Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, August 2, 1995 TAG: 9508030001
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RICK WILLIAMS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
At the beginning of the 19th century, America was a largely agrarian, rural culture of several million farmers and tradespeople. By 1980, we had become an industrial, urbanized giant with a very small proportion of farmers and rural people. These changes were made possible by the scientific development of more and more resource-intensive technologies. Often these technologies - including the internal combustion engine, electrical generation, telephone and other communication technologies, and chemical and now biological industrialization - were introduced and disseminated with little or no consideration of the social and environmental effects.
Today, we face a no more uncertain future, but one in which the possible consequences of our past actions seem the more ominous and threatening. As numerous studies and individual intuitions suggest, energy and mineral reserves are dwindling, water and air pollution are spreading, and disruptions of previously safe biota and ecosystems are exploding.
As well, human health and social stability seem threatened by the rapid expansion of commercial applications of risky technologies. Environmental health risks are of considerable scale and arise in many cases due to industrial technologies. Also, unemployment and crime can be correlated strongly with the economic effects of industrial expansion.
In short, control of our individual futures has, to greater and greater degree, been taken from our own hands. Development of a more sustainable society would greatly help to return some of that control to us, the citizens.
A sustainable society is one that provides for the needs of its members while protecting the supporting environment from damages that reduce that environment's ability to support that society into the future. Such a society does not "externalize" its dependencies and impacts on the environment; rather, it considers its history and its future as a continuum with the present and accepts that what is done socially and technically are factors determined by the past and affecting the shape of the future. It also considers the well-being of all its members as contributing to the well-being of the society as a whole.
How does a society, supposedly democratic as ours is, achieve and institute a sustainable vision? And should we bother, or as some seem to suggest, should we let the future take care of itself?
Yes and no, in answer to the latter questions. We cannot, with 260 million Americans and 5,600 million world citizens (growing by 90 million a year), afford to "let things slide." There is simply too much at stake, not the least of which are the lives and livelihoods of our own children and grandchildren. We must find a democratic (and, by the way, immediate) means of generating a more sustainable culture. How? Are democratic and immediate solutions even mutually possible?
Simply, the answers are in changing our own lives and, in sum, the life of our society. The changes that I believe are necessary are numerous, but one aphorism suggests the overall direction - "Live simply that others may simply live." We need to focus our attention on reducing the complicating entanglements of our intrusive, disruptive socioeconomic system, and each of us must choose decisively the more effective ways we can of simplifying our lives.
For example, most Americans could find some way of growing more of their own food or of buying it directly from farmers. Back-yard gardens and community-supported agriculture (where people pay farmers directly to grow food and make it available) are two obvious examples of what we can do. Most of us can reduce our use of the automobile by walking, bicycling and restricting car trips to only those most necessary (simply save trips by combining the tasks done on each trip). How many of us regularly make multiple car trips when one would do?
These are only a few examples of applying Mohandas Gandhi's aphorism. I even simplify his statement by saying, "Just do less." This approach could minimize both needs for an extensive highway system and for commercialized megafarms run by corporations. These changes could initiate the evolution of a more sustainable society and could relieve the debilitating stresses on our individual lives. And such an approach could encourage investment of time in the quality of life through greater person-to-person interactions and eventually mutual reliance, engendering a neighbor-saving society: a society that prizes neighbors and neighborliness.
By contrast, our present direction toward more industrialization and more economic centralization continues to degrade and demean our individual and collective dependencies on nature and on each other. Two vivid examples are genetic engineering and electronic monetarization, which leave control of the biological and economic realms to a few, usually usurious groups of people.
Many human societies, and the American society in particular, must modify the character of our social and environmental interactions. As much as we might believe that the economic and political systems will resolve and improve these (which they may), it is our personal and specific behaviors, derived from our cultural beliefs, that determine the ways in which we affect and are affected by the world.
This is the implied thrust of Gandhi's statement; we improve our own lives and the lives of others when we truly identify and seek our needs. We should make our wants only to be satisfied by achieving our needs. To achieve a more sustainable society, each of us must alter attitudes and actions. Then, collectively we may be able to say, "We have arrived."
Rick Williams is an assistant professor of agriculture, biology and environmental science at Ferrum College.
by CNB