The demands of an environmental reality - Andrew Conner '11

The recent column entitled “CEOs, hip-hop dancers and biofuel farmers” presents a compelling argument for why the environmental movement needs to be more inclusive so that it can fulfill its vision of reshaping society in an effort to save the planet. Let’s see if we can make this dream a reality.

First, as the article suggested, we need to restructure agricultural production worldwide so that we are producing food in our front yards, community gardens and greenhouses. This will actually be relatively easy to accomplish, since much of the world already engages in these forms of agricultural production, with the exception of greenhouses. Considering the great strides the West has made in fostering “awareness,” it won’t be long before Monsanto becomes a dinosaur of a less civilized age.

Now we need to reach a more “sustainable” population level. After completing our shift from energy-intensive production to more organic methods, we can expect the world’s food supply to decrease and the price of food to increase. The poorer nations of the world will face starvation, but they’ll take comfort in knowing that the polar bears are safe. Population levels will decline and we will be able to enjoy the sustainable abundance provided by our pre-19th century agrarian lifestyle.

Need I say more?

Environmentalism may fundamentally be concerned with limits, but limits are defined by capabilities. Time and time again humans have faced “limits” (mountains, oceans, etc.), but our innovations have redefined the constraints of our environment. This is called progress, which is a word that should not be confused with “progressive.” The former refers to the improvement of the human experience, while the latter is the epitome of false advertising. Progress in regards to agricultural production is why doctors are able to devote their entire careers to the advancement of medicine instead of spending their summers pulling weeds, which brings us to the conception of society presented in the article.

We can pretend that we are a society built on independence and isolationism, but how many students at Middlebury have cleared land, collected seeds, tilled soil, planted seeds, tended to a field, harvested a crop and baked a loaf of bread? We are already interdependent. Just because I don’t know the farmer in California who provides the school’s oranges doesn’t make me any less dependent on him or her.

The inherent problem of the environmental movement is not in its lack of inclusiveness, but the fact that nobody wants to live in the world that it envisions. Until environmentalists agree to find real solutions to the challenges our world faces, they will continue to be ignored (except during the primaries). With an estimated global population of nine billion people by 2050, there will be less land and water available for agriculture. Through innovations in agricultural production, and the production of energy, we can feed that many people and more in an environmentally sustainable manner. Whether or not we will depends, in part, on environmentalists’ ability to operate a simple cost-benefit analysis and adapt to the demands of reality.