I firmly support environmentalism. However, I often find myself at odds with other environmentalists due to a difference in the direction of our beliefs. While I think that finding ways to produce electricity efficiently and without pollution is the best solution to global warming and environmental deterioration, these other environmentalists often advocate a strategy of regressing - namely, choosing not to use electricity at all. While I agree that minimising one's use of electricity is a good idea, due to the current methods of electricity production, I do not think that abandoning electricity permanently is a good idea.
To many people today, the lifestyles of those in the past may seem idyllic. Living in a beautiful medieval castle, riding horses around rather than taking cars, and farming the land for food may seem like a pretty picture to some, but they are leaving out some very important details. Horses are much slower than cars and cannot carry nearly as much. Subsistence farming is a risky business, as if there is a plague or disease of the crops, the farmers may starve. Lastly, medieval castles had little to no insulation or plumbing. Thus, they stank badly and were very cold in the winter. Furthermore, abandoning electricity would make the production of many medicines difficult or impossible, so the diseases which frequently devastated medieval populations would begin to take their toll on any who chose this lifestyle. Regressing, while it may at first seem appealing, is ultimately a bad idea. There are reasons that we have progressed away from the past.
I think we are sort of at an awkward point in our history wherein the negative parts of this contemporary society seems to weigh heavier than the negatives of society past. This is, of course, because the negatives of this society do, in fact, weigh heavier than the problems of the past. For instance, the problem of not being able to travel further than 50 miles from home without dying seems like only a minor inconvenience to most people compared to the detrimental effects of destroying the atmosphere because of our fossil fuels. I guess the problem is that it affects a larger number of people, of course, as we've talked about before, the problems of the past are no worse to each individual, it's simply less bad for the entire species.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you regarding the fact that regressing is not better than progressing. I think that, our problems now could be addressed and that a change in mindset will allow us to prevent or respond more quickly to problems that come up in the future. Regarding transportation in the past, transportation was far less advanced; people were not able to travel very far. In our society people can travel around the world with relative ease, this comes at the expense of possibly destroying the atmosphere. I think that we can progress, however, to finding alternate means to power vehicles in a manner that does not destroy that atmosphere. I think many of our problems have solutions that we need to embrace.
I think this is comparable to driving next to an 18 wheeler. Driving next to one seems really bad and you want to get away from it. Currently we are next to it, and we know that being behind it isn't very safe either. The only thing to do, then, is to drive forward as fast as we can (still at risk) until we are ahead of the truck.