Environmental Life Choices
I have just read an amazingly intense article from Orion Magazine titled The Idols of Environmentalism by Curtis White.
The premise of the article is well deserving of some intense debate and discussion. I feel that the article left some of the more intense issues underlying the issue out of it - what is life for and how should people live their lives? Maybe that is left up to the next article, where the author will discuss how your job (typically the most obvious significant life choice) could be more tied into nature and the ‘environment.’
Everyone is part of this large economic system - and of course - we are scared to leave it. But could we if we wanted to? Even to try attempting living in the woods and living like a hermit means we have bought land from some government and most probably paying taxes to some government body. We cannot deny that we are part of something bigger. I guess this is where the author started to bring religion into the equation - only here do we start to evaluate the ’something bigger’ issue. If religion was the common denominator of our collective lifestyle, perhaps property rights, perhaps taxes would not be requirements of living.
The second larger concept of Mr. White’s article is the concept of Employment and a job. Only in the relative recent history (meaning after World War II) has the United States and other countries of the world seen employment reach the masses. It has always been a chronic issue for the world that approx - at best - only 80% of the eligible workforce was employed. We now regard 95% (this is considered about full employment, since there is always a percentage in between jobs, entering the workforce, or leaving the workforce) being the target. Why was the 80% a bad or undesirable number. Because people went hungry. Because some people were very very poor and lived in extreme poverty while others could live long healthy lives.
Why do we have jobs? What does a job do for us? Has our culture become so bored, that we must keep our lives so busy all the time that job is the only thing that we have to entertain us? We have become defined by ‘what we do’ instead of asking ‘what do love to do’.
Why can’t we work only 20 hrs a week? - If everyone in our large global economic system decided to make the workweek 20 hrs - what would happen? It would be quite an amazing economic theory test. Could we still eat? Be healthy? Would people be happy? Would we start acting more civil to each other? Would crime go down?
I, being a byproduct of this system, am optimistic that we all can remain happy and employed. We all want food on our table, a roof over our head, and a nice shiny new car in our driveway (oh whoops, that isn’t right is it…). Humans have an incessant desire to accumulate - more leads to more which leads to … More. The education and effort that we put into our environmental processes are good - they educate us all on our lifestyle choices. Hopefully - we as a group can learn that we don’t need that extra car, or that extra house in the hills. If we have less stuff - perhaps we can then have more free $$, which then means we don’t need to work 80 hrs a week… If we can begin to reduce or slow that feedback loop, then perhaps when we do consume, we can be aware of any impact that consumption has on the ‘environment’ and the ability for humans, animals, plants…. life… to survive.