Reflections on Environmental Crises

We know that as a society we have some pretty big and frightening problems. It seems like we live in a world filled with crisis. Climate Change Crisis, Economic Crisis, Global Food Crisis, Political Crises, Famine, Drought, War. These words hit the pages of our news outlets every day in some form. It seems that we are constantly on our heels, trying to catch up with whatever globally-detrimental crisis we have entered into. We take the first step towards fixing a serious problem and the cynic in all of us thinks we might already be too late. We are constantly at least one step behind the problems we create, which makes for a frustrating world to live in.

The so-called “green” phenomenon is an example of a reaction to increasing public awareness about our environmental footprint and the damaging effects industry is having on the earth’s atmosphere. Our neighbours to the south have only admitted they have a flawed economic system because major banks and financial institutions are feeling the effects of lending large amounts of money to people that far exceeded what they were able to repay. There is a constant cycle of crisis, response—crisis, response.

In the 1980s McDonald’s came under heavy criticism for the amount of waste (particularly Styrofoam waste containing harmful CFCs) they helped consumers produce each year. The public responded to this situation with a series of organized boycotts that eventually forced the hand of the company. In 1987, a group of Vermont-based activists created a McToxic campaign that eventually spread throughout the nation. The campaign involved picketing of McDonald’s restaurants throughout the United States. It was public outrage and collective action that caused McDonald’s to switch to disposable containers made from post-consumer recycled materials.

The case of McDonald’s demonstrates the imperative that a corporate, capitalist society works under: conduct business in a way that makes the most money. If people had not expressed outrage at the situation and threatened the company with boycotting (a hit to the fast food giant’s bottom line), McDonald’s would probably still be selling Big Macs in Styrofoam containers.

Is this really the best way for us to conduct ourselves? I think we are better than this. I think we, as a uniquely reasoning group of animals, have the ability to do better than this. I also think it is important that we figure this out sooner rather than later. We live in a society where technology has the ability to drastically alter our environment. We no longer deal with the amount of energy one human body can produce (even when that energy is expanded through the use of a tool like a plow). The capitalist need to produce excess and our seemingly unstoppable technophilism have created enormous, powerful machines that have destructive power beyond anything a group of people could ever inflict.

Another example of this terrifying power is mining operations that use deadly chemicals to separate precious metals from the earth. One example of this is at the Yanacocha gold mine near Cajamarca, Peru. Local activists claim that the cyanide used in the process of chemically extracting the gold has leeched into the water supply of many communities. A basic understanding of how water systems function implies that this is a problem that could easily outlive the mining company. This example shows a kind of shortsightedness that cannot be tolerated. The future isn’t ours to gamble on, and yet we do it every single day. Crisis, reaction.

Before we can change this approach to our world and our way of living, we need to know what causes it. My answer to this question goes back to the issue of community. A community is a collective of individuals which shares resources to meet commonly agreed upon goals. Community is all around us in some form. We pay taxes to a province that works to educate our children and to a city that works to keep essential services like heat and water running, and to perform a myriad of other necessary functions for comfortable living. We may belong to a community group that fosters a certain type of religious or common interest (organizing events, providing a space for the meeting of like-minded individuals, etc). But in other, significant ways, we are moving away from communal living. The technologies we use every day (the computer is one obvious example) change the way we interact. This seems fairly simple and has been talked about ad nauseam by almost everyone, but it is a very significant shift.

Today, if we have a problem with a service like the telephone, we have two choices: either attempt to call the company, working our way through the auditory labyrinth of key code choices (or worse, working with that robot they make you talk to) and probably wait a good forty minutes on the phone for a thirty second solution, or we can go online, navigate the visual labyrinth of the company’s technical support page and hope for the solution to our problem to magically appear. Neither of these would be my first choice. What we have lost through the systematization of experience is the knowledge and problem solving ability of an actual human being on the other end of the phone line. Most issues cannot be funneled into a five-part menu; there are exceptions, quirks, disasters and misunderstandings—all of which are more effectively dealt with by a thinking person. This fundamental shift from people to systems is a major contributor to the problems I’ve identified above.

If everyone in a community (in the true sense of the word) started drinking Starbucks lattes every day and disposing one paper cup per person per day into the communal landfill system, it wouldn’t take long for them to see the significant problem this would soon create. The foreman at the dump site would report to the community that this level of waste is unsustainable and that the community is going to have a serious problem if behaviours aren’t changed.

Social norms would be adjusted, legal practices might be instituted, and this community would come together to stop the problem. In some sense, this is what we do (crisis, response), but due to the scale of our cities and our lack of communal interaction we are far too slow to respond. We fall one, two, three steps behind our problems and then wonder what on earth we can do to remedy the situation. Perhaps a first step is acknowledging that the individualistic, capitalist society in which we live is not conducive to responsible, community-driven citizenship. Recognizing this fact better positions our governments to craft policies and laws that protect us from some of the environmental problems that seem to constantly emerge.

As I said before, I believe that we are better than the way we currently live. We are capable of dealing with these problems in a responsible way that actually brightens a future instead of damning it. I propose a fourth step in the cycle. Crisis, response, reflection. Reflection takes very little time and the benefits of engaging in it can be astounding. Why are we dealing with a waste problem from disposable coffee cups when thirty years ago we rose up against the harmful effects of consumer waste? It is because we didn’t properly reflect on the situation. When we come to resolving a major crisis, we need to stop and have serious discussions about what went wrong, how we could have prevented it, and what we will do to fix the system that failed the first time. One of the great boons we gain in our systematized and computerized world is an enormous amount of information. All sorts of data are stored throughout the systems of the internet, and it is to our own detriment if we do not make use of it. Let’s learn from the mistakes we have made in the past and use the weapon of information to foresee problems before they hit us in the form of a crisis, to carefully execute a plan instead of just reacting, and to think critically about what kind of response will serve both the immediate situation and any that might stem from it in the future. This approach can work when we take the time now to reflect on what kind of world we have created and enact policies that effectively address our communal concerns.

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