I see it all as one big integrated package --   one vision that has the capacity to unit all mankind in taking the care of the earth as our most urgent and permanent purpose for being here.  

Do you see any of your leaders in Britain with this vision?  A Churchill for planet Earth?  God, we need a leader who will inspire heroic action and turn things inside out.      

Environment comes after healthcare here in the US.

People who vote are over 45.  They are at risk, either from rising costs if they have healthcare or even losing it entirely if they get sick.  Insurance companies can cancel your policy if you get sick.

Those who don't have health insurance risk losing their homes if they get sick.  the bumper sticker slogan is...  Vote democrat, 3 years to healthcare.

No other enviro issues don't ride the climate change issue.  in the US, climate disaster and all other enviro issues ride on the back of healthcare.

Of course a family can lose their home over rising energy costs too.  That ties in with GHG issues.  Electric plugin cars are cheaper to operate than gas guzzlers.  Homes are cheaper to heat and cool with geothermal heating/cooling.

Family issues.  Healthcare, energy costs, and environment.

And why are property taxes rising?  instead of tax dollars going back to local government from federal government, that federal money now goes to halliburton and friends, to rebuild Iraq.

So property taxes rise to keep bridges and roads and schools all functioning.  Rumor has it that isn't working in some places, like minneapolis.

Has your school district recently downsized by selling school buildings to political cronies then been "forced" to lease them back?  Mine has.  Yikes.  Contracting on america.  thanks again newty.  

Cronytastic bribery on the school board level?  Evidently Pat Robertson's evangelical campaign to take over school boards worked.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

Peter:

A simple answer to your question would be 'yes', but  of course life is never that simple. Your comments address a whole host of difficulties both for environmentalists and for climate change 'followers' (inasmuch as the two are distinct; read on).

The first problem is that government and media alike conflate climate change issues with conservation and environmental issues. That they are intimately connected is a given, but the tendency to attribute every environmental 'ill' to climate change has become habitual in the UK media. Not only is this demonstrably untrue, it also serves to confuse the public rather than enlighten us. As you suggest, this also leads to the supposition that the solution to any given environmental problem will be provided by a solution to the GW question, which tends to devalue the significance of some real and pressing problems, in particular those of habitat destruction, pollution and deforestation.

The second problem is the backlash I observe in online 'friends' when climate change is discussed; 'I am sick and tired of everything being blamed on CO2' is a common and understandable response. The danger is that disenchantment stimulated by media hyperbole on CC is having a knock-on effect for the environmentalist; tarred with the same brush, third parties find it easier to dismiss concerns about real problems as 'ranting' under these circumstances.

We know that the two issues are linked, because they both address problems with the world we live in, and the future world we wish to live in, but given the level of confusion that exists at the moment, perhaps a better strategy, temporarily, is to draw a line between the two issues and clearly identify when a perceived problem is of environmental import irrespective of CC, as well as identify when an argument about the consequences of CC damaging life on earth exists alongside and beyond the more immediate and pressing issues which deserve urgent response.

It is a coincidence, perhaps, that some of the solutions to one type of problem closely resemble some of the solutions to the other, but the fact that a solution serves to address both types of problem should be a good reason to argue that it is all the more pertinent and necessary.

I Hope this makes sense...

Turned out nice again...

Why bother spending so much of your time here?  Doesn't Rush Limbaugh have a ditto head blog for you?  

We Yanks are isolated from global news.  So, is anything happening overseas, or is it just talk?  

Nothing happening here.  And while we talk, the environment is being ripped to shreds by profit motives enabled by a corrupt government.  Hope here is thread bare.  Good news over there?

I've been toying with the phrase "ecosystem destruction" to incorporate the many problems of, well, ecosystem destruction -- oceans, forests, grasslands, even croplands (soil loss), freshwater ecosystems.  This group of problems interacts with global warming, e.g., 20% of ghg's are from forest destruction, another chunk from loss of soil, God knows what is going on to plankton in the oceans, etc.  Then of course global warming interacts with ecosystem destruction in that it dries out, overheats, etc. these ecosystems.

Then there is another set of problems, closely related although not exactly the same, which we can label "mass extinction", although sometimes the term "biodiversity loss" is used, and obviously ecosystsem destruction leads to extnction, and vice versa, and global warming will lead to extinction -- although from extinction to global warming might be harder to pinpoint.

The thing is, either global warming or ecosystem destruction/mass extinction will lead to a highly degraded biosphere, or to put it differently, a Desert Earth.  So it seems to me that both ecosystem destruction/mass extinction and global warming must be addressed simultaneously, and solutions must not exacerbate one or the other(e.g., biofuels certainly doesn't cut it with ecosystem destruction).  But even if we somehow "solved" global warming, that would not solve ecosystem destruction, and the other way around, so they are both necessary environmental issues.

The discussions here have explored just how interrelated global warming is to many of the crises we face in so many areas -- environmental, ecological, political, sociological, international, demographical, economical, medical, etc. etc.  Unless we see the complexity of the problem our approaches to combatting it can be counterproductive and damaging to the other environmental causes we all care about.  

The meaning of "obsession" is apparently losing its original strength, when we consider a not excessive level of it to be desirable ... : )

I certainly agree with you, Peter, and with JustLou and Fergus, that everything is connected.  (And of course Amazing is right too, to remind us that here in the US, environmentalism, or, more specifically, concern about global warming, is only now getting some attention, and still is running behind some other issues.)  As you say, attention to global warming is well and good, nay it is urgently necessary; but it can be bad, if it draws our attention from other urgent problems.

Your contrast of biofuels vs. orangutans (and pygmy elephants and other rare wildlife of Borneo) is a well chosen example.

But there are also simpler examples of what Fergus means by "habitat destruction, pollution, deforestation."  We should note the recently reported extinction of the Baiji, the Yangtze River dolphin, done in apparently by pollution, excessive human traffic on the river, and the disruption of its ecosystem by the construction of the Three Gorges Dam; also, the destruction of African wildlife as a consequence of political and social turmoil in DRCongo, Uganda, Zimbabwe and elsewhere; also, the resort to the poaching of rare animals by poor people in many countries, which is hastening the extinction of tigers, for example; also, the habitat destruction that is everywhere a major obstacle for migratory birds; also, of course, unregulated fisheries, and fisheries in which the existing regulations are poorly enforced.

Somewhat more complicated, because it is global-warming-related, is the sponsoring of the trophy hunting of polar bears by the Inuit of Nunavut.  Still, it is possible to bring attention even to that problem, without its being overwhelmed by the global warming aspect.

As for the kind of "backlash" that Fergus warns us about, I do not know if I have observed that.  In the Gristmill community, is there any negative reaction to the 24/7 coverage of global-warming-related and energy-related news and commentary, which often seems to have a wall-to-wall carpet effect?  Not much, I think; most of us understand well enough how very important those issues are.  But on the other hand, yes, there may be an unexpressed feeling of frustration that other environmental issues are being overlooked.

Chickens are our cousins! So are other sensitive animals! Enough is enough! No more factory farms!

Because Renewable energy is a strategic coupe for all the other progressive aspects.

It means that energy can be delivered to areas without heavily established infrastructures much more easily.
(i.e. Helping the poor)

It means that we have cleaner air, and less healthcare issues.

It means that we have less toxic foods.  (Ideally, since organic food uses less fossil energy)

It means that thousands or millions of jobs will be created.

Poverty, Air/Water Quality, Healthcare, Food Quality, Employment

Can't really say that we have "too much" focus on that.

___

Can say that we have too much focus on faux renewables of biofuels and hydrogen.

The answer is yes.  It is that simple.  How much more blatant do the signals need to get before we see that much of this is HYPE?  It's fashion.  A trend.  

I do think that climate change is a serious issue.  However, I also think that it is turning environmentalism into a one-issue ideology, and making it very easy for the opposition to write off the entire environmental agenda in one sweeping blow.  Consider the attention that is being deflected away from issues like overpopulation, food distribution and ethics, waste, chemical pollution, et caetera.  

I, personally, do not believe that we can completely change course just by reducing emissions. And, whether climate change is natural or caused by us: climate change happens.  It has been that way since Earth's birth.  Being so fanatically defensive instead of being prepared to adapt may just be our downfall in the end.  

And what will happen if the globe inevitably warms and we see the oceans rise, weather change, food become scarce, et caetera?  We'll be stuck in midwest, up to our knees in waste and bad water, wishing we had done something about overpopulation, species domestication, animal/plant extinction, chemical pollution, and so forth, instead of telling people to stop traveling so much by plane.

Peter, thanks for the insight into enviro politics in the UK. Here in the US climate change is really only starting to become a regular topic of public discourse, and our politicians and corporations still have yet to do much about it. But I could definitely see how people could become too focused on climate change to the exclusion of other things like endangered species recovery. And I could see how the general public could get burnt out constantly hearing about it.

Unfortunately, you greeners have experienced the downside of putting all your eggs in one basket.   Continued attacks and new data have eroded all the scientific underpinnings of Global Warming and the whole thing is headed towards hoaxdom.

Ignoring the silly ignorance---nay, malicious falsehoods---conveyed in the last statement, I do think Mr. Troll has a point in his first statement, and that it reinforces the original post. Putting all our eggs in one basket is never a good strategy. Besides, not all enviro problems can be put in the climate change basket.

Here in the Pacific Northwest salmon decline has been a major issue for quite a while, long before climate change was either known about or became an important global biophysical process. Climate change will certainly negatively impact salmon survival in the future, but that will be moot if they go extinct NOW. Focusing exclusively on climate change will not help the salmon. On the contrary, it will probably create even more resistance to the idea that we need to breach some large dams.

Like an ecosystem, the enviro movement needs to be diverse. It needs to continue working on water pollution, wilderness protection, endangered species, "green technology," sustainable agriculture, science education, and all the other areas of interest that make this movement what it is and that give it strength. Focusing on one issue to the exclusion of everything else is a poor strategy that is destined to fail.

Coyote, how we handle the mid-Columbia and Snake River dams (Salmon-o-Matics) has everything to do with our appreciation for the threat posed by climate change.  

It's pretty easy to be anti-nuke and anti-coal when you've got this massive Columbia River hydro system backing you up --- but when you realize that the hydro system is itself a huge threat to a critical species like salmon, that's when we are really forced to confront our insatiable desires for modern amenities.

If focusing on one issue is a recipe for failure, so is failing to see the connections between apparently isolated issues.

Save the world: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 5% annually.

Bart baby, it was far before my time certainly (so we are talking, like, early Bronze-Age-ish), when environmentalists' issues were "easily solved."

Do issues of global warming and energy "undercut all other environmental issues"?  Well, no, if "undercutting" means something like "invalidating," "rendering obsolete," "radically severing the living being from its source of life," and so forth.

What in the world is the "nostalgia" that you are "detecting"?  Neither the reporter in the UK who planted this post, Peter Madden, nor anyone who has commented in this thread (with the exception perhaps of U-No-Poo), believes that issues relating to global warming and energy are anything less than of paramount importance.

On the other hand, let us retain a command of nuance.  Without being at all "nostalgic," indeed while being educated all the time about new things that we had known nothing about before, we have recently been told about Andrew Sharpless's group, Oceana, and the excellent work that the crew of Oceana's ship Ranger is doing to report abuses and illegalities perpetrated by Mediterranean fishers.  That is not at all the same sort of story as, say, a move to drive carbon-tax legislation in the US Congress.  Is it not a very good thing, that we have got news about the exploits of the Ranger's crew?  But then, are you going to write angrily to Andrew now, to command him to stop submitting to Gristmill his "nostalgic" distractions?

Of course we in the Gristmill community need to remain as highly concerned as we are, regarding global warming, and our energy sources, and our energy use; and of course we need to do what we can to spread the word, and to make demands that our communities and our nations change.  But also, we always, always, always need to remind ourselves of why we do what we do, in this regard: because we love the biodiversity of this planet that we call Earth, this community of living creatures.

The operative word there is "love."  And nothing that we do to remind us of that love is a waste of time, a "nostalgic" distraction.

Chickens are our cousins! So are other sensitive animals! Enough is enough! No more factory farms!

Thanks, Bart, I like Bill McKibben very much, and this short piece appeared before I was reading Gristmill, if I have my chronology correct.

I quite agree with what you have written, and consider the third of your bullets, the one about "interconnectedness," to be especially important.  It is certainly true that such causes as stopping whaling, or stopping the poaching of tigers in India and the Amur valley, as unimpeachably good as they are, do not require the kind of radical self-examination and reform that our response to global warming must require.

In that case, though, there remains a fair amount of confusion in this thread.  Or at least I for one am confused.  Peter Madden could perhaps have explained more clearly just what he perceives to be a loss of balance or perspective in our "too obsessed" attitude regarding climate change.  I have interpreted it by my lights, such as they are, but by no means can I claim to understand really what he is getting at.

And, on the other hand, Bill McKibben confuses me, when he writes in the January 2006 essay:

<<
It's not that everyone needs to work on global warming around the clock. We desperately need riverkeepers and acid-rain activists and people working on water and endangered species and rainforest preservation and wilderness and all the other things that first got most of us into this movement. It's just that when those efforts come into conflict with the imperative need to act urgently on global warming, they have to take second place.
>>

I do not think he is saying -- or, I hope he is not saying -- that if we are working on Project A, then we are not working on Project B, and shame on us, because Project B is clearly more important.  That would in fact be reminiscent of that nasty, highly "unpleasant" slogan of the angry and arrogant activists of the 1960s, Pharisaically establishing themselves as an enlightened, superior class: "If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem."

No; and in general, why should there be any conflict at all between, say, working to end acid rain, or working to prevent the destruction of wildlife habitat, and "acting urgently on global warming"?  Cannot both sorts of activities be included in what we think, say and do every day?  What ever could he mean by "first place" and "second place"?

Well OK, he was writing then about the Cape Wind project, and what he (and many of us) considered to be a failure on the part of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., in publicly opposing it.  But that seems to have been a very special case, in which serious environmentalists, with respective concerns for birds, the local fisheries and the unspoiled, natural views from Nantucket and Hyannis, spoke out against an admirable effort to establish a renewable energy source.  Pardon me if I seem ill-educated or naive when I wonder: Does that kind of conflict really happen very often?

Chickens are our cousins! So are other sensitive animals! Enough is enough! No more factory farms!

properly (Paul Hawken's new book), the vast movement that is composed of millions of small groups fighting a gazillion environmental and social justice fights, is not going to worry too much what any particular person advises; in fact, they certainly don't have the problem Madden is talking about, they aren't involved with the big enviro groups to any great extent.  So perhaps the real question is, is there a disconnect going on between the larger groups, working on global warming, and the smaller groups?  Although, if you look at the big enviro sites, frankly, it looks like they are pretty much staying with their original interests and global warming is just an add-on.  So then the question is, who is it that is now very focused on global warming?  Or is it just a "large picture" interest that people talk about, but the vast majority of the on-the-ground action is actually dealing with other environmental issues?

OK, Jon, that makes a great deal of sense.

It would be interesting to know the history about which individuals and which groups made the fate of polar bears an iconic global-warming issue.  Same with the endangered status or extinction of many frogs, especially in Central America, though that has not been always so tightly related to global warming.

Chickens are our cousins! So are other sensitive animals! Enough is enough! No more factory farms!

This is my first post to Gristmill.  I'm not an environmentalist, other than in the non-involved "what the hell was government and big business thinking?" sense.

It seems to me that the concern shouldn't be whether to focus on all issues or just GW.  GW seems like the absolute biggest threat, but why can't all be dealt with, much like they were in the seventies?  (Not to date myself.)  The Martin Agency out of Virginia is the king of the modern twist of approaching different market segments simultaneously.  They designed the Geico and Wal-Mart campaigns for the U.S., simultaneously running different ads for the same product targeted at specific markets.  

Why can't greens do the same?  For instance, coal sends mercury into our seafood.  Gasoline is heating the planet.  Oil puts us at the mercy of an unstable region and an eventual confrontation with China.  Air pollution is the result of both oil and coal.  The loss of the rainforests increases planetary temperature.  Etc.  There's a thread that exists between most forms of pollution, degradation and conflict.  It seems to me that greens should use that to their advantage by using the Martin model.  Create two to three primary messages.  Then run multiple market campaigns under each.  For example, one message could address renewable energy; it would include campaigns addressing gas consumption as a national security issue only; gas consumption as an air polluter bad for kids; coal as a polluter of fish; coal as a danger to children's lungs; etc.  Then target the message and ads to the appropriate markets and decision-makers.

Just a thought.  

I've only been involved in the environmental movement for six years. When I started it was very difficult to get people to listen or care.  Everything changed a year ago when global warming became the issue.  Suddenly it became easy to be green.  Politicians, movie stars,  the colour green became fashionable. Of course, for some people it's just the colour of the month but it has reached a tipping point in what is  now politically possible. Nothing else could have gotten so many people's attention at the same time. People are now more ready to accept a change in perspective in how they look at consumption, energy use, transportation, species decline,etc.  The potential for change has opened up dramatically.  This is a starting point in a sense, because the possibility that our consumer lifestyle is wrong will become more and more obvious as people begin to think and reflect on this.  

   Peter Madden said that climate change may be too much of an abstraction.  I couldn't disagree more.  What is abstract about the weather?  We are seeing more and more scenes of flooding, storms, heat waves, melting ice caps and droughts on tv.  People are experiencing the effects all over the world and those that aren't directly affected are experiencing it vicariously on tv. We used to see the weather as something that just happened.  Now there are armies of experts explaining how it is all tied to human activity.  Talk about in your face.  You can't get away from it.  The potential for changing human consciousness is unprecedented.

    Global warming has iconic status.  Why do you think the big oil corporations have been spending millions trying to debunk it?  The sound and fury that's been put into challenging the idea of  human caused climate change is a good indication of just how huge a potential this has to change people's minds. And once people accept the idea that we are causing the problem they become open to changing their behaviour as well as supporting major changes in government policy.  The danger is that it also opens people to despair that we cannot do anything to prevent it.  But that's where the environmental community comes in with their ideas about what we can do about it.  

If any of the tipping-point scenarios around global climate change are to be given credibility, the notion that environmentalists are giving the subject too much emphasis is clearly absurd. In fact, to see this as a giant PR campaign where environmentalists have a) a coherent public voice and b) a significant chance of changing global warming outcomes by carefully modulating that voice so as to not alienate the masses is also a nonsense. The theory seems to be that the interest of the masses may be engaged by serious public discourse, or failing that by carefully-managed campaigns. History shows otherwise. Sadly, it generally takes serious trauma to enact major shifts in public attitudes. It was not until the horrors of the Holocaust were revealed that anti-Semitism became socially unacceptable in the US and Britain - and that awful demonstration of the despicable depths of racism led a couple of decades later to the emergence of an effective American civil rights movement. It was no accident that many of the white college kids on the Freedom buses were Jewish. Similarly the awful demonstrations of nuclear destruction seen at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were without doubt what kept the Cold War from reaching ignition point.

If the Titanic is to change course before hitting the iceberg it will happen because of changes of attitude amongst leaders, not followers. Environmentalists have a role in education and and activism for sure, but "shouting for help, but not too loudly so as not to disturb people" (Paddington Bear reference, in case you were wondering) is going to get us politely nowhere. The bitter reality is that avoidance of traumatic global climate change is not going to result from any coherent PR action on the part of "the environmental movement". The Global War on Nature has been under way for a couple of hundred years now, and nature, with our help having lost almost every battle, seems about to win the war by sacrificing its own, just as, faced with this summer's long drought her in North Carolina, the poplar trees in my yard have decided to cut their losses by dropping their leaves early. A couple of months of lost photosynthesis, of lost growth, but the trees will survive into another year. Nature will continue, but without many her children. The trauma, if it comes, will certainly change public attitudes on all environmental issues amongst the survivors for a good long time. If on the other hand disaster is averted, then perversely we will be back to waving the placards, with temporary successes on a myriad smaller issues and the likelihood of continued losses on the big ones.

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.

I really enjoyed reading the piece and the comments.  I also wonder about whether the global warming issue distracts people from other environmental issues.  The fact is that sometimes what is good for reducing carbon emissions is bad for biodiversity.
The positive is that the interest in global warming is making environmental issues front page news, and gaining a wide audience.  I think that we environmentalists are going to have to get used to some disappointment in the approaches to solving climate change, or peak oil.  I also would like to see an investment in sustainable regional planning, and local organic food production, energy efficiency, frugality, etc.  But I think that we are likely to (instead? at the same time) see large scale projects (like biofuel development) that have dire environmental effects.  So awareness of issues outside the climate change rubric is crucial right now.  We still have to be outsiders.

"Of course, climate change will touch everything. If the earth warms as predicted, we may not have tropical forests or the special habitats we are trying to protect. On this basis, many argue that we should focus solely on climate change."

Perhaps climate change touches on all of the ills, however the true blanket topic is not this or that type of ecologic disaster, it is over consumption of our resources.  If we put the brakes on our massive consumption, the rest would just take care of itself.

That global warming gets conflated with other environmental problems does make sense, but not for the reasons given. They are all the direct outcome of a cultural paradigm that is disconnected; that sees nature as an "other" to be exploited for personal benefit just as the affluent North does with what it considers to be third-world countries. Global warming and all other environmental problems are really a problem with human attitudes; with a lack of restraint in both human population and consumption; with the reliance on addictive substitutes for the natural fulfillments available in abundance for any species that stays within the carrying capacity of its ecosystem; with focusing all of our energy on competition and destruction instead of cooperation and creation. This is a choice for humans, it is not a hard-wired immutable natural principle.

The solutions to global warming and other environmental tragedies are one and the same. Quit overconsuming the Earth's limited resources and quit using the biosphere as a waste receptacle. Remember that the prime activity of all other living organisms is to self-organize in the creation of mutually supportive relationships that support the web of life in creating and sustaining more life. Remember that the same principles that create a sustainable ecosystem are an intimate aspect of who we are, and that if we are to ever have any hope of reaching our potential as individuals and as a species, we had best start acting like it. We must think and act the way nature works.

There is not just a problem with focusing on global warming to the exclusion of other environmental problems. There is a meta-problem with focusing on applying band-aids to symptoms of a culture out of balance--that has disconnected its relationships with the natural world, with each other, and with our own inner nature. As Paul Cienfuego of Democracy Unlimited points out, we must quit clipping branches and start digging up the roots.

This, of course, makes the proponents of growth economies very squeamish. By taking every proposed solution to global warming, other environmental problems, the energy crisis, etc., off the table if the solutions don't, first and foremost, protect economic growth, they ensure that the problems will remain intractable. Proponents of the status quo (the sycophants of free-market capitalism and its practice of economic cannibalism) reverse all the relationships they haven't severed. Profit is put above people and planet. However, nature neither produces waste nor grows beyond maturity. As Edward Abbey said, infinite growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. We have been aware of the implications of what we're doing for a long time, e.g. Aldo Leopold's "A Sand County Almanac" in 1949, and John Storer's "The Web of Life" in 1953.

Of course, once one reaches these inescapable conclusions, what is the actual process to implement these solutions? What is the alternative to the status quo that we're constantly told either doesn't exist or is utopian and thus unrealistic? The only systemic solution--the one that addresses the common roots of systemic collapse and can improve quality of life--that I'm aware of is to relocalize our communities with steady-state economies and reconnect all of our senses to their roots in the natural world.

Contact me for details :-)

Peace _on_ Earth requires peace _with_ Earth.