THE FAITHFUL CONSUMER August 05

…connecting faith and the environment

By Sarah Streed

The magazine article “Environmentalism is Dead” by Adam Werbach, former national president of the Sierra Club, bluntly—some might say brutally—sets forth the argument that recent environmental defeats (the 2004 electoral victories and the U.S. Senate vote to allow drilling in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge, for example) bear witness to the complete ineffectiveness of environmentalism as a political movement.

Werbach writes the coroner’s report: “We [environmentalists] have spent far less time defining ourselves according to the values that unite us, such as shared prosperity, social progress, interdependence, fairness, increasing equality and ecological restoration. …In order to start winning elections, we need to construct an aspirational ideology as powerful as liberalism once was, and as powerful as fundamentalism is today.”

What Werbach is saying—it seems to me—is that we’ve each got our pet project and that’s causing us to lose the war. It’s the old saying, “United we stand; divided we fall.” Save the seals/ Save the trees/ Save the family farm, etc. divides rather than unites us. We need to unite around an encompassing goal. Is clean air an unreasonable, elitist desire?—No. Are trees a luxury only to be enjoyed by America’s wealthy on sculpted estates?—No. Are ocean or animal lovers only invested in saving seals? Again, no, because this world needs biodiversity; a species lost threatens all.

While I was thinking about all of this, I thought of a Public Relations conference I went to years ago in Chicago. I was in my phase of investigating various careers and attended with a friend who ran the Fiesta Bowl in Tucson, Arizona. The keynote speaker was the PR man responsible for the “Don’t Mess with Texas” anti-litter campaign. His remarks were riveting. He said that he and his colleagues were presented with the problem of littering in Texas. So these ad guys put their heads together and said, “OK, what will influence the gun-toting redneck riding in the back of the pickup with his dog to not throw his beer can out of the cab, but to recycle it or wait until he finds a trash can? Any mention of litter won’t have an effect. ‘Do what’s best for the environment’ will cause him to hoot in derision.” Their answer: Don’t Mess with Texas. That’s what he cares about. And thus, one of the most successful PR campaigns ever was born.

Environmentalists have got to find their own “Don’t Mess with Texas” to rally around. Let’s start by calling ourselves Ecologists. Ecology has at its crux the value that all things are interconnected. People instinctively know this and will support things that are not only good for themselves but for the world as a whole. Stopping coal-fired power plants from being built is not only good for our climate—since burning coal produces the emissions that are responsible for global warming—but it’s good for our children. Pollutants from power plants form smog and soot; correspondingly, the rate of asthma among children has rapidly increased in the last twenty years. Almost every mother I know has a child, or niece or nephew, with asthma, or—at the outside—knows friends of their children who have asthma. Thus, those of us against coal-fired power plants should not be a unique, radical group, but those of us who have watched children struggle to breathe. Two of my children have asthma and I have an almost visceral reaction when I read of the big utility CEOs pushing for new coal-fired power plants. How dare they? When I have to make sure that my son has his inhaler before he goes over to sleep at a friend’s house? There is clean energy—energy that won’t contribute to our children’s asthma yet will give us the power we need to light and heat our houses—so why should corporate CEOs tell us we can’t have it?

August’s tip: Think and pray ecological this month. Instead of praying for your children’s health, pray for wisdom for our country’s leaders so that they will institute the laws that are necessary for our children to be healthy. And don’t stop with prayer. The recent so-called Clean Energy bill was a farce that resulted in no substantial changes in cleaning up America’s energy. We need to pressure our lawmakers to pass bills that are in our best interests, rather than the pork bills in the interests of utility and corporate CEOs.

Sarah Streed is a board member of the Wisconsin Interfaith Climate & Energy Campaign (WICEC) and runs Write Stuff Works (www.writestuffworks.com ) a writing business. She lives in Stoughton, Wisconsin with her husband and children. Email smstreed@sbcglobal.net

All rights reserved by Sarah Streed.

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