In response to Jim Allard’s opinion piece, “Sustainability the enemy of virtue,” which decries environmentalism as “anti-development, anti-industry and anti-man,” I feel there are some outrageously popular dichotomous paradigms in desperate need of a good smashing: Modern environmentalism is not about saving trees because they are pretty and pandas because they are cute; it is about preserving the environment in such a manner that it can continue to support our fragile human forms.
There is no such thing whatsoever as an “environmental issue.” Rather, there are environmental causes for existing issues: public health, social justice, agriculture, foreign policy and, yes, my passionately capitalist friends, even economics. The dichotomy at fault here is that of “Man and Nature,” as if one part were somehow diametrically opposed to the whole. Some industrialists use this dichotomy to cast Man as a hero, a victor over chaos. Some environmentalists use it to cast Man as the lone agent of impurity and the chronic disruptor of equilibrium. The truth is simpler: Man, like any other animal, makes the best use he can of the resources available to him in the form of other animals and plants. Economics and ecology are inextricably linked, because they concern the same raw material; in fact, both words come from the same root, oikos, Greek for “home.”
The sustainability of that inter-linked ecosystem and economy hinges not only on the consumption of expendable resources, as Allard suggests, but more importantly on a careful attention to its incredibly complex relationships which create the conditions in which we can live. The ecological processes which regulate our air temperature, our water currents, our soil quality, our pest control and countless other requirements of our species’ survival are both subtle and malleable. The broad environmental questions are less focused on, “Are we going to run out of this?” and more on “Are we going to destabilize a fragile system essential to our survival?”
As far as the “free market” is concerned, government and big business have shared an intense and impure intimacy in our country for several decades. The suggestion that producers of fossil fuels and energy-inefficient appliances have dominated the market solely through superior output and fair play is absurd. Government subsidies to big oil companies far outweigh federal funds invested in alternative energy — to say nothing of the probable influence of, say, the spouses certain vice presidential candidates. Advocates for alternative energy seek to be protected from this sort of corruption, not to further it.
No movement in American history could less accurately be described as “anti-Man” than environmentalism. It is about preserving the environment for human use, not about suppressing human in deference to the environment. The planet has endured more dramatic changes than these. It does not need us. We need it.
Courtney Ehlers
Junior, history
