Kids playing in the Yamuna River in India
It’s pretty clear many people have become too disconnected from the environment. There has been a kind of universal thought in the last 200 or so years that the planet we live on is infinite and limitless. Of course, that’s not true. Human beings have done so much damage to some areas of the world that they have been left uninhabitable, or nearly so. The photo here is of real kids in a real river — the Yamuna River, in India. It’s estimated that 58% of the city’s waste is dumped in the river. Yet millions of Indians still rely on these sewage-filled waters for washing and even drinking water.
The photo is from a project by MNN.com called the “15 Most Toxic Places to Live” and I’m sure they could have include 15 more, or 150 more. For instance, they left out the Alberta tar/oil sands where the U.S. is planning on getting much of its new oil from in the coming years. This is the dirtiest oil on the planet and it will be very, very expensive. Yet our government thinks it’s worth destroying part of Canada to obtain. This type of thinking can only come from people’s alienation from our natural environment. It’s one reason people don’t feel that climate change is something we need to fix right away. After all, if people think the environment isn’t part of their lives, how could climate change affect them much?
There is a new informational book called Thoreau’s Legacy that is worth checking out. Henry David Thoreau was a naturalist who purposely became very connected to his environment, as his famous book Walden explained. This book is also after a type of human-nature connection, and it puts a human face on climate change with stories from regular people. It just might help people feel more connected to nature. It’s online and available as a free e-book, but it’s also a hardcover book people can buy and share with people.
Here is one excerpt:
“Educational psychologists tell us that people behave according to what they believe rather than what they know. Changing our behavior requires changing our beliefs. Otherwise, I fear, there is little hope for resolving our climate crisis.
. . . . Modeling and experience are powerful tools for shaping values and thus, behaviors.”
This writer (there are many), Rick Lindroth, goes on to say that he has given his daughters valuable exposure to conservation and nature.
A foreword on global warming by the well-known author Barbara Kingsolver helps to kick off the book:
We find ourselves in a chapter of history
I would entitle “Isolation and Efficiency, and How They Came
Around to Bite Us in the Backside.” We’re ravaged by disagreements,
bizarrely globalized, with the extravagant excesses of one
culture washing up as famine or flood on the shores of another.
Even the architecture of our planet—climate, oceans, migratory
paths, things we believed were independent of human affairs—is
collapsing under the weight of our efficient productivity. Twenty
years ago, climate scientists first told Congress that carbon emissions
were building toward a disastrous instability. Congress said,
We need to think about that. Ten years later, the world’s nations
wrote the Kyoto Protocol, a set of legally binding controls on our
carbon emissions. The United States said, We still need to think
about it. Now we watch as glaciers disappear, the lights of biodiversity
go out, the oceans reverse their ancient order. A few degrees
look so small on the thermometer. We are so good at measuring
things and declaring them under control. How could our weather
turn murderous, pummel our coasts, push new diseases like dengue
fever onto our doorstep? It’s an emergency on a scale we’ve never
known, and we’ve responded by following the rules we know: efficiency,
isolation. We can’t slow productivity and consumption—
that’s unthinkable. Can’t we just go home and put a really big lock
on the door?
Not this time. Our paradigm has met its match. Now we can
either shift away from a carbon-based economy or find another
place to live. Imagine it: we raised our children on a lie. We gave
them this world and promised they could keep it running on a fossil
substance—dinosaur slime—and it’s running out. The geologists
disagree only on how much is left, and the climate scientists now
say they’re sorry, but that’s not even the point: we won’t have time
to use it all. To stabilize the floods and firestorms, we’ll have to reduce
our carbon emissions by 80 percent within a few decades.
We’re still stuck on a strategy of bait and switch: okay, we’ll
keep the cars but run them on ethanol made from corn! But … we
use petroleum to grow the corn. Even if you like the idea of robbing
the food bank to fill the tank, there is a math problem: it takes
nearly a gallon (or more, by some accounts) of fossil fuel to render
an equivalent gallon of corn gas. Think of Jules Verne’s novel in
which the hero is racing Around the World in Eighty Days and
finds himself, on day seventy-nine, stranded in mid-Atlantic on a
steamship that has run out of coal. Phileas Fogg convinces the captain
to pull up the decks and throw them into the boiler. “On the
next day the masts, rafts, and spars were burned. The crew worked
lustily, keeping up the fires. There was a perfect rage for demolition.”
The captain remarked, “Fogg, you’ve got something of the
Yankee about you.” Oh, novelists. They always manage to have the
last word, even when they’re dead.
How can we get from here to there without burning up our
ship? That must be our central task now: to escape the wild rumpus
of carbon-fuel dependency in the nick of time. We must make
rules that were previously unthinkable, imposing limits on what
we use and possess. We must radically reconsider the power relationship
between humans and our habitat. In the words of my esteemed
colleague and friend Wendell Berry, the new Emancipation
Proclamation will not be for a specific race or species, but for life
itself. We Americans are the 5 percent of humans who have made
around 30 percent of all the greenhouse gases emitted since 1750.
But our government has been reluctant to address the issue, for one
reason: it might hurt our economy. For a lot of history, many nations
said exactly the same thing about abolishing slavery: We can’t
grant humanity to all people—it would hurt our cotton plantations,
our sugar crop, our balance of trade. Until the daughters and
sons of a new wisdom declared: We have to find another way.
Enough of this shame.
Have we lost that kind of courage? Have we let economic
growth become our undisputed master again? As we track the unfolding
disruption of natural and global stabilities, young people
are told to buy into business as usual: you need a job. Do what we
did, preserve a profitable climate for manufacture and consumption
at any cost. Even at the cost of the other climate, the one that
was hospitable to life as we knew it.
In the awful moment when someone demands at gunpoint,
“Your money or your life,” the answer is not supposed to be difficult.
And in fact a lot of people are rethinking the money answer,
looking behind the cash price to see what it costs us to mine and
manufacture, to transport, to burn, to bury. What did it harm on its
way here? Could I get it closer to home? In previous generations we
rarely asked about the hidden costs; we put them on layaway. But
the bill has come due. Some European countries are calculating the
“climate cost” of consumer goods and adding it to the price. We’re
examining the moralities of possession, inventing renewable technologies,
recovering sustainable food systems. We’re even warming
up to the idea that the wealthy nations have to help the poorer
ones, for the sake of a reconstructed world. Generosity will grind
some gears in the machine of Efficiency, but we can retool.
The arc of history is longer than human vision. It bends. We
abolished slavery, we granted universal suffrage. We have done
hard things before. Each time it took a terrible fight between people
who could not imagine changing the rules and those who said,
“We already did. We have made the world new.” The hardest part
will be to convince ourselves of the possibilities and hang on. If we
run out of hope at the end of the day, we’ll rise in the morning and
put it on again with our shoes. Hope is the only reason we won’t
burn what’s left of the ship and go down with it. If somebody says,
“Your money or your life,” you can say, “Life.” And mean it.
See more about the book and download the whole thing at the Union of Concerned Scientists website.
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