9/7 Response

I really enjoyed the two different perspectives that were provided by the two readings for this Tuesday. The Environmental Policy and Politics reading, while very dry and number heavy, presented an important science driven point of view. This was complimented by the Toward Sustainable Communities reading which described a more over arching history and projection of the environmental movement. Personally, I found the latter to be much more interesting.
Kraft’s second chapter provides an essential grounding for the environmental movement in an impressive array of research and statistics. I found some of these statistics absolutely amazing. For example, “thousands of tiny releases of oil from cars, lawn mowers, and other dispersed sources on land equal an Exxon Valdez spill (10.9 million gallons) every eight months.” Overall, however, I found the impressive amount of research almost overwhelming.
On the other hand, the Toward Sustainable Communities readings reminded me almost immediately of a reading I had done for a class last year, entitled Blessed Earth by Paul Hawken. The book outlines Hawken’s vision of an enormous paradigm shift which is already underway; a change from the centralized, top-down approach to fostering change to an autonomous or highly localized, bottom-up approach. In other words, instead of change coming from a few large governmental or non governmental institutions and organizations, change will come from thousands, or even millions of small, local groups. According to Hawken this change is already underway, as evidenced by the existence of thousands of small local groups all fighting for the protection of social justice, the environment, and indigenous peoples rights.
The parallel between this Hawken reading and Towards Sustainable Communities comes from what Mazmanian and Kraft refer to as the third epoch, where smaller, sustainable communities will be the future of the environmental movement. I think both visions encounter a similar problem; they require a shift in mass consciousness. This is an incredibly difficult process to initiate, and while both claim the process is underway, it is difficult to support that claim. To me, the sustainable communities and the new global era Hawken described are both idealistic solutions. Additionally, paradigm shifts such as the ones being described are almost always slow moving processes, and I hope that the new epoch won’t be too little too late, especially given the often depressing statistics from the Environmental Policy and Politics reading.