As a fan of Harper Magazine's "A Letter On Justice and Open Debate", and as a career professional Environmentalist on "active duty", I humbly ask whether a similar letter may be overdue in 2021 for the Environmental Community.
Professionals are now more aware of systemic bias, cognitive dissonance, wasteful responses, externalization and circular definitions, and outright collateral damage by politically conservative and progressive "environmental causes". The "easy" press coverage is to interview the person who represents someone most impassioned for and against the proposal. This further creates cognitive dissonance in the democracy. People become "for or against" things like "plastic", or "carbon", or "waste", without considering realistically that society must regulate its expenditures to achieve the most bang for the buck. That consideration is especially sharp in emerging and developing markets, which can now widely afford devices like cars, computers, and consumption of "fast food", but which lack the disposable income for waste collection.
This has at times resulted in First World "grabbing control" of vehicles of export, e.g. investments in equipment to "shred" devices Emerging Markets wish to purchase, in an attempt to assuage the First World's own "liability" system. As Carbon and Climate community has long acknowledged, the sky which receives climate-changing carbon does not recognize political sovereignty. And we need to acknowledge the same in disasters such as mining coral islands for tin, or plastic pollution which is not coming from western recycling operations, but from consumption and disposal owing to rising standards of living in the 1960s-labelled "third world".
I'm not sure this is a good idea, but I suspect that if it is, it would take someone headstrong to suggest it. Might as well be me. (Jack Straw, Greatful Dead, Europe '72)
Draft OPEN LETTER: ENVIRONMENTALISM 4.0
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African Telecom IPOs, the Child of Western Flip Phone "Discards" [2017 Bloomberg]An oft-cited theme in this blog is the first mass-marketed pharmaceutical drug - mercury - for the treatment of constipation. Today's western medicine is doubtlessly in debt to western medicine's mistakes... properly re-studied, documented historically, remedied and improved upon.
The environmental community, like doctors of the 1800s, are sincerely caring of their patient - Planet Earth - health and longevity. But we must resist leaders who cling to the ego-festooned past solutions whose progress is measured by press coverage rather than by any measurable positive environmental outcome.
In our community, I recognize that I'm somewhat fairly considered the "red headed step-child - with Tourette Syndrome." Another wannabe "John the Baptist", and all I got is river water that anyone else could baptize with, upstream or downstream. Would pretend to be John Brown, though I cannot pretend to have risked or sacrificed anything like the Abolitionist (protagonist of James McBride's historical fiction, "The Good Lord Bird"). Putting my beliefs and aspirations ahead of my business, I guess I could - like John Brown - ultimately be destroyed by much larger asymmetrical Interests. If that happens, I hope it generates sparks in the headlines; Harper's Ferry shifted the agenda for Civil Reformation. That aspiration to create a positive impact can generate Spiritual Materialism. I hope someone who is more charismatic, with a cleaner ego, takes this match and makes a bigger fire for change.
Regulators don't like job uncertainty, but too many are toll agents for a crumbling infrastructure of 1970s and 1980s laws, based upon the Ptolemy of Liability (your impact on the environment revolves around your emissions), rather than the Heliocentric Environmental Model. Ten dollars spent to save one species in the USA, when one dollar spent in Africa could protect ten species. Ten dollars spent to recycle a plastic straw in Vermont rather than one dollar to collect ten easily collected ocean-bound plastic bags and bottles on monsoon-expecting city gutters in Emerging Markets.
If this is successful (and the Open Wiki-Letter would be better be Housed by an Academic Institution than on my home computer), it might be the right dandelion seed... in case you've forgotten why that blog background imagery was selected in 2006.
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footnote: images above are randomly selected from my 1984-86 Peace Corps album. The kids Sama, Quigle, and Nadege (top right corner) I spent hours with every day - my doors were open. Their dad, Sgt Njang, bought one of the first TVs (third hand) in the village (he got electricity syphoned off the military camp generator a half kilometer away). Twins Nadege and Sama (now 39) discovered their photo on a Facebook page, which I posted in 2009, and friended me on Facebook in December 2020. We enjoyed Whatsapp video chats a couple of weeks ago.
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