Not easy being green
The speed of a digital circuit is measured in nanoseconds. So, in an increasingly computer-centric world, it’s only appropriate that our attention spans follow suit. Accordingly, what passes for a trend these days — for example, the greening of America — only has to last a month or two.
But being a society whose prosperity owes much to its mobility, nothing gets our attention faster than a $3 gallon of gas, much less a $300 natural gas bill. And, while our attention spans may be short, spending $50 or more every week to fill up the minivan is a nagging reminder that high energy prices may be more than a trend. Just as we begin to break into a sweat pumping our gas, evidence is mounting to suggest that global warming is more than a temporary heat wave.
Finding ourselves as the meat sandwiched in between the threat of global warming above and dwindling resources below, we lunge toward solutions to both problems. Many local and state governments have pledged to be better environmental citizens. They are buying cars and buses that use alternative fuels or following the Kyoto treaty protocols.
For several decades, cities and counties have embraced certain elements of environmentalism, particularly recycling. Recast on the West Coast in the early 1980s, the movement spread quickly, especially in the northeast where landfilling was beginning to cost more than pocket change. New York and New Jersey established mandatory recycling laws in the late 1980s, and today the country sends about 30 percent of its garbage to be reformed into something useful.
A telling, if not disturbing, part of the recycling story, though, isn’t how much we recycle, it’s how much garbage we continue to generate. In 1960, each American generated only 2.7 pounds of garbage every day, but today, each of us creates 4.5 pounds of garbage daily, a number than has stubbornly refused to shrink more than an ounce or two per person over the last dozen years. Couple that with our increasing population, and the total amount of waste generated has been rising greatly.
For the past 40 years, environmentalism has been driven by either the fear of nature or the appreciation of it. Examples of today’s contrasting versions include biophilia, coined by city planners and architects to refer to the harmony between man and his environment, and global warming, as heralded in the movie “An Inconvenient Truth.” But to become sustainable itself, environmentalism must be compatible with the systems it seeks to change.
In recycling, as well as other areas, economic factors often have worked against environmental interests, but the price of energy may be tipping the two toward a balance. Constructing new energy-efficient buildings or replacing old traffic lights and air conditioning and heating units all begin to make economic sense when the higher price of oil and gas is factored into the equation.
Without making economic sense, environmentalism will continue its history of starts and fits as it waits for another energy crisis to inch it forward. That is unless we give the subject the attention it deserves, something we have not done yet — probably because it takes more than a nanosecond.