Everyone loves the environment. Conservationists love it because they worship nature and want to preserve it. Industrialists love it because you can't have industry without using raw materials and these come from the earth. They love the environment like a gambler loves his wallet.
And everyone else?
Most people would prefer that the stuff flowing from Hanover's taps taste like water instead of fish poop and that the air not make them cough. Just about everyone wants a strong, healthy planet.
And yet, environmental issues seem to stir up a great deal of consternation and animosity. This should not be. The problem, I believe, lies with poor communication. Long-term health and prosperity is what each side wants, but both fail to understand that they have this goal in common. Environmentalists hurt such communication by failing to emphasize the concrete rewards of conservation and they place undue emphasis on the sentimental and impalpable benefits. While President Bush's foreign policy adventures distract him from enhancing his irresponsible environmental policies, the environmental movement must take action with renewed focus and work to change the way America thinks and acts.
Liberal conservationists present themselves as passionate, emotional supporters of the earth and they wax lyrical about sustaining the mountains and rivers and forests forever, preaching the intrinsic value of wilderness.
Right enough -- millions of people feel the same. Although these emotions are difficult to articulate, the broad success of authors like Edward Abbey and movies like "Free Willy" and other sentimental appeals speak to their importance.
Such impassioned voices prompt some people to devote their lives to the welfare of the planet. Furious demonstrators dressed as owls protest the cutting old growth forests in the Pacific Northwest. Greenpeace steers tiny boats into the path of enormous whaling vessels. These acts are inspiring, creative and brave, but bad for the environmental movement.
Most Americans are neither environmental activists nor powerful industrialists. While emotional appeals rouse people into activism, they turn many others away and make the public image of environmentalists one of silly dreamers without a grasp of the real world. People deride environmentalists as dirty hippies and tree huggers -- or "druids," to use a term popularized by John McPhee.
They are seen, at best, as misguided dreamers and, at worst, as radical misanthropes. To most people, Greenpeace's boats are more Don Quixote tilting at windmills than David staring down Goliath.
The loudest, strangest and most flamboyant demonstrators get the most attention. The young man refusing to vacate his platform high in the branches of a redwood tree is a much more striking image than a tired environmental lobbyist in a business suit calling her thirtieth senator.
Few will listen to someone living in a tree, and the lobbyist does more concrete good for the environment. Equally committed people working within the system wield genuine political influence and enact the changes in laws and policy essential to the health of the environment. There have been protests and petitions against drilling in Alaska National Wildlife Reserve, but the real reason for its current safety from logging is political pressure.
For most environmental issues, rationality and emotion need not conflict. In the long term, conservation is necessary to preserve the quality of human life. Thinking only of maintaining the consumption-intensive status quo is a good way to use up raw materials without any vision of what to do next. Considered rationally, conservation is the best way to maintain a high living standard far into the future.
The environment's problems deserve a realistic, idealistic voice that will be listened to attentively by everyone from Washington, DC, to the logging towns of Oregon. If the movement as a whole takes a rational and collected but urgent tone when presenting the environment's problems, then the rest of the country will hear it, respect it, understand it better and everyone will enjoy the benefits.
