The Things That Really Trouble Me Most ...

Sadly, not a picture of me ...

Anyone who scans the recent posts in this blog can see that I am a beginner as an environmentalist. Since mid-2011 I've been blogging about how we need to come to cherish the earth. In the last seven months I think I've made some strides toward becoming an earth-cherishing environmentalist, personally speaking. Yet I've found it hard to turn myself into a total tree hugger.

One thing that thankfully has changed for me is that I now pay attention to the environmental news. I hadn't used to. I'm now in the habit of turning the pages of each day's Washington Post in search of articles about the environment. There often are none ... which is just one of the things that trouble me greatly.

There ought to be more news coverage about the environment. There ought to be a regular op-ed column about all things ecological. But there aren't.

Another thing that troubles me is that none of the Republican candidates for president has a clue about the environment.

Mitt Romney, former governor of Massachusetts, is supposedly the most liberal of the lot. Here's a paragraph from "Mitt Romney comes under attack after win in Iowa" in a recent edition of the Post:

Former New Hampshire governor John Sununu took the stage here [in Manchester, New Hampshire] with Romney and repeatedly called him a “true conservative.” He highlighted Romney’s Massachusetts record of cutting spending and taxes, standing “shoulder to shoulder” with antiabortion groups, fighting same-sex marriage and opposing his state’s involvement in a regional effort to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

I've italicized the anti-environment part.

For his part, President Obama hasn't been a whole lot better. He's dithering about the Keystone XL pipeline. He declined to promulgate tougher anti-smog standards. He hasn't put his foot down against oil exploration in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska's north coast. He hasn't stood foursquare for a cap-and-trade system or a carbon tax that would tilt our future energy usage away from fossil fuels. He hasn't developed a total energy plan for America's future that these other choices would slot into.

But maybe, one can argue, Obama is just being a realist, given the direction the political winds are blowing from. Accordingly, another thing that troubles me is that the leading environmental advocacy groups unfailingly adopt positions that are adversarial rather than realistic. Quite understandably, they see their function as pulling as hard as they can in the opposite direction from the general numb-to-the environment choices America might otherwise make.

In so doing, leading environmentalists turn themselves into unmitigated radicals. In the short run, that maximizes their (albeit too limited) influence. In the long run, I'm not so sure.

In the long run, what matters is getting as many Americans as possible, of whatever political stripe, on board with the need for us to adopt a revised stance with respect to Mother Nature. We need to stop seeing nature as a bank with an infinite credit line which we can keep drawing on at will to bankroll our economic growth. We need to repeal the supposed wisdom that says we can forever conceal nature's primary role in offering up sustenance to human aspiration.

Right now, nature to us is a pinball machine. For centuries, we expected technological advancement to obviate the tilt switch, so we could rack up any score we wanted. Now the tilt switch is coming back into play. Whether it's the inevitable price of global warming or the cost of widespread deforestation, rampant pollution, lost wetlands, lost biodiversity, we see "Game Over" on the horizon ... and we studiously look the other way.

And, truth to tell, I really no different. I understand with my intellect that we desperately need to change. With my gut, not so much.

Keystone XL pipeline: a
jobs creator?

My intellect tells me, every time I hear the economy is "getting better," that it's a false improvement because it's predicated, as always, on numbers that ignore the costs of environmental damage ... indeed, whenever there's an environmental disaster, the money spent on cleanup is folded into gross domestic product, in the plus column. One main argument in favor of the Keystone XL pipeline is that it will create jobs. Opponents say the jobs will be temporary. But what troubles me is that both arguments sidestep the real issue,  which is how can we wean ourselves off oil?

I keep telling myself that, but it puts me on the sidelines of politics-as-we-know-it to insist on it.

And that's another thing that really troubles me ...