A reader reacts to my suggestion that we move ecological concerns to a higher position in society:
But that’s long-term thinking, of which we are woefully short. If Big Corp can make a zillion dollars by plundering the environment over the next 20 years, every executive and investor will cheer them — even if it means societal collapse after that. “Aw, that’ll never really happen. Prove it!”
A valid point. For all that we have lifetimes now in the eighties, we are not built for long term, deep prediction: our evolution did not call for it. For millions of years, our individual capacity for destruction, or evolutionary suicide, was quite meager, and even ambiguous. For example, a forest fire could conceivably be started by a single prehistoric human, and yet this might be a positive for the forest, given recent advances in understanding the role of fire in forests.
But then our historical progress in working together in larger and larger groups has led to the development of technologies by the aggregate which may be directed by single, foolish human beings. By “foolish”, I mean people whose personal experience, and family experience, doesn’t have evidence of the enormous destructive potential we, in the corporate sense, now control; we have shoveled our garbage into Nature for centuries with, generally, few consequences, and this is the primary example from which we’ve learned. While there are certainly isolated instances of ecological disaster, perhaps dating back into prehistory, I’d like to suggest that the detonation of the first nuclear bomb makes for a convenient marker for world-wide potential disaster, with which we have little personal connection, and therefore requires the ability to intellectually assess the situation – rather than our standard intuitive approach.
And most corporations are not run by science-oriented folks, but rather by people who do things by gut and by golly; the pressures of fiduciary responsibility subsume any other motivations, and so we often see, among other negative consequences, an abdication of the responsibility for caring for Nature.
Of course, we’re not blind to this, and that’s the motivation for the EPA, which has been under increasing attack of late, under cover of denying climate change. And some corporations do practice conscious capitalism. Current examples include Starbucks (assisting employees in furthering their education) and Chipotle (sourcing ethical materials). These can be viewed as just good public relations, but what of it? It indicates that customers and employees are becoming more conscious of the companies’ place in the entire system, both eco and socio.
But the fact remains: our evolution has not prepared us for the energies and materials with which we now work. What works in our favor? Our great wildcard: our brains. With these we may yet be able to overcome our short-term foolishness.
