Just over a month ago, a tragic heavy metal spill caused by an EPA contractor made national news when it turned an entire river orange. The disaster quickly became a springboard for debate about the competence of government agencies and whether Uncle Sam should be playing as big a role in the regulation and protection of our nation’s assets as it currently does.
Throughout this talk, people seemed to gloss over one of the most horrifying facts about the spill itself — that human indifference had created a booby trap, waiting for an accident to spring it.
A mine shaft abandoned close to 80 years ago was allowed to fill with water, which then sat there until it became toxic. Only when this toxic water started to leak out of the mine did anyone begin to consider it a problem, and by then the stakes risen so that a single additional misstep could turn into a disaster.
While it isn’t difficult to see the flaw in this line of thinking, the “wait and see” approach is far too common when addressing environmental dilemmas today. Chlorofluorocarbons and DDT, for instance, were both banned long after they caused great damage to the climate and global ecosystems. Fortunately, both were eliminated before too much irreversible damage had occurred, but had a few people acted a little less quickly, the results could have easily been different.
For the most part, the risks of failing to address these types of problems are not altogether unforeseen. Rather, they simply never garnered enough of the right attention to force anybody to act consciously to prevent them. It takes extraordinary efforts to capture the public eye when a potential problem has been detected, and even then action is usually only taken once a solution is found that inconveniences as few people as possible.
Yet as more species go extinct and issues with more catastrophic consequences become a more imminent threat, a change in our desire to react will be necessary. The costs of ignoring difficult problems and refusing to be bothered by attempted fixes are simply too high for these responses to remain viable strategies.
Global warming is perhaps the obvious choice of an issue where our reactions have been too muted. Even though the vast majority of credible scientists agree that humans are accelerating this phenomenon to some extent or another, apathy towards it when compared with the difficulty of its fixes has left most current attempts to reduce it feeling a little bit hollow.
While it’s easy to blame governments for these insufficient efforts, in reality the problem lies deeper. Voters ultimately define how much importance is placed on these issues at the polls, and too often we are allowing our disinterest to get the better of us.
It’s time to be honest with ourselves and admit that we’re not doing a good enough job making the tough choices that we have to in order to properly avoid environmental catastrophes in our future. We need to realize how easy it is for our passive approach to fail, and we should make efforts to develop an understanding of the risks of this happening again.
Not every step we take has to come at great sacrifice, but it is important that we do take personal action that voices our desire to alleviate these ecological concerns. Buying green and voting for candidates that value sustainability, when done collectively, can be extremely effective in showing our willingness to preempt looming disasters. The dividends we are paid by taking even small steps will compound and land us in a much less dangerous world in the years to come.
Actions like divestment can also help us show policy leaders the path we want to take. These movements proactively send a message that an issue causes more concern than some might think, which in turn will help open more debate about the issue and ultimately inspire more action.
There’s always going to be a desire to “wait until tomorrow” when it comes to environmental problems. Most of their tangible consequences are events that might occur far in the future or even be avoided entirely. However, there’s no way that our gambles can pay off forever, and for each moment that we ignore our current offenses, we increase the risk of something major occurring in the future.
In other words, we’ve been quietly allowing the mineshaft fill for years. Let’s act now before we cause it to spill.
Contact Andrew Mather at amather ‘at’ stanford.edu.