In his article “Going Green? Easy Doesn’t Do it” Michael Maniates argues that the greatest environmental problem with which the American population is confronted is that in their quest for a sustainable, environmental-friendly way of life, they are sold short by environmental elites and political leaders who are “too timid to call forth the best in us or too blind to that which has made us a great nation.” Instead, so Maniates, in order to truly make a change for the better for the environment they are living in, honest discourse and discussion about the current situation is necessary, so that the American people are allowed to fight together to achieve this truly difficult goal – which they have proven capable throughout history.
While I believe Maniates is making a compelling argument with this reasoning that not only resonates with but also motivates many of his readers to reconsider the current strategy of “going green,” I claim that by making the protection of the environment an “American” struggle, the important global variable of the environmental equation gets lost, almost eliminated, which, in my opinion, is contra-productive to an issue that not only concerns all human beings on this planet but that also demands a participation of every single individual living on earth to truly being able to solve it.
Laura makes the interesting observation that Michael Maniates questions the “green” initiatives taken by referring to Paul Revere, Franklin Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King Jr. and their advocacy for change. With this comparison, so Laura, Maniates challenges the revolutionary nature of the American “green” movement and demands that it lives up to the truly transformative, innovative, and progressive social movements that this country has experienced before. However, while this reference to “American revolutionary figures” makes a convincing statement for a more rigorous initiative in the eyes of an American audience – Laura referred to it as the most powerful section -, it makes “going green” an American issue and unites the citizens of the United States in their shared fight for protecting their environment; by nationalizing the cause, the global nature of this problem, though, gets lost, which prevents it from being truly successful as environmental degradation is a problem that is shared by humanity at large.
It is true that the people living in the United States possess the largest ecological footprint of all human beings on this planet, but most large-scale environmental problems cross national borders. The cutting down of the rain forest in Brazil not only affects the Southern Cone nation itself, but instead can lead to changes in rainfall patterns that have an immense influence on a large area of nations. The emission of CO2 of Western European and American cars create a Green House Effect that leads to the warming of the temperature of the whole planet.
Furthermore, Paul Wapner explains in his article “People, Nature, Ethics” that human beings extract resources from the earth to provide energy, food, and other materials. However, in our highly industrialized present, this occurs at a rate at which the environment can no longer keep up. Additionally, the conversion of those resources into consumable goods and services produces waste. But, instead of solving these issues, we seem to prefer the easy way out and simply displace them, which in our globalized world, often occurs internationally. Thus, “Shadow Ecologies” are created, so that New York City “pulls resources from and exports its waste to areas well beyond Manhattan Island.” But obviously, also this strategy is only a short-time solution, as if our consumption and with that waste production continues to increase, also the shadow ecologies will be depleted.
These are just a few examples of the global nature of the issue of environmental degradation. Nevertheless, I believe it highlights that “going green” is not and should not be defined as an “American” issue. The inward orientation that a nationalization of environmentalism creates, prevents the consideration of the effects of the own actions onto the lives and livelihoods of others and vice versa. Tom Knudson’s account of California’s efforts to conserve its ecosystem while importing resources from around the world provides a prime example for that phenomenon. Only when human beings overcome their limited perspective of the own environment being “the center of the universe” and accepting their belonging to the global community, the full scope of the problem can be considered.
In this sense, using American social movements as the inspiration for more “revolutionary” environmental initiatives might defeat the goal of truly achieving change for the better. Unfortunately though, the prevailing emphasis of state sovereignty has not produced many social movements that were active across borders. However, exactly because of that, the green movement is - or better possesses the potential - of being revolutionary: it provides the opportunity for human beings to be part of the very first GLOBAL revolution. Thus, Maniates is right when saying that “time for easy is over”; but the chance of participating in a movement bigger than everything that has existed before, as an agent for change for the global population and the planet we live on, should be motivation enough to quiet conservative voices of conformity and truly set out to becoming “green.”
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