On The Environment

My Geography midterm consists of two double-spaced, one page essays on topics selected by my professor. It turns out that one page is far too short a space to express my full opinions on the subject, but it'll have to do.

Because they are purely opinion, I present them here for your reading enjoyment.

Profit

It is a contention of some environmentalists that there is no such thing as profit. That is, we as a culture and a society are unwilling to pay the full price for what we consume. A statement that there is no such thing as profit implies that human existence is a zero-sum game, where there are no winners and no losers, and that everything balances out in the end.

Attempting to define profit in these terms is impossible, as the Earth is essentially a closed system. We cannot magically produce more air, or cleaner air, or new continents; we're stuck with what we've got right now. As Chuck Palahniuk writes in Fight Club, "On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero." In the longest run, until the end of time, we're all dead anyway. By that standard, there can never be true profit.

Because of the inescapable hopelessness of the long run, people look to the short-run. An environmentalist will say that what is profit in the short-run is, in fact, delay of payment, and that payment in full must be rendered somewhere down the road. I don't see any reason why payments can't be delayed indefinitely.

Indefinitely delaying payment might as well be considered the absolution of debt, because there is no telling what technology might be coming down the pipe in the future to delay debt collection further. We have already paid some of the price of industrialization, from higher cancer rates to polluted waters and reduced speciation worldwide. Just the same, I have the utmost faith in the minds of my generation to slow or even halt the payment of the prices for the mistakes of our predecessors. I won't say that it is a given, or that it will be easy, but all we need to take are baby steps. The continued development of technology will continue to put off payment of debts and allow profit to survive within the foreseeable short-term.

Humans and the Environment

Regardless of their efforts to the contrary, human beings can never truly become disconnected from the environment. Though we bulldoze huge tracts of land to put up housing developments with well-manicured lawns and no trees, we are still very much prisoners of our environment. It is said that a butterfly flapping its wings in China changes the weather in New York City from sunny to rainy. Similarly, so do our efforts to control our environment affect our experiences of it.

As an example, take the American northwest. The relentless logging and deforestation of the area over these past decades has left the area vulnerable to forest fires, and this summer saw some of the largest fires on record. President Bush's response to the situation? More logging! This totally ignores the reason that the fires became a problem in the first place, and is a perfect example of mankind's worsening relationship with nature. Briefly summarized, it goes something like "If you don't understand it, get rid of it."

Such has been man's attitude for most of recorded history for things he doesn't understand. It has led to the extinction of countless cultures and species that will never be heard from again. But man cannot escape his own destruction of the environment, because he must still be a part of it even as he tries to destroy it.

Our fate is irrevocably tied to the fate of our environment. I believe that we will realize this inescapable fact before we travel too far down our current road of total environmental destruction. Though I disagree with radical environmentalists' methods (spiking trees and other forms of eco-sabotage), their persistence and deeply held beliefs in the importance of the environment are constant and important reminders to those who have not yet recognized it. The environmental movement will live on, gain a foothold, and assist in making real strides toward a deeper understanding and respect of the environment.