Reva McAulay
10.18.12
MHC 200 Weekly Writeup #6
There seem to be a couple of running themes in everyone else’s responses this week. One, that environmental sustainability is impossible, and two, that the Civil Rights movement and indeed every other issue in history has not been all that successful. I disagree with both those points. Environmental sustainability is very possible, just not immediately. It doesn’t need to happen immediately. The world is progressing towards it, and that’s good, even if the progress could be faster. To say, oh, it’s impossible and will never happen so we should not even try just slows that progress. Everyone who cares needs to do things to facilitate progress to make up for the people who don’t care, and if some of the people who care don’t do anything because they think it is futile, that just swings the balance in favor of the care-nots. And I bet most of the people who are saying that progress is impossible because people don’t care are not doing anything about it themselves.
As for the second point, the Civil Rights movement has been extremely successful, and anyone who doesn’t think so has expectations that are too high. Sustainability might be a more technically difficult problem to solve, but in getting people engaged it has similar roadblocks, and engagement is ultimately what makes or breaks it. For Civil Rights, the problem was that it affected other people, not the people who had to make the changes. For the environmental problem, the issue is that it will affect people at some point in the future. The world moves slowly, and the change between 50 years ago and today is enormous. If sustainability changed that quickly we would be in a far far better situation than we are in now. If sustainability changed that quickly, it would not even be a pressing issue today.
Emotional engagement is a strange point to agree or disagree with. It’s obvious that they way people are, no change will take place without emotional engagement. The only people who do things for the environment are the ones who are emotionally engaged. I guess the arguable point is who should be doing the emotional engagement, and whether it should be a substitute for or addition to educating people on the facts. Emotional engagement is only good if its based on solid evidence, and if the solid evidence is widely known. Otherwise it could be seen as kind of manipulative. (Then again, what part of elementary school isn’t manipulative?).
Emotional engagement isn’t, though, the ultimate solution to sustainability. It can make people reduce their waste and buy more environmentally friendly products, but emotional engagement is never going to make lots of people decide to fundamentally change their lifestyle away from the ‘constantly increasing GDP’ model. Or I don’t know, maybe it will, but it would take a deeper, longer term, more pervasive kind of emotional engagement than just getting people scared or riled up or virtuous. Its probably the kind of thing that takes a generation or two to change, starting with kids (and here we come back to elementary school and the manipulative aspects thereof), like in the Civil Rights movement. A couple generations from now could consist mostly of people who don’t buy the same amount of things we do, who don’t upgrade and replace everything constantly. That would really be sustainability.
Unrelated to anything else, this closing-the-loop business is really cool. Not like NASA/Space race/man-on-the-moon cool, but still pretty cool. It’s got people figuring out ways to do things previously thought to be impossible, and it’s not so esoteric as biochemistry and finding a magical cure for cancer. All it needs is a little Space Race, Iron Man, this is the future of the human race marketing.
