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I spent much of the 1960s working on three issues I felt passionately about: civil rights, the Vietnam War, and the environment. We’ve done well on two out of three. Our “We Shall Overcome” ideals are not a complete reality, but flagrant, systematic abuse of blacks in the South stopped after people put themselves on the line against injustice. Huge demonstrations against an unwise and unjust American war helped end it, though more slowly than many of us wanted. On the environment, not so good. My 1960s belief that over-consumption of natural resources was the 800-pound gorilla in our room has not gotten much traction. The American public and our elected leaders still accept that increasing the Gross National Product should be a primary goal of public policy, and that we can safely continue to act as if that the planet will accept and adjust, in a benevolent way, to whatever we do to it.
The world renowned biologist Edward O. Wilson argues in his his new book, “The Social Conquest of Earth,” that tribalism, or loyalty to groups, is a large part of what makes humans dominant. We have evolved to defend, by instinct and with emotional fire, the groups each of us has identified with, whether it’s a team, a country or a belief set. The instinct, the emotion, is not easily silenced by facts or by rational argument. So it was with racial oppression in the South. Segregation was the accepted social order, and there was great resistance to challenges. So it was with Vietnam; the President said the war was necessary, and the overwhelming majority of Americans initially went along. The group identifications of white Southerners with segregation, and of Americans generally with military force ordered by the President, were gradually eroded by events, and by many people loudly and clearly expressing facts and values as they saw them.
Stopping consumption levels that earth’s natural systems cannot sustain is a much harder sell that civil rights or Vietnam. Vice President Dick Chaney expressed a common belief that “the American way of life is non-negotiable.” Earlier President Reagan said “It’s morning in America” and took down the solar panels on the White House. Very few current public officials question the goal of increasing overall mining and use of hydrocarbons, which is politically smart given public enthusiasm for America’s traditional pursuit of “more” now and forever. It’s going to take longer, but events and the growing numbers who pay attention to environmental deterioration and to science will eventually produce a chorus, and boots on the ground, for the change we need.
Image by Matt Crypto (Own work) [CC-BY-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
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