From my precarious seat on top of this soap box, I find myself well-poised to take up the fair, tasteful and dignified sport of arguing with a corpse. Internationally beloved novelist and film-director Michael Crichton died two weeks ago yesterday. A medical doctor who held a doctorate in anthropology, he exercised one of the more prominent and articulate voices of skepticism within the scientific community on subjects such as pesticides, second-hand smoke and (what else?) climate change.
More broadly, Crichton created an image of modern environmentalism as a naive, synthetic and fundamentally Judeo-Christian religion in which the pre-industrial Earth was a sort of Garden of Eden, with the Industrial Revolution as the forbidden apple that booted the whole human race into a more dangerous and imperfect world. Practitioners of this religion — so his argument goes — are mainly paranoid city-dwellers, indifferent to scientific fact, guided only by their faith that the moral salvation of mankind depends on eating organic food and renouncing SUVs and air conditioning before it’s too late.
Ah, well. Cat’s out of the bag, isn’t it? It’s broad, sweeping, ignorant and derogatory, but more importantly, it’s not totally untrue.
Like a lot of activist movements, the United States environmental movement has its share of people who are thoroughly removed from and one-sided about the issues on the table. We’ve all seen them — people with a severe underappreciation of vaccines, plastics and the FDA. They have an unrealistic squeamishness about death and seriously regard “Eat or be eaten?” as an impossible question.
They treat extinction as something invented by man’s diabolical imagination, and they treat every species as though it has an unalienable right to exist indefinitely. They regard “nature” as a monolithic entity of perfect, static equilibrium, and man as a hyperactive child with an AK-47 (except the Native Americans; they were all forest-dwelling teddy bears — like ewoks). Roadlessness is next to godliness, and economic concerns take a backseat to the importance of coercing two pandas in captivity to screw.
That said, I wish to register my confidence that real environmentalism is ultimately dominated by other, better, smarter and more earnest faces than this one. Among them are botanists, zoologists, ecologists, microbiologists, physicists, chemists, meteorologists, climatologists, doctors and lawyers.
It is vitally important that we do not confuse the two camps when determining policy, for the latter comes from a position of legitimate professional authority. Its vocabulary include terms like “compromise,” “budget,” “economy” and “poverty.” It understands that without the aid of modern medicine and engineering, a good majority of us would very likely be dead, and those who make it to adulthood would find very high mortality rates in their children. It reveres with gratitude the ingenuity behind these innovations. It reads “Nature” and “Science” and other legitimate academic periodicals. And it eats pizza and drinks beer as frequently as its apolitical counterparts.
And yes, it must break with the apolitical. As long as procedures for material input and output remain questions of policy, environmentalism will have to be political. The reason for environmentalism’s attachment to our nation’s left hip is not any inherent bleeding-heart liberalism, but rather the crucial mechanism that environmentalism and leftist causes share: government regulation. The free market simply will not do it by itself, which is unfortunate because that alienates basically anybody with reservations about a liberal stance on anything. The specter of environmentalism, in this way, becomes a threat to your level-headedness, to your impartiality, to your red-blooded capitalism, to your right to not speak French, to your escape from the cold clammy hand of Uncle Sam, to your rugged individualism, to your sexuality and to the salvation of your immortal soul.
Now, that’s an awful lot of pressure, especially for a broad blanket label for thousands of separate issues that don’t necessarily even have that much in common. There is no such thing as “the environment.” It’s a completely imaginary system for understanding the sum total of material realities on this planet, like “the economy” or “culture.” Nobody in the world actively cares about all or even most of the issues which fall under that umbrella.
Conversely, nobody can possibly be apathetic to all of them, even if they fail to identify their concerns as such. Somewhere along the way, we’re all a little concerned with public health, agriculture, the availability of food and clean water, bio-diversity, the economy and natural disasters. You could never, for example, assert your all-American rugged individualism by shrugging off synthetic hormones in the tap water that lower your sperm count and make you grow breasts.
If I could unmake one word that has entered popular lexicon in the past half-century it would be “environmentalism,” for in that single word is a unified, moving target with which thousands of disparate causes can be dismissed with a wave of the hand and a roll of the eyes.
Dr. Crichton and I will have to respectfully agree to kind-of-disagree. In pace requiescat.
Courtney Ehlers ([email protected]) is a sophomore majoring in environmental studies and history.