Green Priorities?

Image (c) Fred First www.fragmentsfromfloyd.com

Recently my wife and I have enjoyed conversing with a new acquaintance in Columbia: Monta Welch, founder of the Columbia Climate Change Coalition (check out the CCCC's online group). One especially thought-provoking conversation in particular has reopened, at least for me, the question of “green priorities.” As we – as green-minded Missourians, Americans, and earth-dwellers in general – continue to moved toward a united voice and mission, we must ask ourselves, “What for?” Why find and expand our “green community?”

Some of the ready answers are powerful in and of themselves. First, of course, clichéd though it may be, we are a stronger force together than we would be alone – in lobbying, in outreach, in mutual encouragement. We educate one another; we stretch and challenge each other’s perceptions. There is something good – something both utilitarian and ‘holistic’ – about all of this. All things “green” have their value; all green actions have their place.

And to be sure, we should indeed avoid the temptation to hold as more “valuable” any one ecological interest over another: One person’s goal to protect a fragile, local ecosystem is not more “valuable,” per se, than another’s focus on harnessing wind power or teaching conservation to children. But here’s the thing: all “values” aside, are there not, in this hour, some issues more pressing – more worthy of our combined energies and passions as a green community?

If the climate scientists are right, the answer, it would seem, is a resounding “Yes.” The Climate issue, that is, is strikingly “pressing” in that the rivers, the forests, the ice-caps and endangered species, the coastlands, and all that we are trying to protect, are themselves “endangered” by the prospect of what might come in the next few decades if we as a species don’t change our course.

To be sure, whatever we have already been doing, we need to keep doing it, and with no less fervor --- whatever our passions (rivers or forests, alternative energies or endangered habitats) we should not let them go. But for those of us whose main environmental concern has NOT, to this point, been global warming (and I count myself as on that boat), the time has passed for passing the responsibility to “someone else.” If we have no more room on our “front burners,” then clearly we need a bigger stove.

Nathan First
Missouri Renewable Energy