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Blog Entry 14 of 14 Are we really our own worst enemy? Maybe so.

Are the things that we want, that we think we "need" in order to make our lives happier and better, the real cause of the way our society has been going? Have we egged on our respective governments (local, state, national) to make laws that make us more comfortable only to find out that those very laws are the ones that allow us to lose liberties guaranteed by the US Constitution? Do we want to make other people responsible for things that we ought to be doing ourselves? Are we just taking the easy way out, and then complaining when the folks we left in charge don't do what we wanted them to? Years ago, in the old Pogo cartoon, the comment appeared "I have seen the enemy and he is us." Was it true back in the 50s and 60s when that cartoon was popular? Is it true now? As we look at some of the provocative issues of the day, let's not go pointing fingers until we've spent a bit of time looking into the mirror.

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Environmental Awareness - Fantasy and Reality

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Contributed by: Eva Kosinski on 4/14/2008

As the issue of Global Warming continues to come into clearer and clearer focus (with more and more previously-unconvinced folks looking at the data), I wonder how we will actually be able to deal with this.

Right now folks are talking about carbon footprints and selling carbon credits as though that will do anything but switch around who makes money from the about to be serious global warming disaster. Making people buy environmentally friendly materials for their home-building probably will save some energy (and certainly line the pockets of the few big outfits that make them), but the real hard-core issues that relate to global warming have yet to be addressed - our individual contributions in our daily lives.

How many folks would be interested in actually doing the things that would make an immediate difference in our energy use (and don't get me wrong, I've got the same problem as everyone else in resisting these):

Use the computer only a few hours a day
Keep the house cooler in the winter
Don't use the A/C (just run it when you need the computer)
Put all of your groceries on one list and only get them once a week
Let the kids ride the bus to school

These are the obvious ones. But there are others, that are part of our culture, things so ingrained that it wouldn't occur to us that they might be related to global warming; things we don't want to look at too closely because then we'll have to change some core values.

Think how much energy could be saved and how much pollution avoided:

If we didn't feel it absolutely necessary that the stores we shop at have bazillions of choices for each product. If there were only 7 kinds of breakfast cereal, on the shelf, we'd be on our way to a different store.

If we didn't insist on having fresh fruit and vegetables available for our tables, no matter what the season. How much fuel gets used every single day to bring us fruit from South America?

If we weren't pushing out of our communities the industrial, commercial, and agricultural resources to make each city self sustaining? We seem to prefer having row houses and residential developments, with focus on encouraging those with wealth and pushing out those who do the work that sustains our everyday lives.

What do things look like in cultures that do not use a lot of energy? From the stand point of most Americans, those cultures look "primitive," "third world" or worse. We measure success by the number of choices that we have. We had those limited choices in the past, and we don't want to go back.

Why is that? Partly because having the luxury of many choices is our working definition of freedom. Those who get a good education, work hard, and get a reasonable salary feel they should be able to get what they want with their money. If we are reasonably well off, we should be able to buy the fresh nutrients that we need, even in the winter.

Am I saying that we should all go back to 1932 and have ice boxes and tiny stores with two types of soap to choose from? No.

What I'm saying is that our culture is based on freedom, and it is a fantasy to believe that we can stop global warming (some scientists say it's already too late) by just pushing around carbon credits or forcing folks to use green building materials. If major changes need to be made, we are not, as a culture, willing to go back to the good old days. It goes against the grain, and may, in fact, be why we are so willing to believe these band-aid approaches will do any good -- we really don't want major surgery on our way of life. Some environmentalists are now suggesting that major surgery and a return to the earth is the only choice we have, and are willing to sacrifice any freedom or prosperity in this country to a socialist "we know what's best for you" curtailing of our freedom to choose. That's why radical environmentalism will fail -- it relies on government force.

So what's the choice? How can we make any difference? What the US has done best over it's history (and I believe it's success is directly related to freedom here that is not seen elsewhere), is to innovate. There are now starting to be new options. In some communities you can choose to have your electricity come from wind power. Solar panels are more affordable and are now more universally available. Satellite based solar is in process.

We actually *could* make communities where there is a local source of electricity (maybe a wind farm) where you could work from the Internet, where the newer technologies (electric rather than diesel) could be used for public transportation, where there are still farms that sell vegetables locally, where you could raise your own vegetables in your own greenhouse and sell them to your neighbors, but our top-down, rules and regulations culture won't allow that. And we don't have the creative minds anymore to experiment and come up with new solutions that haven't been thought of before.

We have been told, and will, no doubt, continue to be told, that it's all the fault of the greedy oil companies (who now, at least, are showing interest in alternative energies, but only because they are getting government subsidies), but our needs and wants have been served by those same companies for years. We created the demand, and still create the demand. We want a better environment, but probably not at the expense of our own conveniences.

Where the rubber meets the road is education. Our top-down insistence that creativity be pushed out of our education system in favor of teaching to the test has put us at a severe disadvantage. We treat our children to a feast of tasteless educational choices and then can't understand why they don't want to stay in school. Teachers (go ask one who retired early) have been pushed out if they wanted to encourage free thinking and creative alternatives, or if they were more concerned about the needs of a given student who needed a different approach. The out-of-the-box thinkers we will need to create the answers have dropped out of school, or have been hooked on mind-numbing drugs. Creative and brilliant teachers have been pushed out in favor of plodders.

Top down is killing our culture, whether it's coming from the political arena (war without our choice), the educational arena (all children left behind) or from the environmental arena (un-enforced regulations for the well connected, hardline regulations for the rest of us). As we lose our freedoms, we lose our creativity, and, in my humble opinion, our future.

The reality is global warming needs to be addressed with creative ideas. I'm still not convinced the data hasn't been tweaked a bit to make it all look worse, and to get us on board with top-down solutions. We need to be at the ground level, looking at our homes and asking ourselves what we can do (within our own comfort zones) to lessen our needs. We need to tell our local governments that it's more important to allow someone to sell their produce to their neighbors than it is to fine folks for not having a business license so they can grab the sales taxes. We need to tell our schools that getting all the children into creative and fun thinking is more important than getting subsidies from the federal government which force them into boring and tedious "education" for the lowest common denominator.

Or we can just follow the fantasy, and let the government keep telling us what's good for us, let the big guys buy up other folks' carbon credits, let the schools keep going into the abyss, ruining truly creative thinkers, until all of our freedoms are taken away in the name of saving the environment.

Our complacency, our lack of awareness of how we've let our culture slip into empty mindlessness, our fear of sticking out to complain when it started to be clear that our freedoms and creative choices are being systematically taken away, is responsible for a lot of what's happened. We wanted what we wanted, when we wanted it, regardless of how much it cost, whether in money or environmental degradation and we wanted someone else to do it. Someone else had to be responsible. And we just stood back and abdicated our responsibility.

Reality will be a lot harsher because we waited so long to start truly being aware of the root causes of these problems. But the time for fantasy is over.

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CONTRIBUTOR INFORMATION

Eva Kosinski

Louisville , CO

Eva Kosinski has posted 14 blog entries and 2 comments since joining on 12/18/2005. Eva Kosinski 's average blog rating is 4.57.

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