Posted: 4/18/07

The environment

Jake Dubuque | contributing columnist
jdubuque@smcvt.edu

Given that this is Earth Week, I thought it was only appropriate to discuss the environment and environmentalists. I am going to make an audacious statement that I care more about the environment than 99 percent of the people at St. Michael’s College. Blasphemy, right? Let me prove you wrong.

To define “the environment,” I will use a broad definition: the quality of life on Earth. I care a great deal about the quality of life on Earth and give it my highest priority. While that’s a rather bland statement, I hope discussing it will prove insightful. Life is made possible by the interaction of billions of variables, none of which is static. At every moment, everything is changing – and thank God for that. Because life is dynamic, it has managed to overcome adversity and evolve into something better, more complex. Unfortunately, I fear that too many environmentalists have lost sight of this and have become too focused on a narrow definition of the environment.

All too often I hear self-proclaimed environmentalists talk about the need to ‘preserve’ the environment. What does that word mean? Do we really want to freeze things as they are and live in this environment forever? No. Humanity’s destiny is not to ‘preserve’ an arbitrary point in history, but to successfully manage a dynamic environment and help guide it toward a better future.

Unfortunately, the definition of environment is usually confined to the scope of the natural world. While that definition might have been accurate at one point, that point is long gone. In today’s world, our environment is both natural and economic. And yet far too many people emphasize one over the other. Some people want to ‘save the environment’ by ‘protecting’ nature from humans – but at what economic cost? Some people want to ‘economically develop’ – but at what (biological) environmental cost?

I want the best of both worlds. I want to jet around the world, drive a large S.U.V., have lots of electronic gadgets, and leave my lights on; I don’t want to live in darkness. At the same time I want to have biological diversity with open land and clean water, I don’t want paradise paved over and built up. I’ve given a great deal of thought as to how to maximize the quality of the environment and realized that the solution is easy – invent our way out of our current problems.

The goal shouldn’t be to return to the past, but to advance to the future. Why shut off the lights when you could power them with wind turbines? Why buy a tiny Pruis and drive it 55 mph when you could buy a hydrogen-powered Hummer and drive it 70 mph? Why develop Williston farm land when you could build skyscrapers in Burlington? The problem isn’t a lack of conservation, but a lack of management and ingenuity. Developing clean power to run our economy will eliminate pollution, while conservation can only reduce it. Increasing urban density will allow the economy to expand while still promoting open, pristine land.

I care a great deal not only about my quality of life, but everyone else’s quality of life. Isn’t it wrong to tell Chinese peasants that they can’t own cars, is it wrong to tell Indians that they can’t own air conditioners, is it wrong to tell Africans that they can’t build roads, because all of those things are bad for the natural world? We can continue to develop in a more environmentally-sustainable way by emphasizing new technology.

The common retort to this idea is that future technology is a distant solution while we face an immediate crisis demanding immediate action. In truth, we are facing a long-term problem demanding a long-term solution. Hybrid technology and energy conservation are short-term Band-Aids that do nothing to solve the long-term problem. And so I ask environmentalists, why do you want to take resources away from developing a long-term solution (like clean hydrogen power and renewable energy) to pay for short-term feel good actions like demanding automakers invest in technology to marginally increase fuel-efficiency of carbon dioxide spewing vehicles?

I sincerely hope that the environment will be better in the future; I hope that our quality of life and the quality of the natural world increase dramatically. I’m sure we’d arrive there sooner if today’s ‘environmentalists’ would just turn on the lights.