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Redfairen

(1,276 posts)
Mon Apr 1, 2013, 05:03 PM Apr 2013

We Need to Get Past the Energy and Environment Debates of the 1970s

In this era of extreme partisanship and ideological intensity, I find myself struggling to explain the concepts of environmentalism and sustainability in non-political terms. I don't really understand why safe air, water and land should be a subject of political controversy. I should know better since I am not new to this field of inquiry. I first started studying environmental politics in the fall of 1975, when I walked into the late SUNY Buffalo Professor Lester Milbrath's amazing graduate seminar in environmental politics. At that time, we were working to understand the root causes of the environmental problem and analyzed the newly formed (1970) Environmental Protection Agency designed to help solve it. Like my fellow students, I was not an "environmentalist," just someone interested in understanding why rivers were on fire, toxics were oozing out of the ground, and the air was sometimes orange. Being from Brooklyn, I was not particularly interested in nature. If anything, I was more interested in the decay of cities and the growth of the suburbs. To me, the environmental problem had little to do with preserving nature and more to do with the health of people and their cities. I did not see the environment as an issue of ideology, any more than I thought of cancer treatment as a partisan issue. But as a fledgling political scientist, I came to learn that everything was political.

I learned that the people who made their money by making automobiles, steel and gasoline did not want government to tell them how they made those things. They saw environmental regulation as an inconvenient impediment to production and profit. They did not care about the environmental impact of their businesses and assumed that the planet was big enough to absorb pretty much anything. In response, a growing group of environmental activists came to demonize these business people as evil-doers bent on poisoning people and the planet -- and by the end of the 1970s all of this had hardened into the ideological and often symbolic environmental politics we have endured for decades. It was jobs and industry versus bunnies and clean air -- Then and forever.

Fast forward to 2013, and we see environmental protection as a political issue co-existing with a growing concern for something we call sustainability. With human population topping seven billion and human economic activity at a massive global scale, we are starting to see the emergence of global level environmental challenges. Climate change is the most obvious of these challenges, but it is not the only problem. Our oceans, ecological systems, food supply and drinking water are all threatened by the unforeseen impacts of human technology. Some corporate leaders pretend that these are not real problems and just the invention of some pesky scientists and environmental activists. On the other side, some environmentalists act as if we can simply shut production down and return to nature. Both are wrong, the environmental problems are real, and with seven billion people, half of whom live in cities, we are not about to return to nature.

Here in America, without industrial agriculture most of us would starve. It is silly to pretend that we can live the way we do without damaging the environment. The problems are real, but the solution is not to shut the economy down or pretend we don't have a problem. The solution is that we need to learn how to produce what we need without destroying the planet's resources. We need a sophisticated, science based, approach to sustainably manage our economy. We need to learn how to produce food, water and energy without damaging the planet's ability to provide for us. When I say "we", I mean government, communities and corporations. We need to get past the self-destructive ideological nonsense and learn how to talk and listen to each other.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-cohen/we-need-to-get-past-the-e_1_b_2991845.html

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We Need to Get Past the Energy and Environment Debates of the 1970s (Original Post) Redfairen Apr 2013 OP
it won't happen while there's still corporate profit to be wrung from the commons... mike_c Apr 2013 #1

mike_c

(36,214 posts)
1. it won't happen while there's still corporate profit to be wrung from the commons...
Mon Apr 1, 2013, 05:11 PM
Apr 2013

...and money enthralled politicians to protect the corporations at all costs. Call me cynical....

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