As comments on my article Great Man Theory begin opening more questions, I find it increasingly necessary to respond with another post.
My largest concern with the ecological lens, which is argued for best on our blog by Philip Rothrock, is that global warming is not yet seen by enough people to be a pressing issue.
My best possible analogy is to abortion:
The argument in abortion debates, in my mind, relates to Aristotle’s Metaphysics:
Potency refers to the ability of a virtual reality (in this case a woman is impregnated) to become actualized – a baby is born.
The argument is: when does potency become actualized?
The argument against abortion then, is that actualization occurs at the moment of conception: that abortion is always murder because the child will be born unless we interfere.
It doesn’t take a prophet to recognize that fertilization will produce a child; we don’t need to see the woman’s round belly to know that she is having a baby. It has happened countless times.
Yet human-caused global warming has never occurred before… so how do we prove the Earth is pregnant?
The pregnancy test exists – we know that parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere have risen 35% since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. And increases in GHGs are the corpus delicti of fertilization.
But what will it take to prove to Americans that their spending habits need to change? Increases in CO2 certainly aren’t convincing enough (especially because so many are convinced that scientists still argue about the effects of CO2).
My answer in previous posts has been greener technological advancement, which Philip has argued is short-sighted, but Whalley and Walsh have argued is the long term solution (259).
So who is right? Both, really. The term argument (from A Rulebook for Arguments) is defined as “a set of reasons or evidence in support of a conclusion” (xi). One does not necessarily defeat the other, but I believe Philip’s argument is misworded.
The conclusions of Philip’s argument aren’t that technological advance is short-sighted: advancement in green technology does lead to long-term payoff; the true conclusions are that we need to change our habits of excessive expenditure. And Philip is right. No single approach will reach the numbers we need in CO2 – we need to do everything we can to combat global warming.
But in keeping with my original argument: convincing people to consume less for ecological reasons is easier said than done.
So change the argument. The Bali Roadmap, which in part outlines the methods of developing greener technologies, “calls for the creation of incentives” (Whalley 259). So why not incentives on the individual level? Why not give people the desire to spend less?
In this video interview with Bill McKibben , the naturalist argues that the number of Americans who said they were very happy peaked in 1956 and has gone steadily downhill since then. How could this be? When our affluence has steadily risen?
McKibben offers that friendships make people happier than “a bunch more stuff out in the storage locker on the edge of town” and that our desire to by houses on remote plots of land distances us from the community that neighbors bring.
McKibben argues that stuff doesn’t make people happy. And if we could convince people that their happiness relies on friendships rather than material possessions, we might be on the track that Philip proposed.
And Philip’s track does make the process easier. It puts less demand on the need for technological change.
And though we may have trouble convincing people that the world is pregnant, perhaps we could convince them that spending simply isn’t making them happy.
The Earth is Pregnant!
Works Cited:
Weston, Anthony. Rulebook for Arguments. Indianapolis: Hackett Pub., 2009. Print.
Whalley, John and Sean Walsh. Bringing the Copenhagen Global Climate Change Negotiations to Conclusion. CESifo Economic Studies, Vol. 55, 2/2009.
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