In the Light of Humane Nature: Human Values, Nature, the Green Economy, and Environmental Salvation - Softcover

Weissman, Arthur B

Softcover

ISBN 10: 161448760X ISBN 13: 9781614487609

Publisher: Morgan James Publishing, 2014

Synopsis

Despite significant progress in recent decades, the environmental crisis is far from over. We know what needs to change, but we don’t seem to know—economically, politically, or socially—how to stop the juggernaut of destructive development and resource depletion. Something continues to undermine our efforts to become a truly sustainable society.

In the Light of Humane Nature highlights the positive accomplishments we have made recently in greening the economy and also exposes the underlying causes for our continued march toward disaster. A seasoned environmental professional, Arthur Weissman argues that what causes our environmental problems and stymies solutions ultimately relates to human values and our attitudes toward the world around us, including other humans, other species, and nature as a whole.

He provides a twist on the usual environmental critique of society by demonstrating that we will attain our true relationship to nature only when we embrace the highest human values. When our moral and aesthetic values become all-encompassing and not just self-serving, we will indeed be part of nature and not apart from it. Through this engaging work he encourages all of us to live up to our highest human (and humane) ideals so that we may solve our environmental and social problems and become better human beings in the process.

In the Light of Humane Nature weaves personal narrative and autobiographical detail with professional and philosophical discussion to describe the growth of the green economy movement and what it still lacks. Throughout the discussion Weissman sticks to essential concepts all can comprehend, and he concludes with a contemporary solution and appeal to the younger generation.

About this title

About the Author

Arthur B. Weissman, Ph.D. is an environmental professional with over thirty years of experience. As president and CEO of Green Seal, he has led the organization both as a force to promote the green economy and as the premier non-profit certifier of green products and services in the United States. He has also worked for the US Environmental Protection Agency, US Congress, and The Nature Conservancy and has degrees from Johns Hopkins University, Yale University, and Harvard College. His other interests include family, classical music and piano, hiking, birding, reading, and writing.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

In the Light of Humane Nature

Human Values, Nature, the Green Economy, and Environmental Salvation

By Arthur B. Weissman

Morgan James Publishing

Copyright © 2014 Arthur B. Weissman
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-61448-760-9

Contents

Preface, 
Chapter 1 Introduction: And Still the World Burns, 
Chapter 2 An Historical Perspective: From End of Pipe to All of Pipe, 
Chapter 3 Responsible Parties: Who Makes the Economy Green?, 
Chapter 4 Common Consumer Concerns, 
Chapter 5 Our Moral Relationship with Nature, 
Chapter 6 Now All Is Beautiful, 
Chapter 7 Conclusion: The Moral and Aesthetic Imperative, 
Appendix: A Green Platform, 

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: And Still the World Burns

Flames on the horizon from flare stacks reached like wailing arms into the sky and cast a pall with their unearthly glow. Over time they sputtered, then died, and a Light began glowing in their place. It grew ever stronger and warmer. Plants, animals, and people returned.

Approaching the Great City from the west and in view of its famous skyline, one passes through a vast expanse of wetlands and streams, industrial parks and highways, known as the Meadowlands. Strewn as it was with tires and toxic pollutants in the 1950s and 60s, it was a terrible place for a naturalist to grow up, but a good breeding ground for an environmentalist. Hog farms once gave a portion of the area a bad name and permeated the turnpike with malodors. Scum lined the water and decimated whole populations of fish. Factories, waste dumps, and chemical ponds smothered the landscape.

Today egrets, herons, ducks, and other birds are easily viewed from the train in this jumbled ecosystem, signs of a different era that has to some extent cleaned up its act. The farms have been replaced with hotels, warehouse outlets, and a major sports arena, all interspersed with bulrushes and reeds in cleaner water. The river that runs through it has improved considerably, with more fish species returning. While the crumbling elevated highway gives stark evidence that this is still part of the Rust Belt, the new construction and fresher wetlands invite, rather than jar, the eye.

Yet the Meadowlands remains a legacy of decades of degradation. The river is far from clean, with much contaminated sediment accumulated in its beds. Fish populations are nowhere near their pre-industrial levels. The landscape looks better, but it is by no means natural or harmonious. Iconic laws and regulations for clean water and clean air and toxic waste cleanup have improved the scene, but only so far. The area gives hope that human use can become more in design with nature, rather than in total disregard for it; yet the scars are so deep and pervasive that restoration seems a far-off goal.

In the broader context the intense industrialization here is being replicated worldwide in developing countries and parts of developed ones. It is happening anew on the frontier of forest, desert, and tundra, and even in the ocean. Multinational corporations are behind much of this activity, and not all are American or even European. Environmental laws and regulations that now form the protective superstructure in developed countries either do not exist or exist only on paper in developing ones. Combined with social forces such as subsistence agriculture and migration, the world's resources are under unprecedented pressure and stress. Earth's forests, freshwater bodies, estuarine and coastal habitats, wetlands, and grasslands are diminishing or being degraded each year at alarming rates.

Over the past twenty years some developed countries have begun to embrace the concept of sustainability as a positive, preemptive principle for their economies. In Europe this has been manifested in far-reaching laws prohibiting toxic substances in electronics and other products as a way of promoting greener chemistry in ordinary commerce and agriculture. The practice of producer responsibility for manufactured products and corporate social responsibility for the company as a whole have become common, if not universally accepted, aspects of business in North America and Europe.

Green products and services have infiltrated the marketplace in many categories, and green marketing claims are everywhere. Looking at the advertising, one might well wonder whether there remain any serious environmental problems warranting our concern. Corporations, at least in the developed world, seem finally to understand that society demands a shift in their values, where profits and shareholder value are not the only goals of their charter. Even the largest retailer in the world now takes sustainability seriously and has commanded companies in its supply chain to be green or be gone.

And still the world burns.

The world burns as we continue to burn up its once vast reservoir of rainforests, tropical and temperate, and clear forest and natural habitats for agriculture and development.

The world burns as we continue to burn up its once vast reservoir of fossilized fuels, raising our global temperature and rendering our climate more unstable and chaotic.

The world burns as we continue to burn the genetic material of our children and other animals as we disperse toxic chemicals throughout our planet.

And the world burns as we continue to burn through the once vast store of biodiversity and genetic heritage of all other species on the earth through mindless destruction of them and their habitats.

The Meadowlands may be a veiled harbinger of the destruction that awaits us with climate change, species and habitat loss, and pervasive toxic pollution. We have been warned for decades about the continuing deterioration, with global reports and environmental near-disasters such as the Ozone Hole. We know what needs to change, but we don't seem to know — economically, politically, or socially — how to stop the juggernaut of destructive development and resource depletion. In the face of a growing global population and greater material demands from its burgeoning middle class, we face the dilemma of trying to raise the world's standard of living as our material life-support system on earth nears exhaustion and possible collapse. We continue madly on this path, fully within our control, yet in reality clearly out of control. Something essential is missing or dysfunctional within us.

* * *

Our attitude toward nature is lacking in a vital way; in our destruction of nature, something is lost in our souls. We must develop sound moral and aesthetic attitudes toward nature based not on ecological knowledge so much as on human values themselves.

This is not a call for less information and knowledge. While we have learned much in the past fifty years of the environmental movement, nature is so complex that we need even more research on ecosystems, biology, and environmental science. The uncertainty and controversy over climate change — where not merely political — reflect the extent to which our understanding of the earth's systems and dynamics is still very limited.

But more information and knowledge will not necessarily change our behavior nor cause the deniers to cease denying that we face real and critical environmental problems. What is missing is not so much in our heads, as in our hearts and souls.

To some extent, this element has been missing for a long time. Environmental problems are not new. Destruction of nature and our life-support is an old story that dogs human history. As far back as the ice ages, we decimated the mastodons and mammoths, and in the classical period we destroyed once-abundant forests surrounding the Mediterranean. Our pioneers dug up most of the rich loam soil and grasslands of the prairies for farming and felled large areas of forest in the upper Midwest for lumber and charcoal. New England by the mid-nineteenth century (prior to the opening of the Erie Canal) was largely cleared of forests for pasture and agriculture, and the South for plantations and wood. While some of these activities were certainly necessary for the survival and development of society, the extensive transformation of natural landscapes often had unintended consequences. Deforestation in the Mediterranean caused regional climate change and desertification around two thousand years ago, and the plowing of the prairies led to widespread soil erosion, sedimentation, and eventually the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

Today we have good information on the habitat changes and destruction we are causing, on the loss in particular of tropical rainforests, on the depletion of other renewable and non-renewable resources, and on our global impacts on the stratosphere, atmosphere, climate, and ocean. We have monitoring systems and global databases for many environmental indicators, from tropical deforestation to atmospheric CO. While we have only a vague idea of the total number of species on the planet (anywhere from around ten million to one hundred million), we have a good idea that ecosystem destruction, particularly in the tropics, is decimating many of them at rates greater than experienced since the last major extinction sixty-five million years ago. We argue about the total supply of fossil fuels and whether we have reached peak oil, but surely all realize this reservoir is ultimately finite (despite any new discoveries) and certainly harmful as it is uncovered and burned.

The world still burns, regardless of how much we know, because we have dissociated ourselves from nature and from our humanistic values for nature.

The world still burns, regardless of how much we know, because we lack something vital in our attitude toward nature.

The world still burns, regardless of how much we know, because we have lost sight of our kinship with nature.

And the world still burns, regardless of how much we know, because our denial of nature has led to a denial of part of ourselves — perhaps the part that loves.

* * *

Come with me as we seek the cause for our predicament and how we can solve it. Let us journey through some recent environmental history to see how far we have come and what still keeps us from living sustainably. We'll consider the issue of responsibility and what drives us as consumers and even get philosophical in addressing root causes and solutions for our crisis. Brace for color as I dice the discussion with personal observations, vignettes, and reflections. But please stay for the conclusion.

Here is the bottom line, the headline, the sound bite: Our relationship with nature is fundamentally a moral one. Our destruction of nature represents a violation of our most important human values as well as a threat to our survival.

I know that morality is not a favorite subject today, that it has Victorian, religious, even chauvinistic overtones. But we must honestly recognize what is most important in our lives and bravely search for those values that are lacking. "Morality" involves deep-seated human values concerning our relationship and interaction with the world around us. It encompasses but far transcends "ethics," which focuses on appropriate behavior among human beings. This emphasis on the humanistic values of nature both highlights and neutralizes that which separates humans from the rest of the world. While morality may be a uniquely human value, as interpreted here it requires humans to overcome their separation from and devaluation of nature. To be a truly moral human being, to live up to our highest standards and values, we must not only appreciate nature and the world around us, but also treat them as if they were ourselves.

Because, in the final analysis, nature, the environment, the earth are indeed "us." Some dream of living on the moon or Mars, but how little regard this gives to the reality of such an environment — and to all it would lack. In any case, living on another planet would still require us to consider how we treat our life support and other species that happen to come along. We cannot escape that aspect of morality and human values. Nor can we ignore any longer the so-called ecosystem services the earth provides us as part of our evolution and their increasing deterioration under our ill-managed stewardship.

Recognizing our true relationship to nature and embracing our most important values are critically important for the future of humanity and of the many other species who share the earth with us. I will not repeat the many dire warnings related to global climate change, loss of habitat and farmland, deforestation, loss of freshwater, depletion of fish stocks, and the like. Some may consider these forecasts alarmist and unfounded or believe that, even if true, humans will find ways to adapt to or overcome any resource shortages or environmental changes through our technological abilities and ingenuity. But this begs the question of whether the resulting world is one we want our descendants to be born into. Furthermore, it ignores the fact that many other animal and plant species on earth will not be able to adapt so readily and quickly and will perish — to their detriment and quite likely to ours, as well.

Ultimately, what is critically important is that we truly attain the status of being human and what is potentially best about that. It is time for us to become the moral beings we know we should and can be. It is time for us to be truly humane in our dealings with other humans and other species. And it is time for us to stop burning the world, our life support, our fellow creatures, ourselves.

CHAPTER 2

An Historical Perspective: From End of Pipe to All of Pipe

He leaned over confidentially toward me and told me in no uncertain terms: "Because you get in the way of our equity with the consumer."

I didn't know what he was talking about.

He explained further. By putting someone else's environmental seal of approval on their products, they would dilute their own brand value with consumers. They didn't want another organization to replace the trust and credibility they had built with consumers over more than a century.

A senior executive with a major consumer products company, Harold had agreed to meet with me in my office in late 1996 to explain why they not only declined to seek green certification for their products, but opposed the very basis for such approval. They had, in fact, initiated a high-level campaign to discredit all third-party ecolabeling programs around the world. It appeared that the nascent movement to green the economy faced possible extinction from an icon of American capitalism before it even got off the ground.

For decades before, from the late 1960s to the early 1990s, the environmental movement in the United States had prosecuted companies for the pollution they emitted to air, water, and land. Environmental laws and regulations and the many advocacy groups formed to monitor and promote their enforcement were adversarial in nature and usually punitive after-the-fact. Companies were considered bad actors whose behavior had to be controlled through stringent limits on their discharges (such as in water or air permits) and the threat of serious fines or even criminal charges for excessive pollution. Throughout, the focus of attention was on what came out at the end of the industrial process — at the end of the pipe. This was not a misplaced emphasis, given what had happened over the course of twentieth-century industrialization: dozens of deaths from factory air pollution in Donora, Pennsylvania (1948); the Great Smog of London that killed thousands from coal burning (1952); Cuyahoga River in Ohio that burst into flames from floating chemicals and debris (1969); the toxic industrial waste horror of Love Canal that seeped into families' homes (late 1970s); the infamous smog of Los Angeles from millions of vehicles (ongoing); countless fish kills from streams polluted by mines or untreated sewage; and so on. Almost all these incidents came from pollution, and most came from a pipe, or at least from the end of an industrial or technological process. It made perfect sense to control these emissions in terms of the dangerous pollutants or toxic substances they contained.

Integrating Prevention Upfront

In the late 1980s and early 1990s a new approach emerged.

Keep the limitations and punishments, but encourage and reward industry's good behavior. Better yet, work with companies to help them do the right thing. That led logically to looking at the entire production process and seeing where improvements could be made from the start to avoid problems at the end. Soon the concept of life-cycle assessment came to the fore — analyzing a product or material for its environmental impacts from raw material extraction through production to use and end-of-life management. Other concepts such as cleaner production, design for the environment, and green chemistry took shape, all part of a fundamental change in how the economy was supposed to function and how its products and services would be judged.

This dichotomy between damage control after the fact versus a more integrated, preventative approach is not confined to environmental protection, as was brought home to me personally and poignantly when our toddler son became stricken with a life-threatening disease. After a month of daily treatments he was declared temporarily free of disease; we asked what we should be doing next to keep him that way, and the doctors (who thankfully cured the immediate problem) had no answer. It took my wife Rebecca several years of tirelessly researching, learning, and experimenting to discover all the preventative measures that could be taken to restore and maintain his health through holistic nutrition and alternative medicine. By considering a person's health in an integrated way, these approaches can provide numerous proactive measures for maintaining health and preventing chronic disease.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from In the Light of Humane Nature by Arthur B. Weissman. Copyright © 2014 Arthur B. Weissman. Excerpted by permission of Morgan James Publishing.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 161448760X
• ISBN 13: 9781614487609
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 138