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Ecoliteracy might save the planet
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WE saw an unusually cool July this year. There were altogether five days when the high temperature exceeded 35 degrees Celsius, compared with 25 in July last year.
But such is human forgetfulness that I have only a very vague impression of the heat spell last year. I seem to have regained some of my reflective power this week, with the temperature edging steadily higher and the smog returning. We are known as homo sapiens, the rational beings, but at least in our attitude toward our environment I do not see this quality much in evidence.
Smog is still heavy, but such is our attention span that few of us view it as more than a minor inconvenience. For politicians and policymakers worldwide, choking smog is much less a cause for alarm than an unexpected dip in US GDP.
New research shows that, as a result of global warming, smog may become a cause of illness and death around the world, with some scientists predicting that over half of the population of the Earth could be affected by a rise in the frequency and duration of polluted air. On July 30, Anders Levermann wrote on this page (“Antarctic ice collapse shows need for quick action”) that “the planet has entered a new era of irreversible consequences from climate change.” The only question now, he asked, is whether we will do enough to prevent similar developments elsewhere.
In their “Ecoliterate: How Educators Are Cultivating Emotional, Social, and Ecological Intelligence,” authors Daniel Goleman, Lisa Bennett and Zenobia Barlow advocate engaging with your communities and with environmental causes in confronting ever-increasing threats to clean air, water and land. According to them, “ecoliteracy” is a form of collective intelligence and community action. It depends on “empathy,” “making the invisible visible, anticipating consequences and recognizing your relationship to nature.”
Becoming “ecoliterate” enables us to deal with environmental challenges.
According to a study in 2009 by Sweden’s Stockholm Environment Institute, in several vital categories for human survival, among them “biodiversity, the nitrogen cycle” and “climate change,” human society has already passed the “safe boundary,” though humanity still has time to make changes.
Energy consumption
The looming cataclysm is directly linked to modern lifestyle, which is based on exploitation of natural resources.
For instance, America obtains 45 percent of its electricity from coal, and most coal comes from environmentally destructive surface mining. In this kind of mining, bulldozers level trees; explosives blast 900 feet off the tops of mountains. After excavation, extensive liquid waste, or slurry, containing toxins such as lead and arsenic, washes away. In the US, since the mid-1980s, surface mining has destroyed “500 mountaintops, thousands of miles of streams and 1 million acres of forest.”
A trip to a coal mine will probably make students more aware of the consequence of such unconscious acts as flipping on the lights. Other kinds of energy sources — oil, hydropower or nuclear power — can be destructive in their own way. But ecoliteracy is not generally an educational priority.
In making a compelling case for growth, our politicians are essentially holding energy-intensive life as something all respectable citizens should aspire to. When the limited human necessity can no longer sustain nonstop growth, greed and extravagance prove to be effective in stoking more demand.
Inevitably, the foul air, water, and expanding landfills are considered the necessary evil we must live with in our pursuit of the good life. As the author claim, “Many of the environmental crises that we face today are the unintended consequences of human behavior.”
In many developed countries, modern farming practice is generally aspired to, compared with traditional subsistence farming that is considered backbreaking, inefficient, and limiting.
Much of this faith in modernity is based on ignorance and superstition.
As the book claims, “Industrial agriculture has indeed created a host of new problems [such as] the use of fertilizers and pesticides ... Monoculture farming ... has led to the loss of biodiversity ... Factory farms ... contaminate water and soil and create air pollution.”
In 1985, then UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali stated that future wars would be fought in the Middle East over water. The UN predicts that by 2025, two-thirds of the world’s population will live “in water-stressed conditions.”
Only conscious individual action, informed by awareness of human affinity to our environment, can lead to real change.
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