Moving the goalposts
When we do anything about environmental quality—say, recycle our garbage, reduce our driving, or advocate on behalf of a treasured landscape or natural resource—we are not really engaging “the environment” in an abstract sense.
Rather, we are seeking, and sometimes finding, a different way of relating to the environment. We seek a change, not so much in an objective or abstracted thing, apart from ourselves, but a change in the relationship we actually experience.
Take global warming as an example. The threat to our livelihoods and perhaps even to our continued existence as a species is an objective fact. It is also abstract: a combination of data and phenomena spread over the entire globe, an accumulation of bits and pieces of evidence.
Global warming only becomes concrete when we begin to engage a personal and social process to do something about it. And it will become more concrete as we change what and where we drive, plant trees, and participate in campaigns for alternatives to more coal power plants.
Environmental programs and advocacy are stuck, it seems, somewhere in between objective and abstract goals (“improve water quality”) and subjective but concrete actions (“keep those suds away from the storm drain”).
A heck of a lot of effort—I'm thinking too much effort—is put toward showing links between those goals and actions. Perhaps this way of defining “effectiveness” is, in itself, part of the problem.
Maybe it would be better to simply redefine the goal itself from something objective and abstract like “improve water quality” to something more concrete like “engage the community in making decisions and carrying out actions which they believe will improve water quality.”
You could go wrong, I suppose. People's beliefs could be wrong, and could remain wrong. But we get it wrong much of the time now—failing to act, falling down on enforcement, building things wrong—even as we spend millions on monitoring and compiling reports in an attempt to be objective. And maybe there are cheaper and faster ways of ensuring we get the actions, if not all the objective facts, at least nearly right.
Rather, we are seeking, and sometimes finding, a different way of relating to the environment. We seek a change, not so much in an objective or abstracted thing, apart from ourselves, but a change in the relationship we actually experience.
Take global warming as an example. The threat to our livelihoods and perhaps even to our continued existence as a species is an objective fact. It is also abstract: a combination of data and phenomena spread over the entire globe, an accumulation of bits and pieces of evidence.
Global warming only becomes concrete when we begin to engage a personal and social process to do something about it. And it will become more concrete as we change what and where we drive, plant trees, and participate in campaigns for alternatives to more coal power plants.
Environmental programs and advocacy are stuck, it seems, somewhere in between objective and abstract goals (“improve water quality”) and subjective but concrete actions (“keep those suds away from the storm drain”).
A heck of a lot of effort—I'm thinking too much effort—is put toward showing links between those goals and actions. Perhaps this way of defining “effectiveness” is, in itself, part of the problem.
Maybe it would be better to simply redefine the goal itself from something objective and abstract like “improve water quality” to something more concrete like “engage the community in making decisions and carrying out actions which they believe will improve water quality.”
You could go wrong, I suppose. People's beliefs could be wrong, and could remain wrong. But we get it wrong much of the time now—failing to act, falling down on enforcement, building things wrong—even as we spend millions on monitoring and compiling reports in an attempt to be objective. And maybe there are cheaper and faster ways of ensuring we get the actions, if not all the objective facts, at least nearly right.
1 Comments:
I agree. Engaging the community is key. Any good stakeholder process should begin with an educational overview of the facts, segway into a discussion of their opinions, and move on to what actions and approaches are right for that particular set of stakeholders.
I also support your argument in the last paragraph. The Germans have been building vegetated roofs for over 40 years with very little monitoring. It took a little observation and common sense for them to realize that these are effective and should just be required in their dense cities.
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