When I first heard that the third Macaulay seminar was based around the environment and sustainability, I won’t lie I was a little unsure as to what I thought of that. I recycled, I understood the world had environmental problems and thought that in some sense that was enough; I had little idea of how bad the planet’s environmental problem really was, both in a physical pollutant sense and in the sense of how oblivious and ambivalent our culture is on the issue. The BP discussion last class really made me reconsider how bad our culture’s ignorance on the issue.
I can fairly safely say that I too would have written BP off as one of the good guys prior to the spill. You don’t often see commercials advertising the environment so I would have assumed they were a company with some significant ties to green initiatives and definitely would have taken the same message we all extrapolated, that everything is fine and our gas consumption is perhaps a necessary evil for right now. The commercial did not advocate change, responsibility or even really awareness; it simply reinforced American’s addiction to oil while plugging their oil over their competitors. BP completely spun the issue of environmentalism to their own benefit, using a serious danger as a marketing ploy.
Again sadly though I will admit if I had simply been glued to my couch watching Family Guy or something similar and that commercial came on I wouldn’t have gone through any of this. I would have sat through it and perhaps maybe thought its good that BP was doing something about the environment while subconsciously the commercial lulled my scared thoughts about the environment to sleep.
The true danger with the environment is simply the lack of consciousness on the issue. Prior to this class, even I, an honors college student who follows the news and cares about the environment had little idea of what was really happening, and just stopping for a moment to consider the awareness of the issue of my fellow classmates in my regular classes really saddens me. The population seems just so entirely oblivious to what is really going on.
I know the fabled arc of the class foretells solutions rather than simply more problems but honestly for me it can’t come soon enough. I really believe that the only way changes can be made is by individual efforts for I think the masses may be long lost. It will be likely be a long time before the mainstream public really comes to grips with the importance of sustainable culture and engineering so the work of those that do understand it is simply that much more important. Now that I have been “brought out of the cave” as Plato’s famous analogy goes, recycling my bottles and giving a nod of “keep up the good work” to those who are trying to make a difference doesn’t seem like enough. So once again I eagerly await the solutions portion of the arc.
