Environmentalism

*Updated Tuesday, May 1st, Scroll to Bottom
I recently saw the documentary An Inconvenient Truth. With all the fuss over global warming and climate change, it’s a great film to get up to speed on what that fuss is all about. According to An Inconvenient Truth, climate change (caused by global warming, argued as beomg caused by human activity) is already having devastating effects and is leading to even more disastrous ones. Since that documentary a rebuttal entitled A Global Warming Swindle has been released. They are criticizing An Inconvenient Truth and arguing that it is nature itself that is causing the global warming phenomenon, not human activity. What I will say about this controversy is that I do think global warming is truly happening and is observable, but I am skeptical about simplifying all the complexity of our ecosystem down to two metrics: carbon dioxide and temperature levels.

I write this not to convince you that either view is correct (as I am not in a position to), what I claim is much simpler: There is no way our thousands of factories, millions of combustion engine vehicles, and millions of pounds of pollution and waste pumped into the land/air/sea could possibly NOT affect our earth's ecosystem. Considering the vast majority of our byproducts are toxic or completely unbeneficial in promoting life, it is fair to say that our effect on the environment is very, very bad. Due to our more powerful technology and population boom, our effect has magnified at exponential rates in the past 50 years. This is why environmentalism is more important now than ever before.

Here's four hard questions we need to think about when it comes to environmentalism:

Do you know what impact humans have on the environment?

This is an issue of awareness, as in developed societies there are countless industrial processes that occur all around us that we do not see in our day to day life. Try simply watching the smokestacks of factory for 5 minutes, or reading up on the effects of factory farming on land and water, or visit your local garbage dump. Try to recall news footage of areas affect by oil spills, or what a forest looks like before and after clear cutting. Go to a major world city and take a deep breath of the smog. We need to start at a place of understanding that 6 billion people most definitely have a huge impact on the environment. Once you observe the processes that operate on a massive scale – such as mining or forestry, you get some appreciation for the magnitude of impact we have.

Do you know what impact you have on the environment?

This question takes the issue down from the faceless human race to the microcosm that is me. For the most part I am completely oblivious to my environmental impact. I'll give you an example, yesterday I purchased a bag of potato chips (among other things). Here's a list of the things I didn't factor into my decision to buy potato chips:

-planting of genetically modified potatoes
-the pesticides sprayed to control bugs
-fuel burned by farm vehicles
-fuel burned to ship potatoes to the manufacturing plant
-waste produced by making and frying the chips
-minerals burned and refined to create aluminum for the chip bag
-inks and bleach for printing on the bag
-trees cut to make the cardboard boxes to ship them (big grocery stores by and large do not recycle)
-crude oil burned and refined for the plastic bags that held my groceries
-10-30 years (by some estimates never, as many landfills lack sufficient moisture) for plastic bag to biodegrade
-??? years - for the polymer bound aluminum bag to biodegrade

I can honestly confess I didn't factor these things into my potato chip shopping. The short (but existent) mental conversation involved a sincere appreciation for the superior taste of kettle cooked potato chips over regular chips, and a brief (and potentially incorrect) mathematical calculation of dollars per 100 grams to compare prices.

My choices have an impact on the environment. Some areas of life I have very limited choice. For example I have very limited choice over where I could obtain electricity for the house I live in, I do however, have considerable choice in how much electricity I use.

What would you sacrifice to help the environment?

To say yes to one thing is to say no to another. This was so well demonstrated in a course I took called Ethics and the Environment. We considered this scenario: suppose you’re hungry and there is a cow in front of us right now. There aren't any grocery stores where we can buy meat. So if I want a steak, what I need to do kill the cow, cut it up and get at the steak meat. This is a choice, I might not want to kill the cow, but the cow-killing and steak-eating are mutually exclusive (excluding sitting around waiting for a cow to die... this severely affects the tenderness of said steak). It comes to a choice, and I cannot choose both.

We're natural born consumers. I don't care what it cost anyone for the production of that bag of potato chips - I simply want them, and will have them. This is very dangerous, selfish behavior that does not consider the ill effects of one's decisions. We hear all the time of bad practices by companies, whether exploitation of workers, child labor, poor treatment of the environment, etc. It is the world of capitalistic competition - might we forget the high cost of low prices?

The choice is mine – would I buy soda pop A if it costed more than soda pop B to help the environment? (suppose A recycled an B didn’t). Would I not buy fancy trendy item C if I knew it was extremely bad for the environment?

I see two issues here, awareness and choice. I need to be aware of the effects of my decisions, and then I need to choose.

Whom will you serve?

I won't say try to sell my particular view on global warming in this post. I will sell my brand of environmentalism: we have a moral obligation to care for the earth. My personal foundation for that belief is that God created the earth, it is beautiful, and he made us her stewards. For others that may differ. What I do object to is the 'we-need-to-cover-our-own-ass' environmentalism. It places man as the ultimate being to triumph, yet in fact we are the ultimate problem that must bow, in my opinion, to God. Fortunately some of that egocentric behavior has been bettered by understanding environmentalism as a way of loving our children's children. We are capable of rendering our world unlivable through chemical pollution, war, or other unnatural disaster.

Regardless of all the global warming controversy, the future will tell the story. If those warning against disaster are correct, we will see many more Hurricane Katrinas, droughts and floods like never before. Should Greenland completely melt away, we would be looking at global catastrophe that will spur our apathy to decisive action. Should that not happen, should we cease to love our earth?

*Updated Tuesday, May 1st*
Recently Intelligence Squared hosted a formal debate on "Is Global Warming a Crisis" calling 3 prominent supporters of Global Warming as Crisis versus 3 who opposed. Transcript (PDF) available, plus audio snippets (MP3) of the debate. It was incredibly thought provoking to hear both angles.