Environmental future shock: the end of easy answers

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Once upon a time environmental issues were simple. You were either for or against clearcutting. For or against wilderness preservation. For or against nuclear power. For or against DDT. The options were straightforward and dichotomous. I think the clarity of those ideas explains a lot of the environmental movement’s success during its heyday in the 1960’s and 1970’s. The issues were simple, and the practical and moral virtues of each side were easy to distinguish.

Now, though, the landscape of environmental choices is growing foggy, and the issues are anything but clear. Nuclear power avoids CO2 emissions but creates radioactive waste. Wind turbines produce clean energy but chop up migrating birds. DDT is toxic to humans and wildlife, but so is malaria. Livestock grazing harms soils, plants, and wildlife, but ending grazing turns ranches into subdivisions. Endangered foxes kill endangered birds, so we’re forced to choose one over the other. Not so long ago, the major questions about the environmental had to do with whether or not we valued it enough to do the right thing. Now, one has to wonder what the right thing is. Any solution to one environmental problem is likely to contribute to another.

Why have environmental issues gotten so complicated? Quite simply, humans totally dominate the biosphere. We use 40% of the world’s primary productivity (energy from the sun stored by plants), and we’ve transformed 40 to 50% of the land surface to meet our needs and wants. As we use more resources and land, options for environmental protection are squeezed into a smaller and smaller space, literally and figuratively. This leads to problems:

  • Environmental solutions become the “best of a bad situation.”Barring a massive reduction in consumption of natural resources, solutions to environmental problems will often involve merely shifting from one type of resource to another. Coal is dirty, so we switch to тАЬcleanтАЭ natural gas. But this means drilling new wells with attendant road, power, and water development carving up open spaces. Another example: the switch from the “paper office” to the “electronic office” (actually a myth, but let’s assume it does happen) merely shifts the environmental onus from forests (to make paper) to mining for metals and drilling for oil used in the production of electronic equipment.
  • Natural areas become subject to competing demands.Nowadays, the dwindling number of natural areas has to serve more and more purposes. Not long ago, a forest was just a forest. Today, a forest has to provide wildlife habitat, recreation opportunities for people, a sink for carbon, and watersheds producing clean water. As we put more and more demands on natural areas, these demands will increasingly be in conflict. For instance, the best way to sequester carbon may be to plant a monoculture of fast-growing poplars or pines, but this would certainly harm biodiversity.
  • Biodiversity gets squeezed.Limitations on the space available for nature preservation per se are going to be an increasing problem. In an ideal world you would have enough space for every kind of plant and animal in its own habitat. But when you severely limit the area preserved, you have to make hard choices about what kinds of species and habitats to keep around. This means that some unlucky species/habitats are going to be left out. On San Clemente Island, we’ve killed endangered Island Foxes to save endangered Loggerhead Shrikes. Hard choices could mean losing some species to save others тАУ not a decision I could make, but one someone may have to.

These trade-offs don’t mean that we can’t protect the environment just that we’ll have to set goals and make some difficult decisions. The problem, then, is to figure out the goals. This is the tricky part because different environmental groups and communities will have different objectives, and many of these may conflict. So we’re going to have to do two things, I think. One is to learn to compromise. We don’t have to compromise on every issue – some fights will always be worth pursuing to the end. But we will have to recognize that a lot of issues will, by nature, require imperfect compromise solutions. The bird lovers may have to accept some chopped up hawks, and the wind power folks will have to realize that not all windy hilltops are appropriate for wind turbines. Some environmentalists and groups are already good at compromising; others will have to get better. Second is to do some serious planning. Scientists can develop models to help determine the consequences of various actions for biodiversity or pollution or climate change. These models are getting better and better over time, and they can be useful in devising solutions that satisfy multiple goals.

All of this discussion of environmental trade-offs probably seems moot right now, when the big political question is whether or not to protect the environment at all. But as time goes by, these sorts of issues are going to be front and center in the environmental movement. Better to start addressing these types of trade-offs now than to succumb to internecine warfare later on as conflicts arise and we realize that there are no easy answers.

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