Do you consider yourself an environmentalist? Why or why not? To answer this question, you must explain what you believe it means to be an environmentalist. How does an environmentalist think and act? If you are not an environmentalist, do you have explicit reasons for rejecting the label? If so, enumerate the reasons and explain them. If not, speculate on why you have never thought about whether you are/are not an environmentalist.
After you discuss your personal orientation toward environmentalism, think about the concept more broadly. What factors do you think encourage or discourage people in today’s society from?
Do I consider myself an environmentalist? My first reaction is to say, "I am absolutely a person who loves the environment". This does not mean that I am completely an environmentalist. However, any short answer demands an explanation. What is an environmentalist exactly? In my opinion, an environmentalist is someone who subscribes to the philosophy that the stability of nature in all regards should be held to the highest standards of importance, safety, and sustainability. An environmentalist is someone who cares about everything from recycling to wetlands to global warming to trash in the oceans to fracking and is not afraid to stand firm on the side of nature when facing important political and economic issues.
This sounds like a wonderful set of personal values to hold and it seems almost counter intuitive and selfish that someone might not agree 100% with these ideals. However, the reality is that while I love the environment, I love sustainability, I love preservation, and I have a chronic obsession with baby animals (especially baby seals), I am also a political and economic realist. Maybe it is the Political Scientist in me, but when I look at the world I see things in terms of cost and effect. What does that mean exactly, cost and effect? To be more precise, it means that when I look at the debate over energy use for example, I know that sustainable energy is the future and that oil and coal is terrible for the environment. However I also know that our current technology is still very underdeveloped and we only have about 8% of our energy needs met with alternative energy like hydro power and less than 1% met with solar. At the present campaigning against coal is, for the most part, simply illogical. It would completely destroy the way our economy and society works and the sad fact is that Americans and the world in general just isn't ready for that to happen yet. It's too soon. In the future this may change, but until then, I cannot bring myself to step onto that bandwagon. While the environment is very important, humanity is also important and we cannot always simply backtrack and transition ourselves as easily as we might like to believe.
This leads us onto a more broad point: Environmentalism as a whole. In today's world, environmentalism is overwhelmingly embraced by the youth and young adults, people who fall between 20-35 years old. As we look at the older and older age brackets, we see that people begin to become more cautious and hesitant when hearing the call to stand up for the environment.
We can try and attribute this difference to many different factors, the most simple being age and the most complex being difference in the quality of news that distributes information to these age groups. I would be going out on a limb but I would hypothesize that people who want The Daily Show and read Al-Jazeera would be more likely to be in favor of the environment than someone who only watched Fox News. While this is not true for everyone, what I am trying to say is that people form different opinions based on the type of news and information they gather. If they listen to only one news outlet that is heavily biased towards/against environmentalism, their personal opinions will be heavily impacted in whichever direction that particular news outlet decides to lean.
Another important factor is special interest. Even though there are many advocates for cyber activism and hackivism, someone who works as a IT security specialist for a fortune 500 company would feel much differently about the issue than a low income student who occasionally pirates music or movies off the internet. Likewise there are a plethora of people with just as many different interests and opinions concerning the environment. While I cannot speak for large big name MNC's like BP for example (Hey, they're people too!), a middle class farmer who finds out that he's sitting on a goldmine of shale oil will have a much different opinion to fracking than a college student or a scientist. Social standing, location, economics, political affiliation, ethics and morality, all of these are crucial factors that are considered by everyone when the issue of the environment becomes a top priority.
We must always remember that the environment is not a toy. It is not a cash-cow resource. And it is not something to be taken for granted. Ever. However, that being said, the lifeblood of hundreds of millions of people worldwide depend on the resources that we extract from it every day. A passionate environmentalist will always argue in favor of the environment before mankind. However, I cannot currently call myself a passionate environmentalist. I am a human being who loves the environment, I treasure it, I respect it, and I wish it no harm. I recognize that change is slow, progress is gradual, and destruction is sometimes permanent. However I also acknowledge the value of human life, the value and necessity of hard work and toil and reward and the benefits that we enjoy every day because we dominate and bend the environment to our will.
It is my humble opinion that we should always seek the middle ground. We should always consider the question, is what we're doing truly necessary? If many people depend on us then what we are doing truly does matter. In cases such as that we must then seek to select the Safest and least damaging route that we can, so that we can begin to repair and coexist with what we have left.
- Chris Postell
Hi, Chris:
ReplyDeleteFirst, a logistical issue -- please make sure I am an author on your blog. It is not appearing my queue and I only happened to check it because I somehow had the URL. Since Blogger doesn't list it in my own page of blogs on which I am an author, I might overlook it in the future (I was about to give you a zero when I remembered you'd sent me the URL and I went searching for it). Moreover, I'm not convinced that you've put comment moderation on your blog, which isn't a great thing because this is how I assign you grades and I don't know if you'll want your grades broadcast over the internet!
Second, this was a very good entry overall. I can see how the political scientist in you leads you to a more nuanced perspective on environmentalism than some others in the course. The combination of EVST and POL students in this class is certainly interesting! You raise very important points about how demographic characteristics, as well as fora for communication and learning and professional and personal communities and associated norms, affect individual-level attitudes and beliefs. We can't (and probably shouldn't) talk and think about environmentalism as a "one size fits all" philosophy. In fact, there are some who argue that talking about it as a philosophy or term at all is counterproductive, because when you are busy labeling who is "in" and who is "out" of a category, you aren't focused on solving real problems, like our need to transition to renewable energy sources.
I understand your ambivalence about anti-coal campaigns. Mountaintop mining (for example) is a terrible practice that not only harms the environment but also communities, at least in the long-run. But what other options to many communities in Appalachia have? The same argument can be made for developing countries that engage in pollution intensive industries. Ought we really expect them to be environmentalists in the same way first-world citizens can be? You touch on these points in your journal and I'm glad you did; you offered important perspective.
One minor critique is that in some places your writing was a bit rough around the edges. Make sure you type in Word, use spell/grammar check, and then paste over here.
Journal content: 1.6/1.6
Journal writing quality: 0.25/0.3