This Earth Day more than 160 countries signed the Paris Climate Agreement, a transnational initiative to moderate global warming. An agreement like this has never been seen before and it is therefore difficult to accurately gauge how successful it will be. There are many challenges that face the pact's implementation, and one of the most difficult facets to change is the global economy especially when places like Russia base a large part of their domestic economies on fossil fuels. Given this inevitable diversity of the world, it is necessary that every demographic be included in this much needed transition because otherwise there may be cracks in the new system that can break the whole movement. A difficult demographic to engage in person-person and nation-nation cooperation is the low-income or less-developed percentile. Sustainability is difficult to ensure in low-income areas because there often more short-term needs that must be tended to which can not always be environmentally friendly due to resource availability. What’s it like on Earth Day in Hollis?
Covenant College interdisciplinary studies professor Calvin Beisner thinks that “Environmentalism is distinctly a preoccupation of the wealthy. Environmental protection increases precisely to the extent that a society becomes wealthy enough to afford it.” (“How Environmentalism Disdains the Poor”). Is this true? Are people who are most ecologically active the ones who have the fiscal and physical security that allows them to be?
On the state level, Anup Shah from www.globalissues.comnotes that “poverty and third world debt has been shown to result in resource stripping just to survive or pay off debts.” This seems to put the poor at odds with environmentalism in a way that is not fixable. If a nation’s economy does not allow it to pay off debts or sustain itself in an environmentally friendly way then it is condemned by environmentalists even if it doesn’t want to be in the position it is in. It appears that the more dire the situation the less sustainable methods are allowed to be. Beisner also points out in his article that a common narrative in the movement is that the more low-tech a society is the more environmentally friendly it is but that this is not true in places like India where population density and poverty force people to burn “dried dung and scrap wood” for heat because of lack of access to natural gas and electricity — never mind renewables.
How can we walk a path towards a happy planet together with no one leaving a trail of bread crumbs back to cheaper, more immediately accessible, dirty methods?
I agree (in part) with Reddit user JordanLeDoux who posted “CMV: The biggest mistake of environmentalists is telling people to ‘save the environment’. Environmentalism is about saving ourselves.” in /r/changemyview on April 17th. He goes on to say that “environmentalism has exactly one goal: to prevent global changes to the Earth’s environment that would destabilize our ability to run a functioning society. That’s it.” I think he’s right in that the framing of the problem is wrong however I think it’s a little robotic to assume that “the reason we worry about species going extinct is because we don’t understand much about how the species interacts with the systems we depend on and [that] some species we have direct use for.” It is true that we should care about tiny creatures like phytoplankton as well as big creatures like rhinoceroses. However to say that the reason we do so is just because of these animals’ interaction with our functional mechanisms is blind to the fact that some people just truly love animals. Everyone has a friend who is obsessed with a weird animal for some indistinguishable reason. (P.S. you should check out springbok. They’re really cool antelopes).
Going back to LeDoux’s main point of framing the narrative around our society, I think that this may be the best vehicle for change in our situation. People understand that the environment should be taken care of and the altruistic nature behind defending it but come on! At a certain point it is redundant to remind the 7ish billion people on Earth who are all leading distinctly different lives that they need to drop what they’re doing and save the rain forests. The poorest among us do not have the time or resources to be able to fight for every little cause no matter how noble it is, but there is a mindset that can be created that is aligned with Aldo Leopold’s “land ethic” wherein we morally interact with the environment but also more selfishly ensure its preservation so that we too must survive. We must communicate the planet as OUR planet, OUR home, and OUR responsibility because without us it is a muse to no one, and without it we have no song.
