By Karen Melton, Southeastern Pennsylvania Group
Bright Green Future is the name of a new book by Gregory Schwartz, a professor of Environmental Science, and writer Trevor Decker Cohen. The book’s subtitle, “How everyday heroes are reimagining the way we feed, power, and build our world” well describes the tone of the book. Dan Chu, Executive Director of the Sierra Club Foundation calls it “an antidote to despair.”
After reading the book, I asked Trevor to share a few key points with our Sierra Club newsletter audience.
Karen: You introduce your book Bright Green Future by talking about ‘wide-eyed optimism’ and shifting our mindset to a focus on the world we want to live in. The stories of optimism you tell are mostly small-scale efforts to breathe life back into town centers, regenerative farms, energy efficient reservation housing, innovative materials and recycling technologies. Sierrans are all about working toward solutions, but how do you find optimism with small-scale solutions when the problems we need to solve are measured in billions of tons of greenhouse gases and plastic pollution, acidification of entire oceans and millions of acres on fire?
Trevor: It’s much easier to understand the power of a solution when its benefits are visible in our own backyard.
We absolutely need large-scale policy changes, but outside of activist circles, people tend to yawn or tune them out. The goal of Bright Green Future is to make people perk up when they hear the words “climate solution.”
We show tangible examples of how sustainability can benefit our communities and inspiring role models to look up to. That spark of interest is then a gateway to start exploring the larger policies, pressure, and organizing needed to build the world we want.
Karen: You describe the U.S. model of city growth as being ‘a lot like a ponzi scheme.’ Can you explain what you mean by that and how it speaks to our broken relationship with nature?
Trevor: Urban sprawl is as economically unsustainable as it is environmentally unsustainable.
When we build a new strip mall or residential subdivision, the tax revenue is simply not enough to support the miles of parking lots, roads, wires, and pipes needed for car-dependent monocultures.
That’s why our bridges are on the verge of collapse, why we haven’t replaced pipes that leak lead into the water, and why so many malls end up eventually failing.
The initial illusion of prosperity hides the cost burden on our cities to maintain urban sprawl.
If we want to fix this, we can reinvest in mainstreets and mixed-use neighborhoods. Believe it or not, a little shop on mainstreet generates five times the tax revenue per acre than a big box store, and costs a small fraction in infrastructure to maintain.
The environmental cost is enormous.
It’s in mining and deforestation to harvest materials, disturbance of ecosystems for development, and CO2 for transportation. One of the biggest industrial uses of land is mining rock for concrete in construction. It’s responsible for most mountain-top removal.
When considering Sierra’s 30 x 30 campaign, one thing we can do is think critically about the way we design the cities of the future.
Karen: I found your discussion about mindset and attitudes toward nature particularly interesting, with Eastern philosophies regarding humans as part of nature, while Western thought tends to view our relationship as either one of dominion or one of stewardship. When trying to build support for policies that protect the environment, we try to meet people where they are. Do you have ideas on how we might better engage with those who view us as having dominion over nature.
Trevor: There are very strong Western religious and rational cases to be made for sustainability.
From a religious perspective, look no further than the very first book in the Bible: “And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and keep it.” - Genesis 2:15.
Genesis calls for sustainability. We were put on Earth to be good stewards of the paradise that God created for us. While we are the dominant piece of creation, if we look at history, we see that dominion without stewardship is folly.
Time and again civilizations collapse when centuries of land degradation collide with changes in climate. The agricultural scientist David Montgomery points out that the life-span of almost all major civilizations is directly correlated to the rate of soil loss.
That isn’t to say that we should have no impact on the environment.
Even the supposedly primordial Amazon rainforest, the world’s great carbon sink, is now thought to be a giant garden crafted by Indigenous societies. Civilizations that have learned stewardship and collaboration with the natural world have survived and done so often for thousands of years.
Today, we are dealing with vastly larger populations and more destructive economies, but our technologies and global networks are mind-bogglingly advanced. If we too as a society want to thrive for more than a few centuries, we would be wise to embody the principle of stewardship, rather than dominion alone.
This blog was included as part of the Fall 2021 Sylvanian newsletter. Please click here to check out more articles from this edition!