Valuing life

Our society is not sustainable. Our culture is not sustainable. Our civilization is not sustainable. And technology is not going to save us.

I don't want to believe this. I really want to listen to Al Gore and the Sierra Club and Obama telling me that if we redesign our grid and recycle and get hybrid cars and eat organic food, we'll fix the planet.

Here's the thing. I believe we might be able to fix climate change with technology. Obviously, the easiest way to stop climate change would be to simply and unconditionally stop burning oil and coal and natural gas and watch out civilization crumble. But I do believe that within a few decades, we could get our emissions under control enough to stop us from killing ourselves, via increased awareness, more energy efficiency and non-carbon emitting power sources. There will be enormous human costs along the way--we're already seeing some of them in the South Pacific and Africa--but we'll get there with our society largely intact if we put enough minds and manpower behind it.

Here's what a lot of environmentalists aren't telling you: climate change is not the only environmental problem we face. The computers that are going to save the world by preventing us from having to commute to work and providing us with helpful green living tips require all kinds of resources to manufacture, many of which are toxic. Silicon Valley is home to 29 EPA Superfund sites, the highest concentration anywhere in the country. Dams have turned rivers like the Columbia from natural habitats into a series of lakes that salmon have a harder and harder time surviving in. Even those nice quiet Priuses need nickel for their batteries, and mining it uses land and toxic chemicals.

If all we want to do is make sure most (richer, more privileged humans) survive, then we can worry about stopping climate change and breathe a big sigh of relief when we get it under control. But if we care about life, if we believe all humans and non-humans have a right to exist, we can't stop there. Mining will always involve exploitation of human labor, will always involve toxic chemicals which shouldn't exist, and will always leave behind waste capable of killing living beings long after we're gone. Manufacturing anything, even solar panels or wind turbines, depends on finite resources, and no amount of "green technology" will be able to make their manufacture sustainable for a population of seven billion (and counting).

This is where you see a big rift in the environmental movement. All kinds of people who probably wouldn't have called themselves environmentalists five or ten years ago suddenly care about our climate. And that's great. But I hope for every hundred people we get to care about the earth, a few will realize that this problem goes much deeper than carbon emissions. I hope a few of them will start to think about the earth in terms of all living things, not just humans.

I was talking with my parents about dams, and about how they've decimated salmon populations. I said I understood that they're a marginally better power source than coal burning plants or nuclear plants, but I want people to understand that they're a stepping stone to something better, not a sustainable solution to anything. And my dad said he understood that we've built too many dams in the West, but he thought at some point, it didn't make sense to set aside everything in nature as untouchable. We could build some dams and flood a few canyons, ruin a few salmon runs, but we'd still have the rest, so it would be ok.

I told him this all comes down to a simple question--do you believe the natural world and other living beings are here for us to use as we best see fit, or do they have a right to exist independent of our desires? If salmon and rivers and every other living thing in the world had an equal voice and an equal vote in our political systems, I don't think a single dam would have been built in the first place.

I've seen this before, when the federal government was deciding whether or not to remove the grey wolf from the Endangered Species List. The debate was between animal rights and conservation groups and the US Fish and Wildlife Service. The conservationists argued that the wolf population wasn't large enough yet to be self-sustaining. FWS said it was, therefore it would be fine to delist the wolves and open hunting on them. Nowhere did anyone suggest that an individual wolf had a right to exist. If wolf population numbers are sustainable, if the killing of an individual wolf won't impact the species as a whole, that wolf has no right to live no matter which side of the debate you're on.

Our society, our culture, and our civilization are killing the planet. I don't want to admit this. It scares me to admit this. But I can't sit by and pretend it's possible to be neutral while we kill the landbase we depend on for survival, any more than it's possible to be neutral by standing silently as someone commits murder in front of you. You have to see this as personal, because it is personal. If my child was dying of cancer from a toxic waste dump that used to be a manufacturing plant, I wouldn't rest until I was sure no one else would get sick from the same chemicals that killed my child. If the park that I spend my childhood exploring, the park where I first tasted stinging nettle and saw deer tracks, was going to be bulldozed (sorry, "developed") to built houses or a coal plant or anything else, I would sit in front of those bulldozers for as long as I had to until they went away. I don't know the best way to fight for our planet, for the other living beings that don't have a voice in our destructive systems. But I know I have to.