It’s good to know that we’re moving forward as a society; all indicators of social justice in America seem to point to this. However, the problem still seems to be with the intentions with which we create legislation. The Modern Environmental Movement was definitely a step in a better direction because it spurred on the passing of the Endangered Specie Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Water Act. Except the reality is that such a victory was accomplished because of alterior motives. I’m still a little turned off by President Nixon’s creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. It’s disheartening that it was done purely as a political move rather than as an endeavor to empower those who care about the environment. I can’t say that any of the pieces of legislature that came out of that period have negatively impacted society, but it goes back to the whole argument between having intrinsic value instead of instrumental value even when they both exist to achieve the same purposes. It’s beginning to make sense why such a mentality shouldn’t be accepted.
It fuels the mentality in favor of practices like fracking. People are willing to overlook evidence just because it’s inconclusive, even if there’s a good chance that it could be dangerous. Ignoring certain aspects of our environmental condition could indeed by caused by not taking lessons from history, but these problems that we choose to accept (and perhaps deal with later) are bound to become worse when new technologies and developments cause different sets of difficulties, particularly with fracking. It’s this synergism of problems that makes future development so worrisome. We end up suffering from our negligence of old problems and make things even by making some new unforeseen ones.
However, it’s heartening to know that New York City is trying its best to encourage environmentally friendly standards. Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Guidelines seem to be helpful on the surface, but as I articulated in an essay a few weeks ago, it needs to be extended more forcefully in order to be successful. I know that if I were in power, I wouldn’t hesitate to raise the price and keep increasing it based on inflation—that 5-cent figure is more than half a century old. The apparent desire (though sometimes necessity) of returning those cans assuredly diminishes as time goes on and as 5 cents become ever more worthless. Having the tax gradually go up would of course raise the cost, but there is otherwise no incentive to actually return them—unless it is a source of income. The deposit laws have slowly melted into the background. I look at these LEED guidelines the same way. They need to slowly be made more mandatory with each structure that gets built because a change would be difficult to accept. I can already hear the libertarian uproar that would come about from making a dramatic leap towards sustainable design.
However, one of the main difficulties that come with all this is this idea of mentality. Making people feel the necessity of environmentalism is just as difficult as using reason to convince a stubborn, unreasonable person. We have to start from a young age if we think we could be successful, especially in this age of Grassroots Environmentalism.
