Being Green In 2001

Jon Lebkowsky

HISTORY

In the sixties and early seventies, my own g-g-generation discovered "the environment." We added it to our charm bracelet of concerns, which included world hunger, the Vietnam War, gender and racial inequality, haircuts, junk food, television, processed food, nuclear energy, Republicans and Democrats. We had definite intentions to do something dramatic about all this stuff, but most of us were distracted along the way by kids, car payments, mortgages, alcohol and narcotics, Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, trips to the mall and our fitness programs. We became young urban professionals defined by consumption patterns and significant debt loads.

So we forgot, those grand-scale crises, though we kept recycling; signed petitions to save greenbelts, humpback whales, and Black-capped Vireos; bought Sierra Club calendars; and drove the smaller, more energy-efficient SUVs and pickup trucks. We enjoyed the great outdoors, wore rugged clothes, and separated newspapers and bottles from the rest of our trash. We did a rather conspicuous bit to control population (saving many child-care bucks along the way). We took our 2.1 kids to Earth Day celebrations.

But we were also human, fallible, forgetful, cheerfully greedy. We heard that there was a hole in the ozone, but we stopped using chlorofluorocarbons, so that became okay. To do our part, we were thumb-pumping our spray. We didn't think to knuckle down and really check whether that ozone had actually healed. What does an ozone layer do, anyway? Our kids probably knew that.

Our jobs and our lives kept us busy. Time passed.

Scientists were still paying attention. They had been measuring atmospheric [CO.sub.2] at Hawaii's Mauna Loa observatory, and by 1983 they were seriously worried about Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. These gases are the stuff of life; they are essential to the biosphere because they trap and hold heat from the sun's radiation. However, massively increased volumes of them were causing a warming trend over the Earth's surface.

Soon, the Environmental Protection Agency was soberly reporting, in stiff bureaucratese, that "agricultural conditions will be significantly altered, environmental and economic systems potentially disrupted, and political institutions stressed."

In 1988 the United Nations established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), comprising the world's leading climate scientists. They organized the Rio Earth Summit of 1999, which acknowledged a pressing need to cut Greenhouse gas emissions--specifically, human gas emissions, primarily from our factory emissions and our car exhausts. In 1997, the Kyoto Protocol was established. Its purpose was to get industrialized nations to commit to curb their spew.

1998 was the hottest year on record, and a megastrength El Nino caused massive storms in some areas, severe drought in others. So much for hand-waving theory and early precursors. Now it was real.

WARMING

I live in Boulder, Colorado, where climate and environmental studies are on the city's doorstep. The National Center for Atmospheric Research and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration both have big facilities in Boulder, and the University of Colorado has one of the best environmental studies programs in the US.

I dropped in on Dr. James White, director of the environmental studies program. He said that the global climate is definitely changing, and there's no doubt that human activity is a significant driver. "If you look at the simple physics around how Greenhouse gases work, if you look at the fact that Greenhouse gases are on the increase, we know we're having an impact on climate," he says. Now the debate is about how that impact is expressed. It might be generalized heat. It might be megastorms. It might be overall climatic instability of some kind we've never seen before.

Can't we have more certainty out of our weather science? Not according to Dr. White. "My own research tells me that climate change is not this give-and-take, push-and-shove kind of linear system, where if we increase [CO.sub.2] by X, we get X climate change; if we increase it by 2X, we get 2X climate change. That is really what the models give us as feedback, because the models don't have mode changes. If North Atlantic deep water fails, a sophisticated model can handle that. But if you look at the way climate has changed historically, going back over the history of the Earth, it's not a little bit here, a little bit there.

"It's more like my little brother, when we were kids. I would pester him, and he didn't respond, and I would pester him more, and he would blow up, and yell and scream at me. When Mom asked me what I did, I said `All I did was poke him once, Mom.' But there was all that energy I built up in my little brother with all those other tormenting little pokes. And it's that kind of nonlinear behavior that makes waiting for the shoe to drop a rather dangerous activity."

Despite the current global warming trend, the southeast US has been actually cooling lately. Temperature trends throughout the US are relatively flat compared to the rest of the world. Though we know climate is changing, we don't know the long-term implications. Lacking clarity about direct, polarizing impacts right in someone's back yard, it's simplest to do nothing.

Scientists are taught to think in terms of hypotheses and conditional statements, not blatant warnings of doom. As a culture we're into denial, especially about problems that seem distant, but demand big money right now. George W. Bush disses the Kyoto accords as too expensive to implement. For him, they are, because short-term political costs to George Bush outweigh long-term climate damage in someone else's administration. Says Jim White, "I think the sad reality is that we may, before all is said and done, get a big climate change, and that may be the mobilizing factor. Some people have argued that we'll need that. We'll need the big change, the grizzly bear set free in the house, before we deal with the bears in the yard."

GREEN TEAMS

White's been looking forward. "I see carbon dioxide and climate change as merely step one in many steps, many problems that are going to happen in the future," he says. "We're going to have to have global cooperation to deal with them all. So we need to take the first step with something like the Kyoto treaty. Maybe we're not going to get the best treaty we possibly can, maybe it's going to have a little more economic impact than we could potentially negotiate. But let's take the step. We're going to have to get to some point of global cooperation in the future, and we're certainly not going to get there if we take all of our toys and step back from the table, and say no, we're not going along."

Meanwhile, White and his colleagues in Boulder are working on a solution in a new, cross-disciplinary approach to environmental sciences curriculum. The University of Colorado has a National Science Foundation grant for a curriculum called Carbon, Climate, and Society. "The idea is for graduate students from the natural sciences--biology, geological sciences, chemistry, etc.--to be coeducated with students from economics, political science, and in particular, journalism. At an early stage in a graduate career, they'll learn team-building skills, essential for them to address environmental issues. There's just no way that a person going through any one discipline can really grasp the full breadth of environmental problems, because it involves the full complexity of humans interacting with the natural environment. So the idea is that they will learn first how to trust their colleagues in these various fields. And we want them to learn how to communicate with the media, and through the media, with the public."

This seems to me to be the kind of activism we need in the year 2001. Given that boiling mix of carbon, climate, and society, it's no longer enough to be educated, even in one of the relevant scientific disciplines. We also have to develop and leverage synergy with experts in science, media, commerce, and politics. We need green networks, green teams, where cooperation isn't limited to academia, or to training students, or to networks of journalists, or to policy analysts. It has to be huge in scope; it has to happen all at once.

Corporations can have "green teams." The British book Managing Green Teams describes "how environmental teams can trigger changes in core operations and integrate environmental concerns in business decision-making at every level in the organization." A web search on the phrase "green teams" via Google got over 1,400 hits. This is an idea whose time has come.

There are two major differences between the world of 2001 and Earth Day 1970. The first is that it's much hotter; we're not just musing over scare talk about "The Ecology," we're really starting to boil. And the second big difference is digital networks. Networks of this kind are something we did not imagine, had never seen before. This is the one new cultural factor in sight that is of the same vast scope as the problem. We've got to unite via networks somehow, leverage the potential there, and find and invent real answers. Reforming our cars, greening our energy, planting some trees, redesigning our cities, these are virtuous but piecemeal efforts. If there are going to be, within our children's lifetimes, 11 billion people in a sustainable situation, that can only be a vastly sophisticated, global, cybergreen society.

And what do we do about George W. Bush? Pretty obvious. Write his mom a nice, long letter.

www.ncar.ucar.edu/ncar/
"The National Center for Atmospheric Research, NCAR, was established
in 1960 to serve as a focus for research on atmospheric and related
science problems.

www.noaa.gov/
"The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was created in
1970 to conduct and apply research about the global oceans, atmosphere,
space, and sun, protect life and property from disasters, and promote
intelligent use of resources.

"www.colorado.edu/envirostudies/
The program is designed to provide a broad but rigorous education
in environmental issues and problem solving, as opposed to traditional
discipline-based training.

Managing Green Teams Environmental Change in Organisations and Networks John Moxe and Peter A. Strachan. eds. 1998; 268 pp. 35 [pounds sterling] The Robert Gordon University

Jon Lebkowsky has served as a community host/moderator for the WELL, Electric Minds, and Hot Wired, and has written technoculture articles and rants for Wired, Whole Earth The Austin Chronicle, 21C, Factsheet Five, Monde 2000, Mindjack, and other publications. He was the "Consciousness" subdomain editor of the Millennium Whole Earth Catalog.

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