RightWay2BGreen

WHAT'S THE RIGHT WAY TO BE GREEN?

What’s the right way to be green? A way that works, that achieves your environmental goals, that creates or restores health and function to ecosystems and provides a sustainably abundant way for humans to live within those ecosystems. Notice that I say sustainably abundant. I do not subscribe to the zero-sum definition of sustainability—that more for anyone means less for someone (or something) else, or as it says on a bumper sticker: “Live simply that others may simply live.”

The abundance theory of sustainability goes like this... As we produce food, fiber, and other goods and services we produce abundance for ourselves and others, including for other species. In my most recent book, The Gardeners of Eden Rediscovering Our Importance to Nature, I said it this way: You can’t have your cake unless you eat it, too. Unhealthy ecosystems, after all, only produce money for environmental groups who are able to sell them as bones of contention and stairsteps to political power.

So, what’s the wrong way to be green? A way that produces scarcity rather than abundance; that damages ecosystems by impairing or even destroying their ability to function and thus produces scarcity for all in the process. Why, you may ask, would anyone who considers themselves an environmentalist do something that harms the environment? Because they’ve made a mistake, or they’ve been fooled, and they’re doing the wrong thing when they think they’re doing the right thing, is one answer, but the more accurate answer is: for the same reason anybody does something to harm the environment—when it brings them money or power or achieves their political agenda.

Those of you who have bought on to mainstream liberal environmentalism have been sold a phony.