In the past week I attended two environmental awareness programs, both sponsored by the Colorado State School of Global Environmental Sustainability. The first was a beautiful film documenting the rapid retreat in recent years of major glaciers in various locations. The filmmaker clearly associated the waning glaciers with human-caused climate change, and offered some thoughts on the consequences of this phenomenon. Overall though, I saw the film mostly as a testament to the tenacity and passion of the filmmaker.
The film event was very well attended, with a mix of students and mostly older locals. It was followed by a panel discussion with some climate scientists, an epidemiologist, and a city sustainability staffer.
The second event was a lecture by Paul R.Ehrlich, a Stanford professor and author of a well-received important book in the 60's on overpopulation and environmental issues. I had seen the notice for this event earlier in the week, and noted that it was only an hour long, and was open to the public and free. I wondered how well attended it might be.
On the evening of the lecture, I headed over to the University arts center where the venue is located, arriving about ten minutes before the start time. The usher at the door turned me away apologetically, advising that they were at capacity. She then directed me to a large ballroom-size rehearsal hall in another portion of the building, which had been set up for an overflow simulcast. When I approached that room, I found several hundred people already seated, and was among the last to be admitted as that space also reached capacity.
I was able to find one of the last unoccupied seats and settled in for the presentation. What I experienced brought together a lot of what I had been reading and thinking about as I have encountered news and discussions of various environmental and sustainability issues. Dr. Ehrlich covered a lot of ground in his allotted hour, and connected many dots. He asserts that there is a concurrence of many interrelated threatening phenomena, creating a near-critical mass of causes and current or imminent effects that urgently require attention and response.
So many critical areas were touched upon - the diminishing of pollinators and effect of that on food production, exposure of humans to numerous pervasive environmental toxins, deterioration of soils, overuse of water supplies, climate change and its effect on agriculture, overpopulation, over-consumption by the developed world and imminent over-consumption by the developing world that wishes for a similar standard of living, the acidification of the oceans due to carbon-based fuel combustion and resulting disruption of critical food chains, the diminishing returns and polluting consequences of energy extraction (not to mention consumption) as the easy-to-access resources are depleted, and more.
The session was mostly a catalog of challenges that must be acknowledged and dealt with, without much opportunity for outlining any resolutions. However, there was a theme that was common between the glacier film and this talk: The scientists have done their work, and spelled things out clearly in terms of the scope and hazards of the threats (assuming one can filter out the sociopathic buffoonery of the science-deniers and their sponsors). If there is to be a solution, it will probably have to occur mostly in the realm of social action. I believe Ehrlich was suggesting that if the political sphere is too corrupt and poisoned by the patronage of oligarchy, people will need to organize from a grassroots level, possibly across international borders, to demonstrate their awareness and commitment to action. In the brief question and answer period, one audience member asked him if the needed responses could be accomplished in a civil manner, or if some level of violence might be expected. He mused that perhaps the 'Tenth of One Percent' had not yet imagined being hoisted by their own petard, which I understood to be a reference to the unpleasant outcome of historic income and wealth inequality, and suppression of remedies that might diminish the profitability of environmental devastation. He also pointed out that some of the nations that might be worst-afflicted with depletion of essential resources are equipped with nuclear weapons.
The motivation for addressing all of this, rather than simply being grateful for having been born and on the way to a comfortable exit before the full brunt of catastrophic collapse is experienced, seems to be an awareness of the plight of the next generation and those beyond But Dr. Ehrlich also posed a question about how people's current sense of well being might be affected by the knowledge that our species might one day face the same stark reality of extinction that we have inflicted on other less dominant residents of the planet.
In deciding how committed we all are to bringing about changes that improve our chances for avoiding environmental disaster and social calamity, we should keep in mind an important point Dr. Ehrlich made about the scope and impact of our actions: let's not confuse effort with results. We've reached the point where individual tokens of recognition of a problem are not going to be sufficient, and we're all going to have to pitch in to spread awareness, to overcome the failure of increasingly consolidated corporate-dominated media to reveal the extent of environmental faults and risks. Environmental and climate science alone is not enough - social science need to employed, and we all have some capabilities in that area.
It was encouraging to see the turnout for these events, and to observe the degree to which people were affected by what they heard and saw. I wonder how much success is possible in bringing about the required changes, given the limitless greed and ignorance that seem to be enthroned in most areas where those changes would logically be originated.
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