I think if Lucy could hear me yelling, “I’m coming, HOUND,” on my way home each day, it would bring her comfort.
Verbose expounding on the status quo from ten years ago leaves the taste of gun metal in my mouth. The constant mediocrity is numbing.
We know that command and control is the most cumbersome and expensive way to do something for the environment. Market incentives, of course; voluntary regulations, great. What the coalition of states in the Northeast and states like California are doing is fantastic, necessary, and right. But it’s not enough to make even a dent in the amount of GHG emissions the US is pouring into the atmosphere on a daily basis. It’s insulting to hear someone that spent 8 years in the Department of Interior discuss reforestation efforts in South America. Just so long as not one American’s right to fuck up the environment in far away places is compromised. What type of catastrophic event will have to occur in order for some Top-down regulations to come from the government regarding GHG emissions? Or rather, how many catastrophic events? The most powerful piece of legislature we have to protect the environment is the ESA; command and control.
The only interesting piece of info Lynn Scarlett seemingly picked up from her decade-long career in the government is that one should engage with the public in decision making. Talk to the people that live in an area and realize they have some knowledge inherent in the systems they live within and manage. It’s kind of analogous to the requirements for a geography degree in times of yore. (If you were going to study a geographic region, you had to commit to living there for 12 – 24 months, and couldn’t graduate without being fluent in at least one other language, preferably the language of the place you were studying.) Little does she know that considering community members as stakeholders hasn’t been a revolutionary idea for over a decade. And expounding in the most verbose way possible on the importance of dialogues and preferences does nothing to change the status quo.
Cut the science-type , academic, this-is-how-things-are jokes. I appreciate that you are coming into your own spiritual place; make that your best contribution. People can learn your politics from a memoir; shift gears. Indeed, catastrophic environmental disasters aren’t funny. Ask the people who suffered in Hurricane Katrina, which peripherally introduces the reality that the poorest people suffer in the face of catastrophe. And there’s nothing funny about a dumbed-down nation of people who are having their most intimate relationships in life with a screen. Citizenship in a country does not a stakeholder make. Stakeholders are people who interact with their environment and communities and have a stake in how they are changing and what will be there for generations to come.
If the average person doesn’t understand the science behind climate change (he/she doesn’t), then the people who do understand need to be working with government officials to draft regulations that will shift momentum into the direction of mitigation and conservation and precaution. This is why we elect people. We can’t just sit on our laurels until the next catastrophe happens. Which always brings me back to Halina Brown, who said so simply and profoundly, It only takes a few major disasters for people to figure things out.
Everything is so rigid and stifled in the middle of a concrete maze with no air flow, no non-human life forms, no connection visually, audibly, or tactilely to the natural world. No one pushes the envelope or says radical things without the envelope of cynicism and jest. No one knows how to, except maybe the ones that have moved on and are looking out windows, but even that’s speculation.
Insight comes from clearly seeing that something is transforming, mutable. It comes from true interest, an almost wonderment, or delving into something deeply until it is seen that it is not fixed. Then you can participate.
