TOWARD A NEW ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT

TOWARD A NEW ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT
© Trevor Burrowes

Health care, energy, transportation, war, economy, infrastructure, education are among the top agenda items for a new president and Congress. They are traditionally dealt with as single, unconnected items. Many important issues will be sidelined owing to their having to compete for limited funds and political will to be tackled in the usual disjointed manner. Within the field of environmentalism alone, there are a variety of issues which are currently in competition!

Deforestation, air and water quality, loss of topsoil, loss of species are among environmental issues that are usually tackled in isolation of each other. As are the development issues – economic policy, industrial practices, energy sources, built environment, trade, population density – that exacerbate them. The resulting lack of coordination or wholeness contributes to public apathy and confusion.

We need an “environmental” movement simple enough for everyone to feel a part of. The first photographs of earth from far space made many see the planet in a new way…as the seamless earth, devoid of artificial geopolitical discontinuities. I believe that sustainability requires that we make the wholeness of the space view of Earth into a reality on the ground.

I have long been struck with the need to connect issues, but not in the tossed-salad sense of connection. The tools are there for connecting issues in a systemic fashion. I hope there are some on this forum who can help toward this endeavor that requires so much work and thought.

City General Plans and other kinds of geopolitical land-area plans offer fruitful ways to begin integrating issues. This is because these plans are comprehensive in scope, and lend themselves to the development of synergies between issues. General Plans are often comprised of elements that include: infrastructure, economic development, land use, housing, circulation, conservation, open space, health policy, transportation, scenic routes, air quality, parks and recreation, arts and culture, design, noise, safety, historic preservation, among others. And the law usually requires that there be internal consistency between elements.

Beyond local planning lies regional plans. This from the city of Los Angeles: “When preparing or revising a general plan, cities and counties should carefully analyze the implications of regional plans for their planning area. General Plans are required to include an analysis of the extent to which the general plan's policies, standards, and proposals are consistent with regional plans.” “Regional plans…provide the legal basis for allocating state and federal funds, as in the case of transportation and water quality facilities. Other regional plans, such as air quality plans, spell out measures which local governments may institute in order for the region to meet state and federal standards.”

So planning tools exist, though still very inadequate, to promote sustainable development within given parts of the earth’s surface. A new US administration might well set in motion a survey of such plans in the US and elsewhere toward seeing what potential consistency and integration exists between them. I believe that everyone can comprehend why land-area plans everywhere should be relatively integrated.

Economic restructuring must also be aligned with planetary sustainability. The international community must fund programs that contribute to global sustainability and climate stabilization.
Off the top of my head are the following: Preserving the Amazon Rainforest; coal sequestration (or something analogous) in China and India; Congo peace-keeping and habitat preservation; micro loans and economic development; international structures that promote sustainability; and family planning. International aid must be tied to green development that might include the above issues among many others.

Sustainability thus sanctioned by the international community could do much to reduce ethnic, religious and national tensions throughout the world. Rather than hoping these can simply be removed, we need to have a compelling substitute for them. Reaching for the big global picture that everyone can grasp is the best way to do it.

Writer Tom Friedman has been a major voice for the kind of environmentalism I think we need. In his view, environmentalism and nation building are one and the same thing. Green development is the hub of the wheel of governance, not one of its many spokes. A green-development philosophy affects every aspect of governance. Imagine a health-care system that had no synergistic relationship with air-quality control. Or an economic program that had no relationship with either.

The primary need is for issues of governance to be integrated as part of a larger sustainability movement.