The Mobil Corp. proclaimed the "good news that the sky is not falling" in an recent advertisement in many national magazines last week. Don't worry, they tell those of us who are plagued by a twinge a guilt every time we use that extra napkin at Collis, because "the cycle of decline in the quality of our environment can be broken and, despite what some of the environmentalists are claiming, great strides have already been taken to improve our situation." They point to a recent book by Gregg Easterbrook "A Moment on Earth: The Coming Age of Environmental Optimism" to support their claim that things are improving.
In many ways they and Easterbrook are correct. We continue to have a ready supply of petroleum, smog has declined in the U.S. even as the number of cars on the road increased, and today our water is cleaner than several decades ago. But I part company with the Mobil Corp. when they assert that "Mother Nature is pretty successful in taking on human nature ... [our problems] won't be solved by crying that the end is near or by diminishing the accomplishments we have already achieved."
Bill McKibben, the author of "The End of Nature" offered an excellent rebuttal to Easterbrook in an article in the New York Times Magazine (July 23, 1995). McKibben notes that the same Congress that helped clean America is now gutting the laws responsible for this turnaround. He points to signals that are being ignored: Widespread extinction, growing population and dwindling wilderness. Most importantly, he identifies a problem that is more important than haggling over emissions standards -- the lumping together of all environmental problems.
The environmental movement is a response to many varied problems. We have made progress on some of the more superficial problems, such as pollution, but we have made little progress on the deeper problems because they do not spring from the same sources. For example, a decline in smog leads to a decline in the drive for mass transportation, and the chances for stopping the growing percentage of invisible carbon dioxide declined with it. As McKibben puts it, "the environmental movement, in other words, has reached a diagnostic crisis ... There are those who insist it is indigestion and want to prescribe some Bromo. Others say arteriosclerosis, which means our basic behaviors must change."
While economists assert that the market will cure all of our ills, we lose 40,000 species per year, and our world population grows, adding 100 million new humans each year. What seems to escape many policymakers is the fact that with every less developed country (LDC) lies the potential for environmental degradation on the same scale as is seen in the United States. Many of these nations clear-cut rain forest to sustain their growing populations (some with doubling times of less than one generation) -- which we in the more developed countries happily consume. After the forest is gone, they can use this land for a short period of time, but soon it becomes a ranch or desert. But they must move on in order to avoid becoming a victim of the vicious cycle. Without any type of foreign aid or educational programs, this pattern will continue. Of course, we in the U.S. do our fair share of destruction of biodiversity -- we have clear-cut old growth forests to near extinction.
What is needed is not only a reevaluation of our own consumption habits, but also a realization that reducing pollution and protecting endangered species are only superficial changes. We must begin to help LDCs modernize without doing severe damage to their remaining wilderness, and we must educate and empower the women living in LDCs so that they will choose to have smaller families.
Discussions about these more difficult, but larger, problems are the first step in a realistic plan that reflects the variety of problems plaguing our fragile ecosystem. It is hard to be as optimistic as Gregg Easterbrook and the Mobil Corp. when one looks at the full range of problems that we must solve, especially when government is headed by men, such as Ronald Reagan, who are of the opinion that "you've seen one redwood tree, you've seen them all."
