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.