October 2003

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Walking North on a Southbound Train

David W. Orr chairs the Environmental Studies Program at Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH 44074; david.orr@oberlin.edu. First published in Conservation Biology 17 (2), April 2003, this article appeared as #766 and 767 of Rachel's Environment & Health News. To receive REHN postings or view back issues, subscribe with the Environmental Research Foundation, POB 160, New Brunswick, NJ 08903; erf@rachel.org.

An old farmer once told me a story of a wily fox that he came to know well, and its interactions with his unfortunate dog. One day, as he tells it, the fox began to run in circles just outside the radius of the dog's tether, followed by the frantically barking dog. After a few laps the tether was wrapped around the post, at which point the fox strutted in to devour the dog's food while the helpless mutt looked on. Something like that has happened to all of us who believe that nature and ecosystems are worth preserving and that this is a matter of obligation, spirit, true economy, and common sense. Someone or something has run us in circles, tied us up, and is eating our lunch. It is time to ask who and why and how we might respond. Here is what we know:

• Despite occasional success, overall we are losing the epic struggle to preserve the habitability of the earth. The human population increased three-fold in the twentieth century and will likely grow further before leveling off at 8-11 billion. The loss of species continues and will likely increase in coming decades. Human-driven climatic change is occurring more rapidly than many scientists thought possible even a few years ago. There is no political or economic movement presently underway sufficient to stop the process short of a doubling or tripling of the background rate of 280 ppm CO2. On the horizon are other threats in the form of self-replicating technologies that may place humankind and natural systems in even greater jeopardy.

• The forces of denial in the United States are more militant and brazen than ever. A former Wyoming senator charges that the environmental movement is "a front for these terrorists," and no significant Washington politician utters any objection. And people holding such opinions have been appointed to strategic positions throughout the federal government.

• The movement to preserve a habitable planet is caught in the crossfire between fundamentalists of the corporate-dominated global economy and those of atavistic religious movements. It is far easier to see the latter than the former, but in a longer perspective the dogmas of perpetual economic expansion will be perceived to be at least as dangerous as those of a purely religious sort. That danger is now magnified by a new right-wing doctrine gaining the status of national policy that permits the United States to strike preemptively at any country deemed to be an enemy without resort to international law, morality, common sense, or public debate.

• There has been a steep erosion of democracy and civil liberties in the United States, driven by what former president Jimmy Carter describes as "a core group of conservatives who are trying to realize long-pent-up ambitions under the cover of the proclaimed war against terrorism."

• In the 1990s, massive amounts of wealth were transferred from the poor and middle classes to the rich. Much of this transfer of wealth was simply theft. In the California energy "crisis" alone, an estimated $30 billion was diverted by those utilities that effectively defrauded the state and its citizens.

• Our problems are systemic in nature and will have to be solved at the system level.

• There are yet good possibilities for averting the worst of what may lie ahead.

Why we are failing

We are failing, first, because for 20 years or longer we have tried to be reasonable on the terms of the opposition, in the belief that we could persuade the powerful if we only offered enough reason, data, evidence, and logic. We have quantified the decline of species, ecosystems, and now planetary systems in exhaustive detail. We bent over backward to accommodate the style and intellectual predilections of self-described "conservatives" and those for whom the economy is far more important than the environment, in the belief that politeness and good evidence stated in their terms would win the day. Accordingly, we put the case for the earth and coming generations in the language of economics, science, and law. With remarkably few exceptions we have been reasonable, erudite, clever, cautiously informative, and--relative to the magnitude of the challenges before us--ineffective. In short, we do science, write books, publish articles, develop professional societies, attend conferences, and converse learnedly. But they do politics, take over the courts, control the media, and manipulate the fears and resentments endemic to a rapidly changing society.

The movement to preserve a habitable Earth is failing, too, because it is fractured into different factions, groups, and arcane philosophies. The left historically has exhausted itself in bloody internecine quarrels, the strategy, as David Brower once described it, of drawing the wagons into a circle and shooting inward. The right generally suffers no such fracturing, in large part because their agenda is formed around less complicated aims having to do with pecuniary advantage.

Further, I think Jack Turner is right in saying that we are failing because all too often we are complacent and lack passion. "We are," in his words, "a nation of environmental cowards... willing to accept substitutes, imitations, semblances, and fakes--a diminished wild. We accept abstract information in place of personal experience and communication." Effective protest, he continues, "is grounded in anger and we are not (consciously) angry. Anger nourishes hope and fuels rebellion, it presumes a judgment, presumes how things ought to be and aren't, presumes caring. Emotion remains the best evidence of belief and value. Unfortunately, there is little connection between our emotions and the wild." We are endlessly busy trading email, doing research, writing papers, and attending conferences in exotic places, but we go into the wild less and less often. We are cut off from the source.

Finally, we are losing because we have failed to appreciate the depth of human needs for transcendence and belonging. We have allowed those intending to pillage the last of nature to do so behind the cover of religion, national pride, community, and family.

What is to be done?

To that question there can be no simple or definitive answer, but I do think there are some obvious places to begin. The first step requires that we take back public words such as conservative and patriot, which have been coopted and put to no good or accurate use. How is it, for example, that the word conservative came to describe those willing to run irreversible risks with the Earth? How have those driving their sport utility vehicles to the mall, sporting two American flags and a "God Bless America" bumper sticker come to regard themselves as patriots? Unable to defend the integrity of words, we cannot defend the earth or anything else.

The integrity of our common language, however, depends a great deal on the cultivation of discerning intelligence among the public, and that requires better education than we now offer. What passes for education has become highly technical and specialized, little of which is aimed to draw out the full human stature of young people. Consequently, fewer and fewer people know history, how the world works as a physical system, or the rudiments of the constitution, and fewer have a respectable political philosophy. We are a people ripe for the plucking.

This leads to a third point. We do not have an environmental crisis so much as a political crisis. A great majority of people still wish a decent and habitable world for their descendants, but those desires are thwarted by the machinery that ought to connect the popular will to public decisions but no longer does so. And in the mass-consumption society we have all become better consumers than citizens, which is to say willing participants in our own undoing. The solution, however difficult, is to reconnect people with the political process and government at all levels.

Fourth, we once fought a revolutionary war to establish political democracy in western societies, but have yet to democratize the workplace and the ownership of capital. These are still governed by the same illogic of unquestioned divine right by which monarchies once ruled. The assumption that corporations are legal persons and thereby beyond effective public scrutiny, control, or law is foolishness and worse. The solution is to enforce corporate charters as public license to do business on behalf of the public that are revocable if and when the terms of the charter are violated.

Fifth, political reform requires an active, engaged, and sometimes enraged citizenry. The means whereby citizens are informed have been increasingly monopolized and manipulated. Unless we reverse course, apathy and incompetence will prove to be the undoing of democratic government and all that depends on a healthy democracy. The nature of what will replace it is already evident: an unconstrained and well-armed managerial plutocracy intent on global plunder.

Sixth, we need a positive strategy that fires the public imagination. The public, I believe, knows what we are against but not what we are for. There are many things that should be stopped, but what should be started? The answer to that question lies in a more coherent agenda formed around what is being called ecological design as it applies to land use, buildings, energy systems, transportation, materials, water, agriculture, forestry, and urban planning. For three decades and longer we have been developing the ideas, science, and technological wherewithal to build a sustainable society. The public knows of these things only in fragments, but not as a coherent and practical agenda--indeed the only practical course available. That is the fault of those in the field of conservation, and we should start now to put before the public a positive agenda that includes the human and economic advantages of better technology, integrated planning, coherent purposes, and foresight.

Imagine

Finally, we should expect far more of our leaders than we presently do. Never has the need for genuine leadership been greater, and seldom has it been less evident. We cannot be ruled by ignorant, malicious, greedy, incompetent, and shortsighted people and expect things to turn out well. If we are to navigate the challenges of the decades ahead, what E. O. Wilson calls "the bottleneck," we will need leaders of great stature, clarity of mind, spiritual depth, courage, and vision. We need leadership that is capable of energizing genuine commitment to old and venerable traditions as well as new visions for a global civilization that preserves and honors local cultures, economies, and knowledge.

Imagine a world in which those who purport to lead us must first make a pilgrimage to ground zero at Hiroshima and publicly pledge "never again." Imagine a world in which those who purport to lead us must go to Auschwitz and the Killing Fields and pledge publicly "never again." Imagine a world in which leaders must go to Bhopal and say to the victims "We are truly sorry. This will never happen again, anywhere." Imagine, too, those pilgrim leaders going to hundreds of places where love, kindness, forgiveness, sacrifice, compassion, wisdom, ecological ingenuity, and foresight have been evident.

Imagine a world in which those who purport to lead us must help identify places around the world degraded by human actions and help initiate their restoration. Some areas might take as long as 1000 years to restore, such as the Aral Sea, the Harrapan region in India, the forests of Lebanon, soil fertility in the Middle East, Chesapeake Bay, and the North Atlantic cod fishery. Imagine a world in which those who intend to lead help lift our sights above the daily crisis to the far horizon of what could be.

Self-described realists will dismiss the idea of better leadership as muddle-headed. Some will see in it some global conspiracy or another. Prospective leaders will profess sympathy but say they do not have the time to improve themselves further. And those least qualified to lead will pay no attention at all. But it is not up to any of them to prescribe for us. We are now citizens of the earth joined in a common enterprise with many variations. We have every right to insist that those who purport to lead us be worthy of the task. Imagine such a time! Imagine a time, not far off, when we might all be on board a train heading north!

References available on request.

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