Do You Care More About Earthworms than Jobs?


You may have heard folks dismissive of environmental concerns express opinions along the lines of, "If it's the difference between a spotted owl and feeding my family, I choose my family."

I'm tempted to reply to such statements with talk about false choices, straw man arguments, and so on, but no. Forget all that. and forget for a moment whether we have moral obligations to protect the diversity of life on the planet. Let's think selfishly of just ourselves, our jobs, and our families.

The thing is, environmental quality has a direct impact on jobs, quality of life, the economy, and even the stability of government. If you care about a society's capacity to support itself, then you have to care about the environment. If you care about yourself and your own children, you have to care about the environment.

This sentiment is brilliantly illustrated in the following quote from Jared Diamond (author of many books, including Guns, Germs, and Steel, and most relevant to this quote, Collapse). (I heard Prof. Diamond make this remark on a recent Scientific American podcast).

"If one asked an academic ecologist to name the countries in the modern world that suffer from most severe problems of environmental damage and of over-population, and if this ecologist never read the newspapers and didn't know anything about modern political problems, the ecologist would say "Well that's a no-brainer, the countries today that have ecological and population [problems], there are Haiti, Somalia, Rwanda, Burundi, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal, the Philippines, Indonesia, Solomon Islands."

Then you ask a politician who doesn't know, or a strategic planner who knows or cares nothing about ecological problems, what you see is the political tinderboxes of the modern world, the danger spots, and the politician or strategic planner would say "It's a no-brainer; Haiti, Somalia, Rwanda, Burundi, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal, the Philippines, Indonesia, Solomon Islands", the same list."


Posted: Mon - June 18, 2007 at 09:32 AM          

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