In 1957, the world watched in wonder as the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, into outer space. Despite Cold War anxieties, The New York Times admitted that space exploration ‘represented a step toward escape from man’s imprisonment to Earth and its thin envelope of atmosphere’. Technology, it seemed, possessed the astonishing potential to liberate humanity from terrestrial life.

But not all assessments of Sputnik were so celebratory. In The Human Condition (1958), the political theorist Hannah Arendt reflected on the Times’s strange statement, writing that ‘nobody in the history of mankind has ever conceived of the Earth as a prison for men’s bodies’. Such rhetoric betrayed an acute sense of alienation. Misplaced wonder at our own scientific and technological prowess, she worried, would isolate humanity from the realities of the world we share, not just with one another, but with all living creatures.

Arendt’s disquiet stemmed from the postwar context in which she lived: the United States economy was booming, and, for many Americans, the much-celebrated cycle of expansion and construction, of extraction and consumption, appeared infinite. Millions of Americans had bought into the glittering promise of limitless prosperity. While technologies such as plastic wrap and Velcro, microwave ovens and nonstick cookware might seem mundane today, they were unimaginably novel at the time, and pushed people further into a manmade world. While Arendt was concerned that humans would become self-absorbed and isolated, stupefied by the synthetic, and prone to totalitarian tricksters, others fretted that nature (for a large portion of the population, at least) was no longer a place to discover transcendence but had instead become merely a resource to be exploited. At mid-century, we were in the process of trading Walden Pond for Walmart.

If enchantment with ourselves and our artificial creations can alienate us, there is another conception of wonder that can help us transcend our self-centred, even solipsistic impulses. In the 1940s, Rachel Carson began developing an ethic of wonder that stood at the centre of her ecological philosophy.

A trailblazing marine biologist who sparked the modern environmental movement with Silent Spring (1962), Carson’s lesser-known writings – Under the Sea-Wind (1941), The Sea Around Us (1951), The Edge of the Sea (1955) and the posthumously published The Sense of Wonder (1965) – encouraged her readers to consciously cultivate habits of awe, to pay careful attention to the often-overlooked ‘beauties and mysterious rhythms of the natural world’. ‘We look too hastily,’ she lamented. ‘[P]eople everywhere are desperately eager for whatever will lift them out of themselves and allow them to believe in the future.’

Disturbed by the devastation wrought by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, and distressed by the spectre of the nuclear arms race, Carson understood that human beings could now annihilate the world along with all of its splendours and secrets:

Mankind has gone very far into an artificial world of his own creation. He has sought to insulate himself, in his cities of steel and concrete, from the realities of earth and water and the growing seed. Intoxicated with a sense of his own power, he seems to be going farther and farther into more experiments for the destruction of himself and his world.

This understanding fundamentally shaped her ethic of wonder. And while she admitted that there was no single solution to humanity’s hubris, or to the dangers and uncertainties intrinsic to the atomic age, she argued that

the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the Universe about us, the less taste we shall have for the destruction of our race. Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions, and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction.

For Carson, bearing witness to nature, and responding with joy, excitement and delight at the sight of a ‘sand-coloured, fleet-legged’ ghost crab scurrying across the starlit dunes of a night beach, or to the miniature, multitudinous worlds hidden within tide pools, those slant-rock shallow basins where sponges, sea slugs, and starfish so often reside; or even to the daily affirmation of the sunrise, which anyone – no matter her location or resources – could see, fostered a sense of humility in the face of something larger than oneself. At a time when US culture was becoming increasingly therapeutic, shifting from a focus on society to a focus on the self, Carson’s ethic of wonder moved her readers’ awareness from private vexations to the other-directed realities of the world, and she invited them to become ‘receptive to what lies all around you’, to revel in the exhilarating voyage of discovery. It also taught that human lives were linked to a vast ecological community inherently worth preserving and protecting from depletion.

Carson’s poetic prose about the wonders of the natural world allowed her to transcend science as mere fact, to find, as she put it, ‘renewed excitement in living’. She viewed her ethic of wonder as an ‘unfailing antidote’ to the boredom of modern life, to our ‘sterile preoccupation’ with our own artificial creations. It allowed her to ‘witness a spectacle that echoes vast and elemental things’, to live deeper, richer, fuller, ‘never alone or weary of life’ but always conscious of something more meaningful, more eternal than herself. By modelling wonder as a state of mind, as a habit to be taught and practised, she harkened back to a Thoreauvian call to experience amazement at all the daily beauties and mysteries that humans had no hand in creating.

Whatever piece of nature’s puzzle she contemplated – whether it was the nebulous stream of the Milky Way on a cloudless spring evening, or a migrant sandpiper skittering along the salt-rimmed coasts of Maine – Carson unearthed more than personal joy in nature. She also proffered a philosophy of how to live a good life as an engaged member of one’s larger community. She wanted to reunite our material and moral worlds, and she showed readers how they might make meaning out of science, against an age of materialism and reductionism. She intuited an ‘immense and unsatisfied thirst for understanding’ in a disenchanted world, and her readers responded in spades, revealing in fan letters sent after the publication of The Sea Around Us that they had been apprehensive and ‘troubled about the world, and had almost lost faith’ in it. But her writings helped readers ‘relate so many of our manmade problems to their proper proportions’ – small in the grand scheme of things, ‘when we think’, as an admirer observed, ‘in terms of millions of years’ of natural history.

When we read Carson as a philosopher, and not simply as an environmentalist, we might realise that we could use a little more wonder in our own lives. We remain captivated with ourselves, with our own individuality: from self-cultivation to self-care, from self-presentation to self-promotion, we too often emphasise the personal at the expense of the wider world. These days, we rarely stand in awe of the virescent landscape, too busy marvelling at the miraculous devices that allow us to trade our physical realities for virtual ones – devices that, as much as they have empowered us, keep us indoors and tethered to technology, gazing with reverence at our own greatest inventions.

But Carson reminds us to look up, go outside, and really see what lies beyond ourselves. If we redirect our sense of wonder outward, and not toward our own ingenuity, we might resist the worst of our narcissistic impulses; we might fall in love with the beauty that is all around, and come to the revolutionary realisation that power and profit from scientific and technological progress are worth neither the sacrifice of humanity nor the Earth. We might recover a little bit of enchantment, opening ourselves to experiencing radical amazement at the fact that any of this exists at all, and that something will continue to exist long after our lives cease. In learning, as Carson did, how to be a moral member of the ecological community, we might inhabit and love our shared world more fully, forging new connections to everyone and everything that exists around us, despite our differences. How wonderful that would be.

Jennifer Stitt is a PhD candidate in US intellectual history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is interested in the history of philosophy, literature and political movements.

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.

If environmental solutions aren’t systemic, living green will always mean going against the grain — and usually failing.

Every year around Earth Day, I’m reminded of papers I graded in an environmental sociology class. The assignment was to assess your values, explain how you thought you would live as an adult (about 20 years in the future), and then complete an online calculator to find out: If everyone in the world lived like you, how many planets would we need?

The students were all young and idealistic, and most of them cared deeply about the environment. In their papers, they professed how they would live their lives in the most sustainable ways possible — eating vegan diets, avoiding car travel, growing their own food, and so on.

Most were sure they’d find a way to make it work without sacrificing luxuries like international travel.

Then they calculated how many planets would be needed to support everyone in the world living with their ideal lifestyle. Every single student required more than one planet. Most needed about three.

That’s right: If everyone in the world lived like these idealistic, passionate environmentalists, we’d need three planets to produce enough resources for their needs.

These papers hit me hard emotionally. When I was their age, I was them. Their dreams were my dreams — only for me, those dreams are dead.

Even the most committed of them couldn’t get her environmental footprint down to what one planet can provide. There’s almost no way to live in the United States as it is now and be fully sustainable. Attempting to do so requires a constant, overwhelming amount of effort.

I know because I’ve tried to do it myself. It was exhausting, frustrating, and often unsuccessful.

The question is: What good is it to single handedly live a green life in a society that’s racing toward catastrophic climate change? You’ll still go down with the sinking ship in the end if you’re the only one trying to bail water out of it.

Here’s what I have learned as a sociologist that I wish I could tell my 20-year-old self:

The solutions to environmental problems need to be systemic. They cannot be achieved by a group of do-gooders each trying to individually make good choices within a system designed for the opposite.

Right now, living a sustainable lifestyle is difficult because it requires going against the grain of society constantly. It means reading every label to avoid the ingredients you won’t eat, or requiring extra travel time to take the bus or bike or walk instead of driving. It’s often expensive and time consuming.

Also, systemic solutions need to work for all of us.

Environmental policies reflect the power dynamics within our society. If mostly white, urban, middle to upper class, college-educated people — the people hold the most power in our society — make our environmental policies, then the policies they craft will work best for themselves, and less well (or not at all) for other groups of people.

The rich and the powerful are often hypocrites. They might grow organic gardens or drive electric cars but live in a huge home (or several) and take multiple international trips each year. Instead of inflicting hardship on more marginalized groups — with bad policy or bad habits — they should begin by holding a mirror up to themselves.

Until we reach a place where we find solutions collectively in a way that is inclusive of all groups within our society, and until we make sustainable living the default or easy choice, we won’t reach the point where the one planet we’ve got can support all of us.

OtherWords commentaries are free to re-publish in print and online, with attribution to OtherWords.org.

And colleague says “global warming” no longer strong enough term. “Global heating is technically more correct because we are talking about changes in the energy balance of the planet.”

Photo: U.S. Department of Agriculture

Declaring that after three decades of studying the climate he’s “never been as worried” about the future of the planet as he is today, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber—founding director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany—warned that even as extreme weather wreaks havoc across the globe and experts issue one terrifying prediction after another, political leaders are still refusing to confront the climate crisis with the necessary urgency.

If past is prologue, the media will soon move on, leaving the greatest threat humanity has ever faced virtually uncovered

Climate change catastrophe is upon us. We see it in the record-breaking floods from storms like Florence, and in the record-breaking fires across the US once again this year. But the media – which barely mentioned the link between these catastrophes and climate change — is preparing to move on to the next new, new, thing.  Can’t blame them.  Trump and the Republicans are providing enough fodder to feed a thousand news cycles with daily outrages that keep the country on the edge of chaos.

But here’s the thing – climate change will affect us more profoundly, more negatively, and sooner than anything we’ve been led to believe. What we’re seeing now is just a taste of what the future holds, and the disasters we’re causing today with our continued use of fossil fuels will soon be a permanent feature of our existence, irrevocable in anything other than geologic time, if we don’t act immediately.

Here’s why.

We’re ignoring feedbacks in our forecasts. Back in 2004, in an article in the Baltimore Sun, I warned that the rapid warming in the Arctic had the potential to release methane from clathrates and permafrost, speeding up the rate and extent of warming.  By 2006, I noted that there was evidence  that this particular feedback had started already.

It’s been known for some time that feedbacks cause earth systems to respond non-linearly – that is to experience extreme and swift reactions well beyond what our models forecast.  Such rapid warming can be found throughout the geologic record, and two of the most disruptive, the Permian die-off and the Paleocene/Eocene thermal Maximum (PETM), share the root cause of today’s warming – sudden increases in the amount of atmospheric carbon.  Now, rapid is a relative term in geology.  Something on the order of a thousand years is the blink of an eye gauged against geologic time.  And both these events took centuries to unfold, and eons to reverse.

But when it comes to carbon emissions, humans are giving “rapid” a whole new meaning.  For example, during the PETM warming, unusually intense and sustained volcanic activity was releasing about 0.2 of a gigatonne per year, whereas today, humans are releasing about 10 gigatonnes per year.

A recent report published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, identifies ten feedbacks that could – and absent immediate action, likely will – increase the pace and extent of warming; something they refer to as the “Hothouse Earth” pathway. Hothouse Earth is not a planet compatible with the world humans evolved in, nor is it capable of sustaining civilization as we know it.  For example, under the Hothouse Earth pathway, sea level would ultimately rise by as much as 60 meters (about 197 feet) and stay that way for millennia. This would inundate virtually every coastal city in the world, and displace close to 3 billion people.  And these billions of refugees would come on top of others already displaced by heat, drought, disease, storms, hunger and the political unrest they would cause.

Feedbacks are the tail wagging the dog – together, they could dwarf the warming we’re forecasting from just human emissions without feedbacks.  Despite the fact that we’ve known about them for decades, they aren’t considered by the IPCC forecasts, they’re rarely covered in the news, they’re routinely ignored in policy discussions, and we are dangerously close to triggering some of the worst of these feedbacks – if we haven’t already.

Carbon budgets employ safety factors that aren’t safe in order to give us the illusion that we have more time to act to avoid catastrophic warming. There’s been a lot written about the Paris Agreement and why it may not have been adequate to stop dangerous warming, even before Trump withdrew the US and backtracked on Obama’s carbon reduction measures. People pointed out that two degrees was too high to avoid feedbacks, that the measures were voluntary, that fully implemented it would still allow temperature increases of 3.5 degrees C or more.  All legitimate, all deeply concerning. And the fact that countries are now behind in terms of meeting their targets shows these concerns were valid.

But the use of carbon budgets may be the least understood and most serious flaw in the Agreement – in fact, carbon budgets are the basis for all IPCC forecasts and they expose us to extraordinary risks.

We’ll get to the details in a moment.

But first, a word about risk management. Typically, if the consequences of something are irreversible, ubiquitous, and catastrophic, we use extremely conservative safety factors when we design something.  For example, airplanes and bridges are engineered with huge margins of safety and a lot of redundant systems.  They are as close as we can come to fail-safe. But when it comes to protecting the Earth from the ravages of climate change, we’re accepting risks of failure we wouldn’t accept for a washing machine, a toaster or a blender.

Now the details. Carbon budgets are established to determine the maximum amount of GHG we can emit, and for how long, to reach a given atmospheric level of GHG concentrations needed to limit warming to a given temperature increase. So, for example, if we seek to limit temperature increases to less than 2°C, then we have to limit GHG emissions to a level that avoids atmospheric concentrations sufficient to cause warming to exceed that limit.

In establishing carbon budgets, the IPCC used a series of probabilities for staying below the target temperature of 2 C (3.6 F). The probabilities they used were a 66 percent likelihood of meeting the target, a 50 percent likelihood of doing so, and a 30 percent likelihood. What this actually means is that 66 percent of the models forecast temperatures below the target level, or 50 percent of them do, or 30 percent of them do.

Notice what’s not included in the carbon budgets the IPCC considered: a confidence level of 100 percent or even 90 percent. Now, think about this for a moment. We are using margins of safety for the future viability of our planet’s life-support systems that we wouldn’t tolerate in almost any other area of our life. Would you board a plane with a 33 percent chance of crashing? Cross a bridge that has only a 66 percent chance of holding up? No. You wouldn’t.

So why is the 100 percent probability of making our goal not included in the IPCC’s scenarios — or the 90 percent probability for that matter? Answer: because we’ve already blown past  the carbon emissions that would achieve either one.  So now, we’re stuck with the planetary equivalent of taking risks equal to playing Russian roulette with two bullets in the chamber. You’d think this would be a big deal, something worth talking about.

But of course, you’d be wrong.

By specifying a 66 percent probability of meeting the 2°C target, rather than 100 percent or 90 percent, we can appear to buy ourselves a lot of time. The lower we set the probability of staying below 2°C, the higher the allowable carbon budget and the more time we have to get off it. Of course, that doesn’t actually give us more time—but it does provide the appearance of doing so.

So, higher odds of success require lower carbon budgets and give us less time, lower odds of success allow more carbon to be released over a longer time.

Now let’s do some numbers.

If we wanted to have a 66 percent probability of staying below 1.5°C, our total carbon budget would be 2,250 tonnes of carbon dioxide. By the end of 2017, we burned through all but about 160 billion tonnes of that budget. Since we are emitting about forty billion tonnes per year (about forty-four billion US tons), we will blow through the budget in 2021. If we were to choose a more rational level of risk management, such as a 90 percent or 100 percent likelihood of preventing global Armageddon, we would have had to start acting a couple of decades ago, since we exceeded those limits in 2013.

Contrast this with the carbon budget based on a 66 percent probability of staying below 2°C, or 2,900 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide (GtCO2e). By 2017, we would appear to have nearly 810 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide emissions left, or twenty years’ worth.

Playing craps with the planet we live on is—to say the least—irresponsible. Using an inadequate margin of safety doesn’t actually increase the time we have to act to avoid catastrophic changes to our climate and seas, it merely appears to do so.

A house on the coast of North Carolina’s Outer Banks collapsed when it was undercut by the storm surge from Hurricane Isabel in 2003. Credit: Mark Wolfe/FEMA

In 2012, North Carolina’s Coastal Resources Commission warned that sea levels there could rise by a metre over the next century. The warning was based in part on U.S. Geological Survey findings that “sea level rise along the portion of the East Coast between North Carolina and Massachusetts is accelerating at three to four times the global rate” and that sea level in the region “would rise up to 11.4 inches higher than the global average rise by the end of the 21st century,” according to ABC News.

It was meant to help the state prepare its long, wide, low-lying coast for the kinds of severe occurrences that are becoming increasingly common as climate change ramps up. But developers and others complained the forecasts could hurt property values and increase insurance costs.

Politicians came up with a novel “solution.” They passed a law banning policies based on the forecasts.

Under the law, predictions can be for 30 years at most and must be based on historical data about sea level rise. This ignores mountains of scientific evidence about global warming and its consequences, including the fact that sea level rise is accelerating as ever-increasing greenhouse gas emissions drive global average temperatures higher.

The law allowed developers and government to continue building homes, buildings, roads and bridges along the coast, oblivious to threats outlined by people who study climate and oceans. Whether heeding the warnings would have mitigated the devastation and tragedy from Hurricane Florence depends in part on actions government might have taken. But refusing to accept scientific evidence for the sake of short-term profits, although all too common, isn’t the way to protect citizens and property.

The Coastal Resources Commission released a more modest warning in 2015, concluding sea level rise could be 15 to 20 centimetres over 30 years — less than other research predicts. North Carolinians also elected a governor last year who accepts the reality of climate change and has committed to taking action. But so far, not enough has been done to safeguard the vulnerable coastline from sea level increases or storm surges exacerbated by climate change.

As meteorologist Eric Holthaus explains in the Washington Post, “A warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapor — producing heavier downpours and providing more energy to hurricanes, boosting their destructive potential.”

The notion that storms and other weather events will follow predictable historical patterns is being shattered by record climate-related storms, droughts, floods and heatwaves worldwide. The tragedy so many are facing, from loss of homes to loss of lives and livelihoods, is compounded by the fact that much of it is or was preventable. Employing solutions while continuing to develop new knowledge and technologies in everything from agriculture to renewable energy would create good jobs and economic gains, while protecting human health and well-being and the very life-support systems that keep us alive and well.

Many in the U.S. understand this. While the federal government rolls back environmental laws and protections, “more than 3,000 U.S. cities, states, businesses, investors, counties, regional associations, faith communities, and post-secondary institutions are on track to reduce the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by at least 17% — and possibly by as much as 24% [by 2025], bringing the country close to meeting its promised target under the Paris Agreement,” an Energy Mix article states.

Those reductions depend on how well signatories to Bloomberg Philanthropies’ America’s Pledge keep their commitments on a range of goals regarding renewable energy, energy efficiency, electric vehicles, carbon pricing, carbon sequestration strategies and preventing methane leaks. But the benefits of doing so go beyond ensuring our survival and well-being — though that should be enough!

A study by C40 Cities, the Global Covenant of Mayors and the NewClimate Institute concluded, “Cities around the world could create 13.7 million jobs and prevent 1.3 million premature deaths per year by 2030 by pursuing ‘ambitious urban climate policies’ that ‘vastly reduce carbon emissions globally,’” Energy Mix reports.

As our thoughts and hopes are with the people of the U.S. East Coast, the Philippines and other places caught in terrifying weather, we must remember that we’re all in the storm now. Our way to safety is also our way to a brighter future.

Published with permission from David Suzuki Foundation

Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is one of the world’s last intact ecosystems, but dangerous oil exploration could soon spoil it.

I can still remember the first time I saw tracks left behind by seismic testing in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

It was the mid-1990s and I had been guiding a group of people on a float trip across the coastal plain of the refuge towards the Arctic Ocean. After seven days of traveling through the wildest country I’d ever seen, I was out on a late evening walk and I saw what were clearly tire tracks crossing the tundra.

I couldn’t believe it. We were hundreds of miles from the nearest road or motorized vehicle, but there they were.

For those who’ve never been to the Arctic Refuge, it can be hard to imagine a place so far removed from the busy streets and office buildings most of us encounter every day.

One of the world’s last intact ecosystems, the Arctic Refuge is home to some of the most abundant and diverse wildlife anywhere in the world, including more than 200 wildlife species. Its coastal plain is where the porcupine caribou herd travel to birth their young and is the most important denning site for polar bears in the United States.

The 19 million acre refuge is one of the few places in the United States that has never seen the impact of Western society. There are no roads, buildings, or permanent structures of any kind there. For decades, this special place has been protected from industrial activity.

And yet, to this day, tracks left from seismic exploration that took place in the 1980s are still visible. Seeing this damage was jarring, to say the least — and it could soon get much worse.

After Congressional Republicans passed legislation opening up the refuge for oil and gas drilling last year, the Trump administration has rushed to sell off the coastal plain to the industry on an accelerated schedule.

The good news is that this push has been met with near-universal resistance. Hundreds of people turned out to protest the Department of the Interior’s hearings on the plan, and hundreds of thousands more submitted public comments opposing drilling.

This spring, a group of some of the world’s most significant investors urged oil and gas companies and major banks not to initiate any oil and gas development in the Arctic Refuge. And legislation has already been introduced in Congress to walk back this dangerous plan.

Actual oil development in the Arctic Refuge could be years away, if it happens at all. But in the meantime, the administration is already getting ready to approve a permit for destructive seismic exploration, which could start as soon as December of this year.

Allowing this seismic testing to go forward would do severe and permanent damage to this sensitive wilderness before a single drill rig has ever been permitted.

Not only would it leave lasting scars on this treasured landscape, seismic activity would also threaten critical habitat for polar bears. The extensive noise, vibration, and disturbance could cause mother bears to flee their dens, leaving cubs to starve to death and this already threatened population to decline even further.

The Arctic Refuge is one of our last links to the unspoiled natural world and a source of hope for future generations — even for those who may never set foot there. I’ve been lucky to spend time in this one-of-a-kind place, and it’s given me a first-hand understanding of all that’s at stake in this dangerous push to open it up to the fossil fuel industry.

Time is running out to protect the Arctic. We must all speak out to ensure that this administration’s greed and recklessness don’t leave permanent scars in America’s refuge.

Dan Ritzman directs the Sierra Club’s Lands Water Wildlife Campaign. He’s been leading rafting trips through the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for 25 years. Distributed by OtherWords.org.

This article is licensed, by OtherWords, under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative 3.0 License.

Should we graze it, log it, drill it, and mine it? Or should we preserve it, study it, recreate in it, and revere it?

Mojave Trails National Monument

The Trump administration accidentally released documents showing that they intentionally underestimated the value of national monuments while emphasizing the land’s value for logging, ranching, and energy development. Oopsie.

National monuments are federally protected lands that differ from national parks in a few important ways. Whereas only Congress can create a national park, the president can create a national monument with the stroke of a pen. Many national parks were national monuments first.

The Grand Canyon is an example. You might think the Grand Canyon would be among the most obvious slam dunk places to make a national park in the United States. Alas, it wasn’t.

Private interests initially prevented Congress from creating Grand Canyon National Park. President Teddy Roosevelt protected the Grand Canyon as a national monument in 1908, and it took Congress 11 more years to make it a park.

The Antiquities Act gives the president unilateral power to create national monuments, and Trump generally loves executive power of all kinds. However, in this case, he likes using his power to shrink existing national monuments.

The Trump administration recently reduced the size of two national monuments in Utah — Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante. Bears Ears in particular contains land sacred to Native Americans. The coal and oil industries were behind the decision to shrink the two monuments.

The newly — accidentally — released documents show that the Trump administration intentionally hid evidence that would bolster the case for leaving the monuments at their present size, such as tourism revenue and archaeological value.

At the heart of the matter, in addition to a story about a corrupt and inept government, is a conflict between Americans about the proper relationship between people and the land.

What is our land for? Should we graze it, log it, drill it, and mine it? Or should we preserve it, study it, recreate in it, and revere it?

Presumably, we need a happy medium of both.

Unless we find a way to run our economy without fossil fuels, or the entire nation goes vegan, or we stop using wood and paper, we can’t curtail all drilling, grazing, and logging. And obviously America isn’t going vegan, no matter how much certain animal rights groups think we should.

Whatever one’s opinion of extractive industries, they’re the basis for the economy and the way of life in much of the Old West. It’s a way of life that’s rugged and difficult and, increasingly, threatened by a trend of rural gentrification.

On the other hand, nature has intrinsic value. The beauty of our wild lands forms part of our identity as Americans and enhances quality of life. Intact ecosystems contribute to clean air and water, which we all need. And desecrating the sacred land of Native Americans is morally repugnant.

Additionally, tourism to national monuments pumps dollars into the economy and creates jobs.

Both land uses provide jobs and other benefits. Each is valued by a different group of people.

The Trump administration doesn’t appear interested in any sort of reasoned discussion that recognizes the merit of each side. This only serves to anger and entrench each side in the conflict instead of working toward compromise.

Perhaps someday we can find a solution that provides economic prosperity in America’s rural areas but doesn’t destroy the land in the process. Unfortunately, it won’t be while Trump’s in office.

This article is licensed by OtherWords under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative 3.0 License.

Both are bad, but Scott Pruitt’s abuse of our environment is far more dangerous than his abuse of taxpayer money.

Did you hear that the head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Scott Pruitt, is so corrupt that he spent $1,560 on 12 customized fountain pens? Or that he spent another $43,000 on a soundproof phone booth in violation of government spending laws?

Pruitt’s big spending on the taxpayer dime has earned him well-deserved scrutiny and outrage. But what’s really outrageous is what he’s doing with the EPA.

While Pruitt was getting headlines for having taxpayer-funded aides do his private business, his EPA just gutted an Obama-era law to protect Americans from toxic chemicals.

For four decades, the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 did little to require that all new chemicals (or untested old ones) were properly vetted for safety before allowed onto the market. Even the chemical industry said it was flawed.

In 2016, the Republican-led Congress passed an update that would help keep Americans safer from toxic chemicals.

Under Pruitt, the new law won’t apply to any chemicals in the air, ground, or water. So what does it apply to? Only direct contact.

While spending over $1,500 on pens is a disgusting misuse of government resources, the ultimate harm it does to the American public pales in comparison to allowing toxic chemicals into consumer products and our environment.

Gutting protections against toxic chemicals is just one way in which Pruitt has assaulted the environment while in office. He’s also a climate denier and a good friend to the fossil fuel industry.

It’s great when our government checks and balances work on blatant corruption. I’m glad Tom Price lost his job as health secretary when he used private jets at taxpayer expense.

But what about accountability for actually doing your job? Who gets ousted when they’re heading the Environmental Protection Agency but fail to protect the environment? Or they head the Department of Education but let down the nation’s schools?

The Interior Department, led by Secretary Ryan Zinke, just pushed out longtime superintendent of Yellowstone National Park Dan Wenk, presumably over wildlife protection policies (and you can guess who is for protecting wildlife and who is against it).

Lucky for us, Zinke spent $139,000 on fancy new doors for his own office, so maybe he’ll get enough heat that he has to step down. But is protecting the crown jewel of the national park system — and all of our other public lands — contingent on whether or not the secretary failing to protect them also misspent taxpayer dollars?

The huge amounts these corrupt men spent on their own offices and flights is outrageous. But it’s their willingness to sabotage the departments they’re in charge of that’s truly hurting the American people.

The fossil fuel era must end, or it will spell humanity’s end. The threat isn’t just from pollution and accelerating climate change. Rapid, wasteful exploitation of these valuable resources has also led to a world choked in plastic. Almost all plastics are made from fossil fuels, often by the same companies that produce oil and gas.

Our profligate use of plastics has created swirling masses in ocean gyres. It’s worse than once thought. New research concludes that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is 16 times larger than previously estimated, with 79,000 tonnes of plastic churning through 1.6 million square kilometres of the North Pacific. That’s larger than the area of Quebec — and it continues to grow! Researchers say if we don’t clean up our act, the oceans will have more plastics by weight than fish by 2050.

The Ocean Cleanup Foundation commissioned the study, published in Nature, based on a 2015 expedition using 30 vessels and a C-130 Hercules airplane to look at the eastern part of the patch.

According to a CBC article, researchers estimate that the patch holds 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic, much of it broken down into microplastics less than half a centimetre in diameter. They also found “plastic bottles, containers, packaging straps, lids, ropes and fishing nets,” some dating from the late 1970s and into the ’80s and ’90s, and large amount of debris from the 2011 tsunami in Fukushima, Japan.

When plastics break down into smaller pieces, they’re more difficult to clean up, and marine animals often ingest the pieces, which is killing them in ever-increasing numbers. Larger pieces can entangle marine animals, and bigger animals often ingest those, too.

The North Pacific patch isn’t unique. Debris accumulates wherever wind and ocean conditions and Earth’s rotation create ocean gyres, including the North Pacific, North Atlantic, South Pacific, South Atlantic and Indian Ocean. There’s also one in the Arctic Ocean, although it isn’t a gyre, but an “accumulation zone,” where water from warmer areas sinks as it cools.

As the 5 Gyres organization points out, plastics are everywhere, not just in the gyres. It says the idea of a floating island of garbage is a misconception: “In the ocean, plastic is less like an island, and more like smog.”

Although some of the plastic comes from ships, most is washed from land into the seas via runoff, rivers and wind.

Scientists are conducting research into ways of cleaning up some ocean plastic, but say the only way to adequately address the problem is to stop it at its source. Marcus Eriksen, 5 Gyres co-founder and research director, told CBC that governments need to implement policies to get manufacturers to clean up their acts, “And make smarter products and think of the full life cycle; stop making something that, when it becomes waste, becomes a nightmare for everyone.”

Fossil fuels and the products derived from them have made life easier, but at what cost? We’ve only been using plastics since the 1950s, and our excessive fossil fuel use is also a relatively recent phenomenon. Putting plastics in the recycling bin isn’t the only answer either. Low fossil fuel prices and lack of profitable markets for recycled materials means a lot of plastic doesn’t get recycled, and it doesn’t biodegrade.

We don’t have to stop using fossil fuels and producing fossil-fuel-derived plastics overnight, but we can’t continue to regard the industry as the backbone of our economies and ways of life, and we must stop being so wasteful.

As individuals, we can help reduce the amounts of plastic waste in the oceans and on land by eschewing single-use items like plastic bags, drink containers, straws and excessively packaged items; by avoiding clothing made with plastic microfibers and products containing microbeads; and by choosing reusable containers or disposables made from other materials, such as aluminum, that are more likely to be recycled. Be wary of compostable plastics. Although made from plant materials, they require large industrial facilities to break them down.

The real solution is to buy less stuff in the first place, reduce waste, conserve energy and shift to cleaner, renewable power sources and product materials. It’s past time to take pollution, climate change and waste seriously.

Written by David Suzuki with contributions from David Suzuki Foundation Senior Editor Ian Hanington.

Republished by permission from David Suzuki Foundation

How poverty, climate change, and bad policy put poor people at greater risk from pest-borne diseases.

OK, I admit it, I’m a freeloader.

My neighbors asked if I’d go in on a mosquito control service last spring, and I turned them down. I was skeptical about whether the “eco-friendly” service would actually work. But I was mostly taken aback by the cost: $750 for the season.

Several neighbors went ahead and paid for the service, which proved so effective I was able to enjoy my back yard for the first time without first dousing myself with bug spray.

I felt guilty — and not just because I was mooching off somebody else’s pricy pest control. I’d also been forced to recognize yet one more way privileged people like me are often insulated from public problems.

As fears of mosquito-borne diseases increase and public pest management spending falls far short, private control services are rapidly expanding. The Zika outbreak in 2016 helped kick up residential mosquito control revenues by an estimated 12.6 percent. Demand has also created a market for automatic home spraying systems, which run about $4,000.

For low-income Americans, the cost of these services would be prohibitive. Yet poor neighborhoods are more likely to have severe mosquito problems.

A three-year study in Baltimore found that the greater prevalence of good mosquito breeding grounds in poor neighborhoods, including abandoned buildings and accumulated trash, led to worse infestations than in more affluent areas.

Another study in one Georgia county found that neighborhoods made up mostly of people of color were 4.5 times more likely than whites to be at risk of West Nile, while residents of high poverty areas were 5.5 times more likely to be at risk.

In 2017, the Centers for Disease Control received reports of more than 2,000 cases of West Nile virus from across the United States — and 121 people died from the disease. The actual number of cases is likely much higher, since the poor are also more likely to lack health insurance, and thus avoid seeking medical treatment if they do become ill.

Public health problems related to mosquitoes aren’t going away.

As climate change improves environmental conditions for mosquitoes, it increases the risks of the diseases they carry. According to Climate Central, in dozens of cities across the Midwest, Northeast, and along the Atlantic Coast, mosquito seasons have grown by at least 20 days over the past 35 years.

Despite this growing menace, public funding for mosquito control has declined by more than 60 percent since 2004, according to the National Association of County and City Health Officials.

In North Carolina, for example, the state government cut all funding for such programs in 2014. And while some counties and cities in that state began paying for private services, other cash-strapped communities have not. The Asian tiger mosquito, which has the ability to transmit West Nile virus as well as other diseases like Chikungunya and dengue fever, has been found in every county in the state.

In the long-term, the impacts of this underfunding could be catastrophic.

In 2017, a team of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and other researchers analyzed the potential costs of a major Zika attack in the Southeast United States and Texas. They concluded that efforts to control and treat the disease, which causes neurological defects in growing fetuses, could cost from $1.2 billion to as much as $10.3 billion.

On top of all the other challenges facing people in poor communities, they shouldn’t have to worry about getting sick from mosquitoes. Unfortunately, the White House budget proposal for 2019 would cut resources for the Centers for Disease Control — the nation’s health protection agency — by 20 percent.

Closing the mosquito gap is going to take a much bigger commitment than that.

Sarah Anderson directs the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies and co-edits Inequality.org. Follow her at @Anderson_IPS, Distributed by OtherWords.org.

This article is licensed by Other Words under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative 3.0 License.