices and must demand the truth.

Supermarket Pastoral

While reading this section of “The Omnivores Dilemma” I was struck by Michael Pollan’s foray into Whole Foods Market and how “supermarket pastoral” holds up under close research and investigation. Working at a Whole Foods myself give me somewhat of an interesting perspective on the matter.
Pollan concludes, and once he raises the question I think that it is obvious what the answer will be, that these “whole” foods do not necessarily hold up too well when looked at closely. The question now is, who will care about it? Having become acquainted with the Whole Foods customer over my time in the company’s employ it seems that they may be divided on that point.
I worked in the prepared foods section more or less the deli, serving up quarter pounds of egg salad and heaps of Vegan Kung Pao Tofu. There were a few different types of customers. There were those that wanted to taste everything before they bought it. They wanted to make sure it tasted good, or their kids would like it, before they spent a little extra on it. There were the visual shoppers who always look for new menu items or the most complex looking deli meat (spicy southwest turkey). They didn’t necessarily care about the price and just wanted to experience all Whole Foods had to offer. Then there were those who wanted to know everything about the product they were about to buy. When it was made, where it was made, what kind of meat/vegetables it was made with, things like that. I had the basic array of answers such as “none of our deli meats are made with hormones or preservatives,” or “our salmon is raised on Whole Foods farms, which have higher standards than normal salmon farms,” (I never found out what those higher standards were). These seemed to be shoppers who had fully bought into the idea of “supermarket pastoral” and it would be interesting to see how they would respond to hearing stories about how “free range” Rosie the chicken’s life actually was or how far their grass fed beef is shipped once it’s slaughtered.

Farmer's Dillema

After reading the first section of The Omnivore’s Dilemma I found much to think about in the section in which Pollan goes to speak with and learn from George Naylor in Greene County, Iowa. He learns of how his farm has gone from needing to carefully rotate corn and legumes so as to not use up all the nutrients in a given field to being able to plant corn whenever and on as much acreage as he wants, thanks to synthetic nitrogen/fertilizer.
I did not realize how much we are altering our environment by using Franz Haber’s process of “fixing” nitrogen. One effect already able to be seen in the population boom that would otherwise been impossible. It seems that we looked at earth’s limit on the amount of humans it could keep alive and only wanted to find a way around it. It seems that to keep a healthy, natural cycle, the earth could only have so much of its nutrients taken from the soil, but thanks to our ability to rip nitrogen from the air we can now run the earth to its agricultural limit.
It’s scary just how much oil and fossil fuels go into the farming process. What is promoted as good, natural food is no less synthetic than the detergent we use to clean our clothes. 1-calorie of fossil fuels for every 1-calorie of food produced is incredibly disconcerting. It would be, as Pollan says, more efficient to just be able to drink the oil directly.
The irresponsible use of farmers with their fertilizers is something needing to be addressed as well. It is understandable that they want to use more than enough synthetics to insure high yields; many of them are barely hanging on as it is. Unfortunately all that excess fertilizer has to go somewhere and it hurts natural systems as well as humans. Perhaps the government can offer incentives for farmers that use cleaner methods and have less effect on the surrounding ecosystems and water supply with no regard for their yield.
Again, as will almost all of the issues brought up, money is the main driver as to why these problems have not been fixed. If we can somehow look past the importance of the dollar we will finally be able to take positive steps, but as long we succumb to greed (and it’s hard not to) we will not better our natural state.

It's All Lies

In the movie “It’s All Cool” has some disturbing information on climate change and government censorship. There was however, something that I found even more troublesome as I watched the video. Both sides are vehemently opposed to what the other believes, in this case, climate change. Everyone cannot be telling the truth, which leads me to believe that someone is lying. It doesn’t matter who (even though I have an idea), but one of the sides in this argument is knowingly lying.
It’s troubling to think that this is happening. Why would those who don’t believe in climate change lie about it when they know we are on a dangerous path to a warmer earth? And why would environmentalists lie about global warming (yes, why would they do that?)? Are they just trying to create panic I order to further their radical agenda?
We need to take a look at what each side’s argument does. The anti-environmentalist argument causes people to feel safe, to go about business as usual, to help our economy. The environmentalists want us to re-evaluate how we use harmful products, our industry, and our waste methods. I don’t think that anti-environmentalists want our planet to be irreversibly damaged and for humans to die a slow and painful death, and I don’t think environmentalists want to create unnecessary panic. Then why do we have such polarized views on the matter? You would think that we might be able to get a straight scientific answer to let us know what is really going on. I know what I believe, but can’t help but have some little bit of doubt in my mind because the other side is so vehemently opposed. These seed of doubt are what arrest our progress and hurt the human race as a whole.
It’s troubling to think about because in this modern day humans can’t get on the same page in order to do something at important as figuring out what is best for our home planet. These organizations need to put their agendas, egos, and the thought of money aside in order for anything to ever get done. If we can’t do that then we don’t deserve earth.

I Like Snow

Let’s forget for a minute all the “likelys” “very likelys” and “medium confidences” and look at what this synthesis report is really telling us: The world’s climate is getting warmer, and it’s changing things. Slowly but surely we have seen changes in global surface temperature, sea level, and northern hemisphere snow cover. Earth is here to sustain life, and for the past few millions of years it has done a pretty good job. Now is not the time for humans to be meddling in the inner workings of our planet and bringing about these effects.
Right now these things are just that, effects. The rise in oceans, temperature and reduction in snowfall has not yet brought about colossal change in our way of life. But it’s somebody else’s problem until it gets to affecting humans. There just happens to be no one else to pass the buck on to.
Perhaps it’s going to take New York City being overrun by the Atlantic ocean for people to begin to take climate change seriously. Then again that may never happen. For all we know, climate change is a perfectly normal phase of the earth’s weather cycle and we are just going through a warm phase. But it seems an awful lot like humans are the cause, and looking at what else we’ve done to the planet, I don’t feel confident having the climate in our hands.
The scariest fact of all is that our affect on the planet is growing, “average arctic temperatures have increases at almost twice the global average rate in the past 100 years,” (30). This means that we are only picking up steam on our way to a much warmer earth. The statistics mentioned above are only going to be exacerbated as we keep ignoring our contribution to our warming climate.
The earth knows what to do. It knows how to sustain life. Ironically those that rely on it most are the ones contributing to its destruction. We love earth’s benefits, just as an athlete loves their body, but when it comes time to do the push ups and lift the weights we just seem to want to stick a syringe full of anabolic steroids in our ass and call it a day.

What is Sustainable Development?

Why have we not been able to figure out exactly what sustainable development is? It seems like a simple enough task, to define this term, this goal that we should be striving for. It seems that the problem comes from the governments, businesses, and other organizations that don’t want to be on the wrong side of that definition once we finally figure it out.
The definition that Dryzek gives seems to be a satisfactory one, saying, “sustainable development is a process of change in which the exploitation of resources, the direction of investments, the orientation of technological development, and institutional change are all in harmony an enhance both current and future potential to meet human needs and aspirations,” (145). It’s that last statement that seems to be troublesome “enhance both current and future potential to meet human needs and aspirations.” Depending on what a government, business, or organization views as what these human needs and aspirations are, their interpretation of sustainable development changes drastically.
Just as Speth puts it “increasingly, pollution comes not from something going wrong but from normal life,” (88). If our society is ever to become sustainable, we must first create a standard for what is considered to be sustainable development. The Environmental Sustainability Index developed in Northern Europe is the first step in holding countries accountable for their destructive development. Certainly in this country and in many others we are going to need to revamp our industries and find new ways to maintain the lifestyle that affluent nations seems to need. If we do not lead by example, the rest of the world’s developing nations will follow our same unsustainable path and we will exhaust our world at an alarming rate.

We're Going to Leave it Up to Them?!

The discourse for administrative rationalism is one that approaches environmental issues the same as a countries defense strategy or economy: leave it to the experts. But exactly who a country deems to be an “expert” seems to vary from situation to situation and country to country. If one is to give in to administrative rationalism, they must first be confident that these bureaucratic organizations are indeed fit to assess our environmental situation and find a way to address it. Politics being ever present, we must be wary of which of these administrations we allow to decide the fate of our natural world.
Many of the institutions and practices outlined by Dryzek seem to, in one way or another, hold multiple interests. For example most of these say they are committed to conserving natural resources/reducing pollution while at the same time are concerned with the wallets of those companies depleting our forests, rivers, etc., and putting pollutants into the air. In reference to professional resource-management bureaucracies like the Bureau of Land Management and the Fish and Wildlife service Dryzek states, “None of these is a paragon of scientific management to the extractive industry, be it miners, loggers, oil companies, ranchers, or fishers. But all operate according to at least a public justification of administrative rationalism, however much that may be violated in practice,” (77).
It seems that we are content to have these organizations that simply say they are going to responsibly manage resources and protect our natural environment while they are more concerned with the interests of companies that destroy just that. As long as these companies are able to say they saved a certain percent of wildlife, while in reality giving up much more than they saved, the people of the world can continue living their lives believing that “the experts” will handle the situation.
Many of the decisions made or laws passed will eventually end up in court. In this situation we are effectively letting a judge, a person with expertise of the law, not of environmental issues to decide what our environmental policy really means. Why does this happen? Most likely because those who made the laws were not specific enough or deliberately left some wiggle room in the legislation so that their high paying constituents will be able to eventually find a loop hole.
We are also allowing our government to merely react to problems (“end of pipe’ regulation) rather than be proactive and prevent the problems from happening in the first place. Wouldn’t we be better off never having produced harmful chemical to be put into the air rather than figuring out what needs to be done once they are there?
“The discourse pretty much denies the existence of politics of any sort,” (87). How can this be? In every facet of government, from the popularity contests of middle school student government to the bribery going on in congress today, things other than the issue at hand have a say in how things are decided and laws are made. It is because of this that the people of the world cannot simply believe that the experts will figure it out. We need to be vigilant in watching these bureaucracies and their actions to make sure they don’t allow the destruction of our world. Damn the man, save the (natural) empire.

Make Your Move

A couple of years ago the NFL noticed a correlations with injury and horse collar tackles (bringing someone down by pulling down the back of their shoulder pads). A rule was made, making the tackle illegal, thus solving the problem. We know what is ailing the earth, but unfortunately the problem won’t be fixed with a simple rule change. There are exponentially more factors to consider and most of the players don’t abide by the rules. A person’s tendency to buy in to a particular discourse and shy away from others makes progressing, in an environmental sense, all the more difficult. Humanity must soon choose whether to be prosaic and play the game set before them or clear off the chessboard and use their imagination to start anew.
Various discourses must be examined and intermingled in order for any progress to be made on the environmental front. We see something that could be considered environmental protection when “The Conservative Movement sought only to ensure the resources such as minerals, timber, and fish were used wisely and note squandered, so that there would always be plenty of them to support a growing economy,” (Dryzek 14). Here we see a group realizing the finite quality of the earth, and if they wish to continue to grow, or even exist, they must preserve that which they harvest from the earth. A group that believes in another type of discourse, Green Radicalism would of had to make a compromise when it came to dealing with the Conservative movement. While their environmental practices are economically driven and will eventually want to use some of the resources they are saving, the Conservative movement still wanted to begin to be more responsible with the earth’s resources. The millions of people involved in global policy making are never going to agree completely on an issue, therefore compromise and dialogue across discourses in a necessity.
Going off of Dryzek’s Chessboard motif, it seems that many people on this earth don’t know how any of the pieces move or what the chessboard looks like. Chess is just as much about a player’s opening few moves as it is about the final hunt for the king. Humans need to realize that the competition of discourses is only distracting us from our depleting resources. Our actions 100 years have affected environmental practices today, as will the decisions we make today affect generations of humans, plants, and animals in the future. Soon the debate over weather or not to continue economic growth may not matter since we won’t have anything to fuel our economy with.
Just realizing how our thoughts on the environment have changing in the past 50 years and comparing it to how our economic processes have developed gives a big picture of the state we are in today. “Once areas or marshy land were called swamps. The only sensible thing to do with swamps was to drain them, so the land could be put to useful purpose,” (Dryzek 3). What we once thought of as wasted land turned out to be invaluable ecosystems important to earth’s natural balance. We aren’t learning from our mistakes and the problems we already have are only going to spread if we don’t collaborate on a way to protect out interests, environmentally and economically. It’s frustrating when so many people don’t know how the environmental game is played, and even worse when they don’t care to learn. Perhaps it would just be easier if we all switched to checkers.

What is Wrong With Us?

Going to Goucher, a politically liberal institution, I’ve seen my fair share of environmental newsletters, pamphlets, videos, and other informational media depicting the atrocities committed by the human race on Mother Nature. I know we’re not doing a good job, in fact the crimes we’ve committed against our home planet are tantamount to beating a small child about the face until they are not longer cute to look at.
Speth delves delve a bit deeper into the reasons for the ravaging of earth. The reason summed up when Speth cites the disappearance of Sumatran and Kalimantan forests, “Asked why, an Indonesian professor of forestry replied simply, “Money, power, and politics,”’ (Speth 39). Indeed it seems that money is a driving force behind many of our environmental problems, and the ever-growing economy will make it harder and harder to protect natural habitats and ecosystems. “The world economy’s forward momentum is large […] there is no reason to think that the world economy will not double and perhaps double again within the lifetimes of today’s young people,” (Speth 18).
With many of the worlds forests being in developing countries and the pressure for these countries to keep up, the decision between economic growth and environmental stability is one that is all too easy for governments to make. Therefore, we must highlight the economic benefits of saving this earth (because having a clean, providing, beautiful planet is not enough…). Speth cites nature-based tourism as one of the biggest industries in the word, and no one is going to want to visit the great redwood stumps. We live in a “now” world and the benefits people can’t see in the immediate future are tossed aside. For instance, since the carbon/climate issue isn’t immediately detracting from our way of life it becomes a problem for future citizens of the earth to worry about.
Going along with the economy theme, those that have the least say or ability to change things are those that rely upon earth’s ecosystems the most. The poor and impoverished have the most to lose, many relying on the earth for their necessities and income. “Summary for Decision-makers” reveals that, “In 2001, 1.1 billion survived on less that $1 per day of income, with roughly 70% of them living in rural areas where they are highly dependant on agriculture, grazing, and hunting for subsistence,” (12). Speth refers to the solution thought up by Roger Stone and Claudia D’Andrea, saying, “the relatively simple act of allocating responsibility for managing and protecting forests to the local groups and communities that depend upon their healthy survival rather than on their destruction,” (Speth 40).
It seems that by simply convincing more people than not that the environment and its ecosystems are worth a damn will we be able to take steps to slow the damage already done. In a world infatuated with money it’s not a little ironic that the “almighty dollar” is green.