I think people who consider themselves environmentalists need to consider, and perhaps declare, how they propose to help the environment concretely, rather than in vague generalities. Some posters here do that, but some rail against things like fracking without ever stating just how far they are willing to push society in order to prevent it.
Just showed the film GASLAND to my Environmental Crime & Justice students last night. I’d seen it 2 times before, but something really snapped in me and I was very much affected by the sufferings and environmental health problems so many people face from fracking (not just that it involves perhaps more GHG emissions than even coal-burning–see below*). They use some 596 chemicals in the 7 million gallons of water they pump in the fracking process, like benzene, etc. – known carcinogens and toxins.
It is so wrong to do that to people. They keep saying there are safe methods, but we pretty much know those will rarely or spottily be employed since it costs more and Bush made it perfectly legal to pollute ground and drinking water from fracking (and other oil and gas operations) in 2005.
It may be legal, but it is surely a sin, and we who use energy or products involving fracking (which increasing means everyone) are also part of those harms. Of course it is sad to see the animals that are harmed by it, and the ranchers and farmer cannot really haul in unpolluted water for their animals and crops, the way the have to do for their families, but is it exceedingly terrible to see the impacts on the people.
If a person’s heart is not crying out on this issue, then there is something wrong with that person – some desensitivity to the sufferings of others.
Then just today I read that there is not only not enough studies on the health impacts of fracking, but it seems purposely companies and people don’t want it studied and brought to light:
climateark.org/shared/reader/print.aspx?linkid=288009
I know, Ridgrunner, that you live on a rural ranch/farm. You really need to see that film.
Not all environmentalists are the same. Some do those small things like avoid plastic when possible and turning off lights when leaving a room. Those are personal choices, and people are to be commended for doing them, whether I or someone else thinks they make much difference or not.
But many environmentalists have coercive intent. “I will MAKE you do without this or that.” That attitude, I think, is what makes many people contemptuous of environmentalism, perhaps more broadly than they should.
Take, for example, Obama’s declaration that he would “break” the coal industry and make utility rates “skyrocket”, all in the name of environmentalism.
Do you have a source for that. It’s sort of hard to believe Obama would have said something like that – he appears to me to be a person who is very circumspect in his speech. Maybe Biden?
Well, the coal industry has a lot of jobs, and the poor would like to be warm and refrigerate their food too. But these totalitarian-sounding declarations bespeak an obliviousness to human needs. The whole world can’t be nature parks. There are limits to how “environmentally friendly” we can be without making life miserable or impossible for people. Taken to its extreme, radical environmentalism means “no people” because human activity inevitably alters the environment from what it would be in our absence.
So, there’s a poison seed in the center of the environmental apple, and if environmentalists want a wider acceptance of their views, this needs to be recognized and people need to be assured that they’re not willing to bite all the way down to the seed.
I think most environmentalists understand the issues that we are sort of caught up or entangled in structures of environmental harm, and it will take a lot of work and nearly everyone participating voluntarily (or to some mild, market-based pressures) to put us on the right track, and that inflamed rhetoric (even tho environmentalists may be screaming on the inside) only turns people off. That it will take a combination of government actions at all levels (local, county, state, national, internation) and in various creative ways that make it doable and acceptable for people, as well as actions at home, at work, in businesses, in our churches and schools, etc.
I think most enviornmentalists who have actually enacted various environmental measures to reduce harms are very much aware there is a plethora of environmental strategies that can not only reduce our harms by half or 75% or more without lowering productivity or living standards, and strenthening our pocket-books and the economy at the same time.
And that’s just with current technology. Hopefully if there is some incentive for more environmentally better tech, then that will be forthcoming in future years, probably well before we even implement currently available measures.
It just depends on what we want – a dying world for the kids and the poor around the world, or something viable and good for them.
Nearly every environmentalist I know grasps these issues in that way.
– we still have the beautiful tail feathers). Not to mention they are working to come up with solutions to reduce wind-generator bird kills – which is more than I can say for those naysayers who suddenly got environmental religion about saving the birds.
