Wed May 22 2013

Departments
Letters to the Editor/
Free Press Forum

Lighter shades of green
by Dr. Susann Möller
March 17, 2009

I have yet to meet an environmental group that has not jumped on the band wagon where everyone’s mission is to achieve environmental protection to benefit economic growth. It escapes me how anyone in these times can actually pursue such an agenda when we are approaching with lightening speed the point where both goals are mutually exclusive. We have exploited, scarred, marred and wounded our environment to such degree that its recovery has slowed down if not stopped altogether.

Pretty soon anything deserving will depend on “charitable volunteering,” of which we currently don’t have enough to begin with. Add to this the lack of governmental regulations for the environment and we will find ourselves in a predatory world embroiled in a last-ditch effort to exploit nature’s remains for capital gains. As long as the underlying ethics on this continent measure in quantity only, including the educational system, that is, as long as the majority of the so-called developed countries turn a green buck into a golden calf, that which could sustain us will be lacking: true reverence for and our indebtedness to the natural world that surrounds us.

Now, for-profits and government alike peddle their green-coated products and services which only differ in shade but not in principle. They have suddenly discovered “engaged” marketing in public involvement forums that still pay little attention to the public opinion but try to create demand from the top down. Lest we have been sleeping behind the wheel, grass roots and not-for-profit organizations have been at the forefront of community outreach. In fact, most of their funding requests are earmarked for public involvement programs. They reach out to their fellow citizens because the majority of them is too busy to learn about the environment, stretched too thin to make amends with nature, too specialized in their professions to shift gears, too pressed for time, too afraid of reality, too complacent – but not uncaring. So environmental advocacy groups continually try to wake the community from its slumber, and to have its members cut a sliver from their time to give back to nature.

Most of those fellow citizens have little if no idea how impaired nature really is, and the severity of assaults to which nature is subjected daily escapes their wildest imagination. In essence, nature as well as its users and abusers are all in dire need of responsible stewardship and compassionate guiding principles. These were once thought to come from government and to this day, we expect you to heed this role. Thus entrusted by the people for the people and not for itself, any given government needs to put in place “cooperative conservation” in the TRUE sense of the word: act with the understanding that all tribes, villages, cities, counties, states, countries, nations and continents are connected by the omnipotent rule of nature expressed in vast phenomena and catastrophes, both life-giving and life- taking: a snowball can turn into an avalanche – pest management can lead to the extinction of an entire plant or animal species, a small subterranean rumble can cause a tsunami. We lack the foresight of the consequences inherent in this macrocosmic interdependency – for most of us don’t even comprehend this reality in our very own microcosm “where everything flows downstream.”

I am done with making excuses to protect our life line. To preserve the environment’s vital functions is synonymous with our own. Without ordinances and legal repercussions we will only become emasculated onlookers, disempowered witnesses to the demise of the environment and ourselves. No, I say also to the swapping of arms for legs like clean water for clean air when both are in fact inseparable and interdependent. There is no difference – one way or another, we are loosing our limbs!