Farmers and the Environment

I wrote the other day about Farmers, and how they tend to resist change by attempting to eliminate any kind of negative effect that could result from proposed changes.

This leads to me, somewhat obliquely to the hand wringing going on by climate change scientists around the world about how to get people to do something – anything – to address climate change.

By some estimates, the amount of carbon in the air (in parts per million) that we need to be at in order to prevent some really serious consequences is 350 ppm. Not so bad, except that we are currently at 387.27 ppm. So we're pretty much hosed. What these climate change scientists are basically saying is that if we turn all the cars, factories, and fossil fuel burning power plants off today – right now! - then we'll be at a safe level in a couple hundred years after the environment has naturally sequestered the dangerous excess.

This illustrates quite nicely the problem with putting a bunch of Hunters in charge of managing change.

One of my son's favorite books (he's 5 years old) is Dr. Seuss' classic, The Lorax. In it, a small furry creature, the Lorax, encounters an industrious figure known as the Onceler, and entreats him at every opportunity to stop despoiling the environment. Of course his entreaties fall on deaf ears, and the last of the Trufula trees is felled, and the whole system collapses.

The essential message of the Lorax for industry, is: “If you don't change your ways, you will have no more raw materials left to produce with – and we'll all be destroyed.”

Unfortunately, the little understood (and largely unintentional) message to the environmental movement is: Shrill denouncements of industry – telling companies and people that what they are doing is bad-bad-bad-bad and they need to shape up – basically gets you ignored.”

In the end, the coming environmental/geo-political hardships are as much the fault of the Loraxes as they are of the Oncelers.

Farmers (I use the term technically not vocationally), it has been said, fear change of any kind – and the more someone (especially them) is likely to be harmed by the change, the more they resist it. Don't believe me? Open up an Albertan newspaper any time, and you will see a letter to the editor, or God help me an actual editorial – denouncing the 'soft science' of climate change, and refusing to acknowledge the realities that are as plain as the nose on Gaia's face.

Why? Because if we adopt harsh environmental standards, and begin to cut back our consumption levels to the point that the planet can sustain them – people are going to get hurt. Jobs will be lost, families will be uprooted, communities will disappear. It is inevitable. It is also much more immediate, much more 'real' than the oblique threat of the your summertime being two degrees warmer. “Hell, we're in Canada” they say. “We could use a couple extra degrees.”

What's the solution? Conversation, dialogue. Engaging your friends and neighbors one conversation at at a time. In coffee shops, on the GO train, whenever the opportunity presents itself. The Hunters need to engage in rational, one on one dialogue with every Farmer they can find, and the conversation needs to acknowledge that the short term pain will be great, and that the Farmers hate the idea, and it's ok to hate it every step of the way– but that the consequences of inaction are far, far worse.