The Answer: Policy Change

In Maniates' article entitled "Going Green? Easy Doesn't Do It," he discusses the issues with new popular thought that making small changes in our daily lives can benefit the environment. While this mindset can certainly help, the answer, I believe, lies in policy change. The reason why all these "small easy things" don't actually have a grand impact is because they're as easy to not do as they are to do.
Everyone knows about recycling. Everyone knows that it's better to take a 10 minute shower than a 20 minute one. You don't need to read a book to understand the importance of shutting the lights off when you leave a room. So if we all know these things, why doesn't everyone do them? Because, sadly, not everyone cares. If you don't have to worry about suddenly getting your electricity or water shut off, there's little incentive to conserve them. People who don't care about the environment won't go out of their way to bring their recyclables down to the basement of their apartment building when it's 10x more convenient to just throw them down the trash chute. That's why the only thing that will make a serious impact is through policy change. If I knew what policies specifically would make a change, I'd be working on the Hill right now. But it's undoubtable that more people bring their recyclables to supermarkets to stick in those machines in order to get 5 cents back for each can. What if we had more monetary incentives like that? At this college campus, we could give some sort of reward to students who lived sustainably in the dorms, or recycled everything instead of trashing it.
Look at the One Child Policy in China. I'm not saying we should go communist and pass some incredible law like that, but it just goes to show that policy it the only way to really make a large-scale, lasting impact.

Easy solutions can be start for change

In the face of such a monumental environmental challenge, it is hard to believe that taking small steps is the only or best way to effect change. By reducing the current environmental problem to “lazy” solutions, our leaders are doing much more than just treating Americans like children. Essentially they are diminishing the severity of the problem to something that can be remedied by quick fixes. As Maniates says, these “economic, simple, even stylish” solutions are not enough to halt the environmental damage. They would, at best, slow the current rate of environmental harm. By downgrading the challenge that we face in tackling the environmental issue, Americans are given an excuse to be unrealistic about what they need to do to help solve it.

However, despite the fact that small is not enough, some action is always better than nothing. It is certainly true that many individuals are looking for more complex ways to address the environmental problem, but this is not true of everyone. By starting the dialogue at easy, market-based solutions it is possible to mobilize a greater number of people who may look for more challenging solutions in the future. The numerous consumer decisions that are now at our fingertips are a manageable way for Americans to at least feel like they are making a difference. This is, at the very least, a good way to get started in being a part of meaningful change in regards to environmental issues. It can be a starting point for consumers to demand larger-scale action. At the very least, individuals should engage in these quick fixes, but we should also be engaging our leaders to challenge us with more complex and effective solutions.

Question 1 Response

It should not come as a surprise to Mr. Maniates that Americans today are lazy and that their consumption habits closely mirror the lifestyles they choose. American citizens are complacent with their effect on the environment in large part because of the minimal perceived consequences. The roads are clean, lawns are tidy (thanks in large part to migrant labor) and the air seems clean. Pollution occupies a place in short memory to be a thing of the 1960s and 1970s when Lady Bird Johnson and others enacted policies to clean up America. For whatever reason, Americans seem to be conscious of that era and do not want to return to it, while at the same time oblivious of the very real consequences in the near future.
Mr. Maniates is right when he states that American ingenuity is best matched when struggling. He is also correct when he asserts that a fundamental shift in our system needs to occur in order to make real change. But does he seem to suggest that a fundamental shift that makes Americans struggle is necessary to achieve progress? No doubt that would get Americans to rethink the way they view environmentalism. As Jared Diamond asserts in “The Last Americans” policies that are right, are not always popular and Bill McKibben also outlines this in his book “Maybe One”. Change is not easy in the face of societal norms but it does not help to be critical of baby steps towards changing the way Americans consume.

Discussion Question 1

For your initial posts I'd like you to read and comment on this piece, which appeared in the Washington Post on Thanksgiving Day a couple of years back. What do you make of the article's argument?

The article was written by Michael Maniates of Allegheny College, one of the authors of the "Confronting Consumption" chapter we are reading this week. Professor Maniates may, if he has time, drop in on your blogs and follow your discussions, so aim to give him something to think about.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/21/AR2007112101856_pf.html

Going Green? Easy Doesn't Do It
By Michael Maniates
Thursday, November 22, 2007

Thanksgiving nicely focuses our attention on things of lasting importance: family, friends, community, a rich harvest. None of these blessings come without cost or sacrifice. Today, then, we might consider what we must give of ourselves to preserve such abundance in the face of increasing climatic instability.

One needn't ponder this question in a vacuum. Several best-sellers offer advice about what we must ask of ourselves and one another. Their titles suggest that we needn't break much of a sweat: "It's Easy Being Green," "The Lazy Environmentalist," or even "The Green Book: The Everyday Guide to Saving the Planet One Simple Step at a Time."

Although each offers familiar advice ("reuse scrap paper before recycling" or "take shorter showers"), it's what's left unsaid by these books that's intriguing. Three assertions permeate the pages: (1) We should look for easy, cost-effective things to do in our private lives as consumers, since that's where we have the most power and control; these are the best things to do because (2) if we all do them the cumulative effect of these individual choices will be a safe planet; which is fortunate indeed because (3) we, by nature, aren't terribly interested in doing anything that isn't private, individualistic, cost-effective and, above all, easy.

This glorification of easy isn't limited to the newest environmental self-help books. The Web sites of the big U.S. environmental groups, the Environmental Protection Agency and even the American Association for the Advancement of Science offer markedly similar lists of actions that tell us we can change the world through our consumer choices, choices that are economic, simple, even stylish. Al Gore himself isn't immune. His recent Live Earth concert featured a who's-who lineup of celebrities who said that if we all do our little bit to recycle and conserve -- the simple things, mind you, because that's all we'll need (translation: that's all they think we'll go for) -- we can together rescue the world for our children and grandchildren.

Never has so little been asked of so many at such a critical moment.

The hard facts are these: If we sum up the easy, cost-effective, eco-efficiency measures we should all embrace, the best we get is a slowing of the growth of environmental damage. That's hardly enough: Avoiding the worst risks of climate change, for instance, may require reducing U.S. carbon emissions by 80 percent in the next 30 years while invoking the moral authority such reductions would confer to persuade China, India and other booming nations to embrace similar restraint. Obsessing over recycling and installing a few special light bulbs won't cut it. We need to be looking at fundamental change in our energy, transportation and agricultural systems rather than technological tweaking on the margins, and this means changes and costs that our current and would-be leaders seem afraid to discuss. Which is a pity, since Americans are at their best when they're struggling together, and sometimes with one another, toward difficult goals.

Throughout our history it has been the knotty, vexing challenges, and leaders who speak frankly about them, that have fired our individual and communal imagination, creativity and commitment. Paul Revere didn't race through the streets of Middlesex County hawking a book on "The Lazy Revolutionary." Franklin Roosevelt didn't mobilize the country's energies by listing 10 easy ways to oppose fascism. And it's unlikely that Martin Luther King Jr.'s drafts of his "I Have a Dream" speech or his "Letter From Birmingham Jail" imagined a practical politics of change rooted in individualistic, consumer-centered actions.

This Thanksgiving, the greatest environmental problem confronting us isn't melting ice, faltering rain, or flattening oil supplies and rising gasoline prices. Rather, it's that when Americans ask, "What can I do to make a difference?" we're treated like children by environmental elites and political leaders too timid to call forth the best in us or too blind to that which has made us a great nation.

Surely we must do the easy things: They slow the damage and themselves become enabling symbols of empathy for future generations. But we cannot permit our leaders to sell us short. To stop at "easy" is to say that the best we can do is accept an uninspired politics of guilt around a parade of uncoordinated individual action. What of the power and exhilaration that comes from working with others toward bold possibilities for the future? What of present sacrifice for future gain?

The time for easy is over. We're grown-ups who understand the necessity of hard work and difficult choices. We're ready for frank talk about how we best confront -- in ways rewarding, confusing, creative and hard -- the planetary emergency before us.

The writer is a professor of political science and environmental science atAllegheny Collegein Meadville, Pa.

For Many Species, No Escape as Temperature Rises

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

KINANGOP, Kenya — Simon Joakim Kiiru remembers a time not long ago when familiar birdsongs filled the air here and life was correlated with bird sightings. His lush, well-tended homestead is in the highlands next to the Aberdare National Park, one of the premier birding destinations in the world.

When the hornbill arrived, Mr. Kiiru recalled, the rains were near, meaning that it was time to plant. When a buzzard showed a man his chest, it meant a visitor was imminent. When an owl called at night, it foretold a death.

“There used to be myths because these are our giants,” said Mr. Kiiru, 58. “But so many today are gone.”

Over the past two decades, an increasing number of settlers who have moved here to farm have impinged on bird habitats and reduced bird populations by cutting down forests and turning grasslands into fields. Now the early effects of global warming and other climate changes have helped send the populations of many local mountain species into a steep downward spiral, from which many experts say they will never recover.

Over the next 100 years, many scientists predict, 20 percent to 30 percent of species could be lost if the temperature rises 3.6 degrees to 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit. If the most extreme warming predictions are realized, the loss could be over 50 percent, according to the United Nations climate change panel.

Polar bears have become the icons of this climate threat. But scientists say that tens of thousands of smaller species that live in the tropics or on or near mountaintops are equally, if not more, vulnerable. These species, in habitats from the high plateaus of Africa to the jungles of Australia to the Sierra Nevada in the United States, are already experiencing climate pressures, and will be the bulk of the animals that disappear.

In response to warming, animals classically move to cooler ground, relocating either higher up in altitude or farther toward the poles. But in the tropics, animals have to move hundreds of miles north or south to find a different niche. Mountain species face even starker limitations: As they climb upward they find themselves competing for less and less space on the conical peaks, where they run into uninhabitable rocks or a lack of their usual foods — or have nowhere farther to go.

“It’s a really simple story that at some point you can’t go further north or higher up, so there’s no doubt that species will go extinct,” said Walter Jetz, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale, whose research last year predicted that a third of the 1,000 mountain birds he studied, or 300 species, would be threatened because warming temperatures would decimate their habitats.

Birds are good barometers of biodiversity because amateur birdwatchers keep such extensive records of their sightings. But other animals are similarly affected.

Two years ago, scientists blamed a warming climate for the disappearance of the white lemuroid possum, a niche mountain dweller in Australia that prefers cool weather, and that was cute enough to be the object of nature tours. Many scientists, suspecting that the furry animal had died off during a period of unusually extreme heat, labeled the disappearance the first climate-related animal extinction.

Since then, biologists have found a few surviving animals, but the species remains “intensely vulnerable,” said William F. Laurance, distinguished research professor at James Cook University in Australia, who said that in the future heat waves would probably be the “death knell” for a number of cold-adapted species.

For countries and communities, the issue means more than just the loss of pleasing variety. Mr. Kiiru regrets the vastly diminished populations of the mythic birds of Kikuyu tribal culture, like buzzards, owls and hawks. But also, the loss of bird species means that some plants have no way to pollinate and die off, too. And that means it is hard for Mr. Kiiru to tend bees, his major source of income.

Current methods for identifying and protecting threatened species — like the so-called red list criteria of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, a conservation gold standard — do not yet adequately factor in the impact of probable climate shifts, and the science is still evolving, many scientists say.

Some species that scientists say are at most risk in a warming climate are already considered threatened or endangered, like the Sharpe’s longclaw and the Aberdare cisticolain Kenya. The cisticola, which lives only at altitudes above 7,500 feet, is considered endangered by the international union, and research predicts that climate change will reduce its already depleted habitat by a further 80 percent by 2100.

Other Kenyan birds that are at risk from climate warming, like the tufted, brightly colored Hartlaub’s turaco, are not yet on watch lists, even though their numbers are severely reduced here. A rapid change of climate can quickly eliminate species that inhabit a narrow niche.

On a recent afternoon, Dominic Kimani, a research ornithologist at the National Museums of Kenya, combed a pasture on the Kinangop Plateau for 20 minutes before finding a single longclaw. “These used to be everywhere when I was growing up,” he said.

He added: “But it’s hard to get anyone to pay attention; they are just little brown birds. I know they’re important for grazing animals because they keep the grasses short. But it’s not dramatic, like you’re losing an elephant.”

As the climate shifts, mountain animals on all continents will face similar problems. Scientists at the University of California at Berkeley recently documented that in Yosemite National Park, where there is a century-old animal survey for comparison, half the mountain species had moved their habitats up by an average of 550 yards to find cooler ground.

Elsewhere in the United States, the pika, the alpine chipmunk and the San Bernardino flying squirrel have all been moving upslope in a pattern tightly linked to rising temperatures. They are now considered at serious risk of disappearing, said Shaye Wolf, climate science director of the Center for Biological Diversity in San Francisco, which in 2010 applied to protect a number of American mountain species under the United States’ Endangered Species Act.

Last year, new research in the journal Ecological Applications and elsewhere showed that the pika, a thick-furred, rabbitlike animal that takes refuge from the sun in piles of stones, was moving upslope at about 160 yards a decade and that in the past decade it had experienced a fivefold rise in local extinctions, the term used when a local population forever disappears.

On the Kinangop Plateau in Kenya, Mr. Kimani exults when he finds a Hartlaub’s turaco, once a common sight, near Njabini town, in a stand of remaining of old growth forest, after engaging local teenagers to help locate the bird. The turaco could lose more than 60 percent of its already limited habitat if current predictions about global warming are accurate, according to Dr. Jetz.

“Even substantial movement wouldn’t help them out,” he said. “They would have to move to the Alps or Asian mountains to find their mountain climate niche in the future.”