Deliberations for this “Green Issue” took on added significance for me when I attended the Feb. 28 Kentucky Author Forum discussion of life on a poisoned planet between Bill McKibben and Wendell Berry. McKibben, the author of The End of Nature and nine other books about the environment, was being interviewed by his counterpart from Kentucky, who has written for years about how our economy and lifestyle are ruining the natural world.
They shared a dire diagnosis of Mother Earth. Like general practice physicians, these two essayists see things as an organic whole, and our planet, the body we inhabit, is showing symptoms of major chronic diseases — in its air, its water and its ecosystems. It’s running a fever with global warming.
After years as canaries in the coal mine, these two writers are now closer to the mainstream, as most of the rest of us — with the exception of certain politicians and businesspersons beholden to special interests — now accept that the damage we’re doing to our nest must be reversed. So where do we go from here?
McKibben and Berry prescribe solutions that involve cutting back on our energy consumption. Fueled in large part by the global economy and the increasing frequency of long-distance travel, our carbon burning to bring products to market and for personal transportation is out of control. The authors point to the decline of local communities brought on by this big-bang economy as a further indication of malaise. Rather than making people happier, McKibben noted to the Author Forum crowd at the Kentucky Center, our consumption-based society is having the opposite effect. He pointed out surveys that report a lower life-satisfaction rate among Americans since the 1950s, when this abandon-the-hometown migration took off. The solution he and Berry favor is a return to local communities and a “healthier” lifestyle based on regional foods, goods and services — as well as a pulling together of our extended, in a physical sense, families.
A master of summing up, Berry told the Author Forum audience, “It does seem that farmers’ markets make people happier than Wal-Mart.”
Yet as I write this by hand on a legal pad at the Indianapolis airport, I wonder if we can put this jet-setting racehorse back in the barn. Like many Americans, I’ve transplanted hundreds of miles from my hometown. When a family matter pops up — in this case the funeral of a cousin — I am a major fossil-fuel burner as I drive to Indianapolis, where the flight I need for my hurry-up schedule departs, and then board a plane for the trip to Minneapolis. My older son chose a college in faraway New England. To see him play with his baseball team, I either fly to Massachusetts or, as I did this year, wing it to Florida, rent a car and att/files/storyimages/games during the spring break warm-weather part of his season. Then there was that jaunt this winter with my wife to visit her sister and brother in-law at their second home in Costa Rica.
This is what I’ve become, what we’ve become. Do I move back closer to most of my family in Excelsior, Minn. (and my wife back to Kirkwood, Mo.) to lessen our travel needs? Do we ask our children to remain in this area through adulthood to reduce our spent-fuel carbon footprints?
I don’t think so. But I’m convinced the environmental crisis we face is severe enough to warrant action on all fronts. We need to rein in our energy use even as we explore cleaner technologies that will transport us, heat and cool our homes, and otherwise power our fast-paced lives. We need to drive less, fly less and be more conscious of how many miles are being traveled to market by the clothes we wear, the food we eat and other items in our lives that we now only price-compare. We need to understand that our homes and places of business are energy sinks that could be more efficient and, with technologies like solar and wind power, might contribute to rather than draw from the power grid.
We’ve made the world smaller and damaged it in the process. And we’re all part of the problem. We make choices every day that further choke our planet and it’s not permissible to pret/files/storyimages/otherwise. Yes, now is the time to demand that our government — and governments around the world — play a part in advancing new technologies and dramatically reducing existing greenhouse-gas emissions.
But now is the time also to lessen our individual demands on a compromised planet, to make us smaller once again and the world larger. I should start with me, and you should start with you.
