Comments Parke has made

Urgency Without Alarm

Well, Dave, I think your reaction burns a tad hot and, viewed from the outside, adds credibility to Kristof's case. On the other hand, I certainly agree that Kristof is entirely inconsistent in his column.

Nicholas Kristof has his cake and eats it too. It all happens in this immortal sentence: "The loss of credibility is tragic because reasonable environmentalists - without alarmism or exaggerations - are urgently needed."

How, after all, does one establish that environmentalism is "urgently needed" without raising the alarm? Why does Kristof think it's so urgent, anyway? What's he worried about; how did he get worried?

If there is no cause for alarm, why should there be cause for urgency?

Personally, I place myself squarely in the "sky-is-falling" camp--I believe that unless radical change occurs things will become very, very ugly (read: even uglier than they already are). I haven't seen a shred of evidence to disprove this view, though--like everyone else--I could turn out to be wrong in the end.

But the problems of climate change, ecological degradation and, for that matter, nuclear or biological war, are secondary. The primary problem, as I think Jared Diamond would agree, is the human capacity for denial: to not see what we don't want to see. And we surely don't want to see that the sky is falling. It just scares us too much. So we dig in. We distract ourselves (perhaps in a wild frenzy of consumerism). And, so, the sky falls (eventually). Diamond argues that it needn't fall, we only need to be rational in the face of the evidence. We need to see that the sky could fall. This has been the rhetorical objective of the alarmists.

Kristof is right of course that willful exaggeration, dishonesty and shrillness of tone have gotten environmentalists nowhere with most of the public. But note how successfully these very tactics have proven in promoting mainstream objectives. Just turn on your evening network news to sample a wealth of exaggeration, dishonesty and shrillness of tone. It's magnificent!

So why is alarmism so ineffectual when used in the service of environmental issues?

Actually alarmism works the same way in all cases. It shuts us down and numbs us out. This reaction frustrates the ambitions of environmentalists, who wish to energize the best instincts of the public, but works nicely for marketers aiming only to inspire fear, apathy and their inevitable consequence, consumerism.

So what are environmentalists to do? How can we solve truly scary problems that really do bear down on us urgently?

I have some bad news. We have to begin by addressing the root cause of denial, which is fear. As long as my mind and yours are ruled by fear, we will certainly destroy ourselves (given enough time). And the only way to address the root fear that lies at the base of all our political madness is some kind of contemplative practice, a slow "therapy" that gradually dissolves our fear. This has to occur one-by-one. You start. Then maybe your neighbor will come in behind you.

This is not very politically satisfying. Seems too slow, too arduous, too unlikely.

Well, there you have it.

The world we see around us is but a reflection of that which dwells within us.