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OBERLIN'S
UNIQUE POSITION Although general awareness of environmental issues is many times greater than it was in 1950, most people in the US and in the Oberlin community are not convinced the situation is even close to crisis. At the same time, a number of us are sufficiently concerned about the future of human civilization to believe Oberlin has the responsibility to provide its community with environmental education of the highest quality. The recent successes of the environmental studies program reveals that Oberlin is at a critical juncture. The Oberlin community might commit itself to bringing the quality and character of the environmental education perspective embodied in the environmental studies program to the entire Oberlin community, or it can decide that the environmental challenges before humanity do not merit this broad representation in the college community’s educational agenda. Oberlin has deep roots in issues of equity and social justice. The environmental disasters we are courting will affect everybody, but the poor and minorities will be the first to suffer and suffer the most, at least in the short-term. Climate change and the weather extremes associated with it will hit those in the tropics and sub-tropics, and the poor everywhere, particularly hard. The toxic by-products of our affluence are disproportionally inflected upon the poor and people of color in the United States and elsewhere. It is time to recognize that the environment is not a special interest group. Environmentalism is the "ism" that will have to dominate our thinking and actions if we are to transit the century with sufficient life-support capacity remaining to maintain civil society and some global order. The opportunity for Oberlin to lead is at hand. The scientific discussions as to the devastating effects human activities are having on Earth have arrived at consensus: Our present patterns of habitation are not sustainable and some of the damage will take centuries for recovery, if it is to happen at all. And we have put in motion alterations that just might undo major components of life-support and thereby collapse local societies, perhaps global civilization. We may wish to deny the consensus of myriad scientists, but the indicators are everywhere. • Ecosystems and species are being lost at a rate approaching that of sixty-five million years ago when the earth experienced its last mass extinction of biological diversity and the dinosaurs were vacated from the land thereby allowing mammals to gain large-animal dominion. • The CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has increased by over thirty percent in the last one hundred years, and the decade of the 1990s was the hottest on record. • Half of the world's forests have been cut down, while three quarters of the major ocean fisheries are either fished out or in decline. • Human activities use over half of the readily available freshwater, and the Ogallala aquifer under the Great Plains of the United States, like many other aquifers, is being depleted much faster than it is being recharged. • Nitrogen and phosphorous have been the limiting nutrients in many ecosystems, but human activities in the last one hundred years have doubled their availability globally. • Hormone mimics like DDT, PCBs, dioxin, and furans, as well as other pollutants, are everywhere, even in the remote, pristine Arctic. • Rates of soil erosion in the United States are higher than they were during the dust bowl era of the 1930s, and the global loss of crop land to soil exhaustion, erosion, salinization, and waterlogging is four percent per decade. Well over half of the world's rangeland has been degraded. • Humans use, directly and indirectly, about twenty-five percent of life's global energy flow provided by photosynthesis. • The stratospheric ozone layer continues to be reduced by chlorofluorocarbons and other human generated compounds resulting in increasing ultraviolet light at the earth's surface. • Acid rain has increased substantially on all northern continents. • The human population has increased from one to six billion in the last two hundred years and is now globally one hundred times more dense than any similar-size animal in the history of the earth — truly an ecological anomaly. In summary, humans have become a dominate evolutionary force on the planet that is radically changing the dynamic equilibrium that has made Earth a habitable, friendly home for us. The above data and much more are available in many venues: • Worldwatch Institute's publications — State of the World series published annually since 1984, Vital Signs, some 180 papers on specific topics. • Union of Concerned Scientists papers and analyses. • Numerous primary and review papers in scientific journals like Nature, Science, and BioScience; and countless books. Here are but a few of the books that are relevant: • A Green History of the World: The Rise and Fall of Great Civilizations, Clive Ponting (1992) and Something New Under the Sun, J.R. McNeill (2001) give the big picture from an historical perspective. • The Diversity of Life, Edward O. Wilson (1992); The World According to Pimm, Stuart Pimm (2001); and The Future of Life, Edward O. Wilson (2002) explain biodiversity's role in life-support, why it is important, and how human activities are compromising live-support. • Global Warming: Are We Entering the Greenhouse Century?, Stephen H. Schneider (1989) and Laboratory Earth: The Planetary Gamble We Can't Afford to Lose, Stephen H. Schneider (1997) explain climate science, how we know climate change is here with a human signature on it, and why changing the climate is a very bad experiment to run. • How Many People Can the Earth Support?, Joel E. Cohen (1995) and The Population Explosion, Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H Ehrlich (1990) explain the population issue. • Betrayal of Science and Reason: How Anti-Environmental Rhetoric Threatens Our Future, Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich (1996) explains what science can tell us and how mis- and dis-information are used by special interest groups to confuse the general public about the seriousness of environmental issues. • Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth , M. Wackernagel and W.E. Rees (1996) establishes that we have exceeded the carrying capacity of Earth for humans. And if all people lived as we in the United States do, then we would need at least three more Earths to live in a sustainable fashion. The uncomfortable truth is we are decreasing the planet's life-support capacity. Limiting our ecological footprint is not a matter of choice. It is only a question of how and when. The science is in and we are in deep trouble. The political discussions, however, have not gained center stage, although they have been contentious side events. No political consensus is in sight. The up-shot has been that the wider culture is not acting on the science despite concerted efforts to warn of dire, but not immediate consequences. Why do we have this disconnect between science and action? Many people are poorly informed, but others just believe otherwise. The reasons are many, but foremost is that the human brain did not evolve an inclination to consider distant possibilities that, in the present, do not require consideration. We think short-term, because those that did survived and left descendants who had the same short-term disposition. Evolution has played a nasty trick on us — long-term thinking is not adaptive in the present. The evidence for this conclusion is found in collapsed human cultures scattered around the globe primarily on islands, but also on the continents. We, however, have advantages over many collapsed cultures: literacy and science. We know about collapsed civilizations and can, in theory, organize our culture to avoid their mistakes; for example, impoverishment of biological diversity and thereby compromising life-support capacity, or total social break down through violence and war. Truth be told, our culture, including institutions of learning, have spent the last decades of the twentieth century, by and large, on timid approaches while essentially every major environmental trend remained negative, and many have become worse. The twenty-first century is the environmental century. We have a choice: Will it be a century of human activities that increase the likelihood of local and global social disruption and collapse, or the century of environmental recovery? This is the grand opportunity for Oberlin to choose boldly an agenda to promote recovery. Oberlin can be an exemplar institution in making this the century of environmental recovery. |
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