Squashed

Here is North Korea, which  a GMU professor suggested should get a prize for the Earth Hour thing.  Most of their country had no electricity at all for that time!  Jakob Lodwick added, “It’s true. Everyone’s going eco-crazy without defining the limits or goals - it’s just a direction. Green this, green that. Green tennis shoes. Eco-gift wrap. If we don’t come to our senses, it’s going to be dark green, as in, The Dark Ages.”

The goals of environmentalism a both simple and numerous.  They are numerous in the sense that “green” means everything from protecting the rain forest to protecting the atmosphere to creating natural spaces in urban areas to ensuring safe and plentiful water for human use.  They are simple in the sense that the goal is almost always “Save much as possible.”  How much of the rainforest do I want to preserve?  As much as I can.  Even if we succeed beyond our wildest expectations, we won’t be at a risk of being overrun by rainforest.  How clean do I want my drinking water?  As clean as possible, please.  If we get to the point when we our collective livelihood is threatened by too many pandas running amock we can deal with it then.  In the case of climate change, our ambitions are still in the mitigation stage not the elimination stage.  We’re just hoping that can be enough.

What surprises me is that an avowed capitalist is asking for limits and goals.  If people value the environment, wouldn’t telling them to value it less be one of those dreaded market interferences?  Shouldn’t we weigh our environmental desires against the practical cost of achieving them rather than enforcing some arbitrary metric?  If you need specific goals for things like carbon dioxide emissions, I’d be happy to set some.  Otherwise, you can think of environmentalism like that other beloved green—money.  Is there a limit or goal to how much money you should have?  Sometimes people will set personal goals—and I’d definitely encourage that as a sound environmental plan.  But I’m not worried that we’ll suddenly going to lose all perspective and all technological capacity because too many people recycled their  toothbrushes or reused their coffee mugs.