A lightbulb or a solar panel? Musings on Thomas Friedman and the death of “environmentalism”
Last night I attended Thomas Friedman’s lecture at the CU-Boulder campus about his new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution - And How it Can Renew America. One question came to mind when I left the lecture: Will a light bulb or a solar panel ‘save the Earth’?
“In the face of perhaps the greatest calamity in modern history, environmental leaders are sanguine that selling technical solutions like florescent light bulbs, more efficient appliances, and hybrid cars will be sufficient to muster the necessary political strength to overcome the alliance of neoconservative ideologues and industry interests in Washington, D.C.” – from The Death of Environmentalism by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus
The “literal-sclerosis”—“the belief that social change happens only when people speak a literal ‘truth to power’” that Shellenberger and Nordhaus discuss in the article makes a lot of sense to me. The “environment” is not a separate, nicely-packaged outlier in the world. It IS the world. This is much of what Thomas Friedman discussed during his book talk; the changes necessary for effective, sustainable environmental change are overarching and simultaneously systemic, and will require policy changes and thinking changes…not merely a matter of getting everyone to use CFLs instead of incandescent bulbs. He says that we are currently having a green “party,” but not a green revolution.
I believe, though, that it is even more nuanced than this. In order for there to be a larger scope of “thinking change,” and certainly policy change, individuals must change their thinking…because it is individuals that make up groups, individuals that make up think tanks, individuals that make up the government. So, yes – we must be encouraging switches to CFLs and riding your skateboard to work once a week; but individuals must also be enabled and educated to get involved in group- and policy-change.
