Regenerating the Human Environment

In this episode Dr. Mary Lucero explains why the way we think is contributing to environmental decline, and offers ideas for regenerating our ecosystem by changing the way we think about everyday problems. 

Listen to why:
·         We cannot effectively restore the environment until we recognize that we are the environment. 

·         Decisions about which new technology to adopt should be based in part on understanding of the effect a product might have on the environment.  
How is it being made?  What is it being made out of? By whom?  And most of all, for how long will it be useful?

·         Environmental policies often end in bulky documents that cloud the stalemate between polarized politicians and favor corporate interest above public needs.  

·         Governments should focus on efforts that simply protect rights of all to life and liberty.  

·         We need to move away from the linear programming that fosters multiple choice standardized testing models, and move to more holistic thinking that considers many options and justifies solutions based, not only on focused, immediate goals, but also on the impact decisions will have on the community at large today and in the future.

Unaffiliated References
US News 2018 update on Deepwater Horizon Expenses
Current State of the Ozone Layer  2023 European Environment Agency Report
Seven Generations Learning Institute

Further Reading from Our Affiliate Store

• Silent Spring (Anniversary Edition) 
• Managing our Environment, Managing Ourselves
• Let the Evidence Speak-Using Bayesian Thinking...

The Cornerstones of Healthy Food Systems Podcast Introduction by David Lucero.
Theme music by Zakhar Valaha 

This version was updated in summer, 2023, when we decided to remove the cornerstones.endofite.com website reference.  The only change was to remove the word cornerstones from the website reference. 

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Transcript

Regenerating the Human Environment

When you hear talk of the environment, what comes to mind? 

Do you think about alpine forests with babbling brooks?

Maybe you envision pristine wildlands, prairies,  where the deer and the antelope play.

If you live near the ocean, your mind may turn to coral reefs teaming with tropical fish, or deeper waters where blue marlin, mahi-mahi, ono and whales thrive..

But whether the environment you are most likely to consider is a forest, a jungle, an ocean or a desert, most of us have an unfortunate tendency to consider the environment apart from ourselves.  

Humans are integral to every environment.

This perceived separation between humans and the environment is unfortunate, because every major  niche within our global environment is influenced by the highly mobile two legged species called humans.  We either occupy these niches permanently, extract resources from them, pour wastes into them, or pass through them on our way somewhere else.  

Humans modify every environment

As a species we are highly mobile.  And when we find an environment we are not well adapted to, we modify it to suit our needs.   

We drain swamps, re-channel rivers, cover soil with pavement or concrete, and develop elaborate systems of heating, cooling, lighting, and food production to address our every need. 

We also manage other living systems.   Too many insects?  We spray pesticides.  Too many weeds?  Herbicides.  Too many deer?  Sometimes wildlife officials sell more hunting permits.  Sometimes, they euthanize the excess. 

Such decisions about what lives and what does not are made at every scale of society.  

Private citizens in their own homes, must decide whether to set mechanical traps baited with cheese, use poisons, or buy a cat and stop leaving crumbs on the floor in order to get rid of house mice.

Municipalities set rules about maintaining yards and controlling pet populations.  How many listening today have a mosquito truck that passes through their neighborhood every few weeks spraying insecticide to rid the community of mosquitos and the diseases they might transmit.  

Federal and state governments create and enforce rules for managing wild plants and animals, and protecting endangered species. In fact, state and federal governments even apply pesticides and herbicides to public wildlands, so the odds are good that your favorite forest, rangeland, or wetland has been chemically modified on a repeated basis. 

At an even larger scale, global initiatives like the Global Wildlife Program, funded through the World Bank claim to combat wildlife poaching, trafficking, and demand.

My point is not to challenge these actions.  Clearly, some of our impacts on the environment are good, and others not-so-good, but I want to stay out of those arguments at this time.   My point today is simply to remind us that we are integrally connected to our environment, and our environment is integrally connected to society as a whole. 

This means it is impossible to discuss the environmental cornerstone without considering the political, economic, and social factors that influence our interactions with the environment. 

Humans and the Environment are Interdependent. 

This intimate connectivity between humans and the environment makes us dependents of our environment.  We simply cannot sustain ourselves without the natural resources like clean air, clean water, living soil, and the trillions of plant, animal, and microbial life forms that regenerate our air, soil and water.   

But our environment is also dependent on us.  Our actions create impacts that disrupt the natural balance of this environment.  

This interdependence would seem to indicate that every decision we make about politics, commerce, the food we eat, the homes we build, the clothes we wear, the children we raise and the way we treat our sick should be made with the environment in mind.  This doesn’t always happen.

When we ignore our responsibility to the environment, our own sustainability diminishes.  Our air becomes polluted, living species go extinct, soils erode, deserts expand, and invasive species fill our lands  

Human Induced Environmental Damage is Usually Caused by Acts of Omission

It is safe to say that no one sets out with the intention of destroying the world we live in.  Pollution on a global scale is hardly intentional.  Yet time and time again, humans are implicated in the loss of forests and grasslands, the expansion of deserts, the disappearance of plant and animal species, and changes in air and water quality around the planet.  The results of these losses ripple, not only through the natural world, but also through the economy, which depends on natural resources.

These acts are not carried out with the intention of injuring others.  Acts of omission are acts of neglect.  They are failures to take responsibility.  Much like a drunk driver has no intention of running over pedestrians when he gets behind the wheel, few people or corporations who take shortcuts on waste disposal do so with the intention of destroying the environment.  Yet collectively, the effects of these shortcuts, which may take decades to become evident, harm people.  They negatively impact economies, and they disrupt all forms of life on the planet.

Take for example the 2010 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil Rig in the Gulf of Mexico.  The explosion resulted in direct injuries and deaths.  Cleanup workers were hospitalized. The resulting oil leak spread about 4.9 million barrels of oil onto the Gulf of Mexico and polluted 1,100 miles of shoreline.  Lives were lost.  People, plants, and animals were injured.  Fisheries were impacted.  Food supplies were damaged.  Eight years after the accident, US News and World Report placed the cost of remediating damage from the Deepwater Horizen to BP alone in excess of $65 Billion dollars.  

Subsequent investigations found negligence among various parties involved with the operation.  It was thought that the explosion could have been prevented had proper precautions been taken. Yet there was no evidence I am aware of that anyone deliberately blew up the drilling rig.  

Like the Deep Water Horizon tragedy, most of the environmental damage we see around us results from neglect, inattention, and failure to acknowledge the risks associated with our actions.

Restoring the Environment Requires Awareness

It stands to reason that if humanity’s destructive impacts on the environment are caused by neglect and inattention, sustaining, restoring, and regenerating the environment will require greater awareness.  My belief that a change in understanding can stimulate restoration naturally, without adding economically crippling policies to our lawbooks, is my primary motive for hosting this podcast. Can simply raising awareness work? In the end, it may also require legislative action, but I believe those actions will be less disruptive, and more effective, if driven by a collective conscience that has more understanding of our relationship to the environment than society at large has today. 

History brings us several examples of successful restoration projects that have resulted from improved awareness.  

It can be argued that the dawn of the modern environmental movement was launched in the 1960’s by Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring, which documented the accumulation of the pesticide, DDT, in birds of prey, and the subsequent decline in populations of apex raptors like the bald eagle.  Carson’s book raised public awareness of DDT’s effect on formation of egg shells, and eventually contributed to the banning of DDT in many countries.  In the US, DDT was banned in 1972.  At that time, the bald eagle was on the brink of extinction.  It’s recovery, like the recovery of other raptor species, correlated well with the reduction of environmental DDT.  Today, bald eagles are no longer considered threatened. 

Now I have read, and I acknowledge that there are alternative views on the role DDT played in the demise and recovery of raptors.  The DDT story has a large enough consensus behind it to be considered a classic example of environmental demise and restoration.   The point I want to make here is that DDT would not have been banned, and raptor populations would not have been restored, without first having a change of public consciousness. 

A similar example lies in the radioactive reagents like radium that were used in the early 1900’s to make glow in the dark clock hands, cockpit dials for pilots, and all sorts of consumer collectables.   As factory works began to experience unprecedented levels of cancer, and renown scientists who pioneered the study of radioactivity began dying, public awareness drove industry to abandon this practice.  

Many of you will  remember the 1980’s when everyone was worried about the hole in the ozone layer? Hardly anyone even talks about the ozone hole today.  I did find a web page by the European Environment Agency that reports the current state of the ozone later.  The page was updated in April of 2023.  If you want to read the report, you know the drill.  I will put the link in the show notes, along with a link to a US News follow up report on the DeepWater Horizon incident.  

 According to the European Environment Agency report, the hole in the ozone reached its maximum size in the year 2000.  It has been getting smaller, with some variation, in the years since.  This is attributed to the global effort to reduce the use of ozone depleting substances, so if the decline is real, and is due to this conscious change in human behavior, this is a tremendous environmental success story that began with increased public awareness.

In all of these examples, public awareness was key to regeneration.  This is why I believe that changing human awareness is key to regenerating the environment.  

Restoring the Environment May Also Require Economic Change

Even as we acknowledge the success of efforts to restore the bald eagle, reduce the size of the ozone hole, or remediate the greenhouse gasses present in our atmosphere, we must also acknowledge that restoration comes with a price. And like everything else that involves money, the cost of restoration is rarely borne equally by those who created the problem and those who were affected by it. 

This unequal cost sharing underlies much of the controversy that surrounds environmental policies.  Government agencies not only tax the general public, they also pass policies that destroy livelihoods for workers.  If the best paying job available in your town was at a factory that made DDT, sold it to farmers, or sprayed it on crops, you may not have cared as much about the plight of the bald eagle as you cared about the health and welfare of your family. 

Historically, the biggest corporations may be affected by new policies… It seems certain that international chemical corporations lost money when DDT was banned.  But such large corporations have deeper pockets than you and I, so they are usually able to withstand these changes.  As DDT was being banned, new agrochemicals, like glyphosate based herbicide blends helped to fill the financial void.  But glyphosate kills plants.  DDT kills insects.  You can bet that small service companies who depended on income from DDT were less resilient, and felt the pain of the DDT ban more deeply than the major corporations felt it.

We can and will continue to introduce new products, and wait for public awareness to reveal problems, protest, and create bans.  Consumers will always demand new and better products. But if we are to minimize future efforts that ban one environmental toxin only to see a new one enter the market and cause injury, we need to build a collective consciousness that challenges new products with healthy skepticism, and pays a higher premium for products and services whose safety and efficacy have been proven, not across a handful of studies, but across generations or centuries of use. People are already doing this.  Sustainably sourced foods, blue jeans, essential oils, and countless other environmental products are available on the market today, and they cost much more than your run-of-the-mill discount store specials.  The companies that produce these products serve high end consumers who care about the environment and the conditions that workers are exposed to.

While those in the middle and lower class tiers of society may also value the environment and laborers, they may have a harder time paying for these products. 

However, the majority of society takes the opposite path.  We pay high prices for the latest technologies, and make ourselves and our loved ones the guinea pigs whose long term health will be tested.  

I don’t think we want to return to centuries past.   I don’t even think that would be possible.  But I do think many of us would enjoy a better quality of life if we did not jump to be first in line every time for the latest new technology on the market.  Let someone else be the guinea pig!

Polarized Politics Hinder Restoration Efforts

Too often our discussions around restoration are polarized, with one group arguing for bans and the other side arguing for jobs.  The end result, whether we are banning DDT, reducing fossil fuel consumption, or seeking to prevent microplastics from entering the environment, is that billions which could be diverted to restoration end up being spent on litigation.  Policies become increasingly complicated.  Loopholes become harder to find. And environments suffer even as politicians polish their nails with pride thinking about their success as environmental legislators.

One reason it is so easy for legislators and activists to become polarized is that the environment itself is complex.  Infinitely complex.  But as humans, we have a hard time concentrating on many variables at the same time.   For example, if you sit back for a minute, take a deep breath, and imagine a warm, sunny day in a forest clearing, you can probably conjure up a clear picture of what that experience is like.  You might even feel imagined warmth, recall the sounds of a babbling brook, and smell the freshness of your conjured up pines.  But if, at the same time, you try to imagine the cell phone ringing in your pocket, your child calling because he’s just been in a car accident, and yourself trying to recall the multicharacter password you need to report the accident to your insurance company, your image of the forest clearing quickly becomes quite vague. Our conscious minds just don’t multi-task that way.  

Yet, as I said a moment ago, environmental problems are not simple.  They are complex, nonlinear, and multivariate.  Actions taken today may not reveal impacts for decades, or even generations. So an intervention that seems beneficial now, may reveal problems down the road. 

For example, in the 1960’s and 70’s, a walk on the lakeshore was liable to leave you with scarred feet because so many broken bottles and pull tabs from pop-tops on soda and beer littered nearly every public area.  I remember my own little feet getting sliced open by glass on the shores of Lake Travis, near Austin, when I was a child.  My experience was not at all unique.

Little by little, canning companies replaced the pull tabs on soda and beer cans with fixed pop-tops, and glass bottles were replaced with plastic.  Most people considered this a step forward.  This had to be safer, and seemed better for the environment.  But a little more than a generation later, the great plastic garbage patch appeared in the Pacific Ocean and the endocrine disrupting effects of microplastics in our food and drinking water became a public concern.  

Should we ban plastics and go back to broken glass on the beach? Of course not.  But perhaps we can find more creative solutions to what is quickly becoming an enormous global concern.  Perhaps we can find better ways to entice individuals to throw their garbage in waste receptacles. Sound impossible?  What if the plastics all had microchips, and issued cryptocurrency if it entered a public recycling facility within so many weeks after purchase?  Maybe we find new materials, or return to former paper based materials.  Some of this is already happening.  We are seeing more paper bags in stores.  We are seeing plastic cooking utensils being replaced with silicone, which tolerates heat better, and leaches fewer residues into your food. This creativity that solves problems is more likely to flourish when less legislation and litigation is there to restrict our learning and our actions.  

The problem I have with legislation is that the more complex the environmental decision becomes, the more our legislators retreat to those black and white paradigms of us against them. Decisions become based on perceived gains, including gains that impact bank accounts and social capital. And regardless of who wins the debate, the environment suffers. Since the environment is infinitely complex, this process of arguing for black-and-white solutions is infinitely unsustainable. 

Reducing polarized thinking will require different ways of learning

We need a different approach. 

We need to master the power of more holistic thinking, that drives us away from mine-or-yours, for-or-against, polarized reasoning. 

If we are ever to see true environmental sustainability, we need to regenerate the human mind, moving away from education models that foster liner thinking, and start teaching children at a young age to consider multiple angles and alternative solutions to any argument. 

Examples of this path to complex reasoning is Bayesian thinking https://bookshop.org/a/33990/9783319713915, which I first became exposed to as a researcher doing phylogenetic analyses.  But complex thinking models can also be taught simply, in the more enduring learning models like the storytelling traditions popular among indigenous peoples, and the Seven Generations model, promoted by the Seven Generations Education Institute. https://www.7generations.org/about/  For transparency sake, I have no affiliation or connection to this institute.  I met some of their representatives at a conference once, and in the course of conversation, I was told that their mission was to teach in a way that helps people consider the impact of their actions, not just for themselves today, but for their community now, and up to seven generations in the future. 

Such holistic thinking is not foreign to any society.  It is embedded into many ancient traditions.  Yet this kind of thinking is neither practiced nor rewarded sufficiently in our ACT and SAT driven academic institutions. 

Regenerating the Environment with Revitalized Leadership

For these reasons, I am quite convinced that contemporary threats to our environment cannot be solved by global politics or by contemporary public school teaching.

The wise national and global influencers that truly seek to address the environmental concerns we now face would achieve more by removing policies that concentrate leadership among a few, restrict the way we learn in public schools, and support deterioration of environments and local economies through various loopholes that drive inequality and benefit special interests.

Limiting large national governments to efforts that protect the basic rights of individuals, and leaving complex environmental decisions to be resolved at more local scales would not only ensure more sensible environmental policies, it would also promote greater equality, since more people would have a voice in the legislative process. Policies and potentially hidden loopholes would become more transparent, because backstage deal making would become more difficult to hide.  The role of larger, more powerful governments would become that of protecting individuals and communities against thugs, bullies, and others who would exploit them. 

Such movements would strip away obstacles that prevent local communities from building land and economic restoration efforts.  This would lay the groundwork that allows local leaders to evolve by giving them experience at small scales and allowing them to grow to levels at which they can be maximally effective.  With increased competition from other leaders, natural selection would limit the power of those leaders who, in the absence of significant competition, become too big to meet the needs of their communities.  While such an effort would support local economies, it would also support local environments because businesses would quickly recognize that government is no longer there to bail them out when faced with the consequences of their actions.  

To sum up the key points:  

·         We cannot effectively restore the environment until we recognize that we are the environment, and the environment is us.  We need to stop seeing the environment as something out there, beyond us. 

·         We need to be mindful of how our choices and actions affect the environment as a whole.  Decisions about which new technology to adopt should be based in part on a deep understanding of the effect a product might have on the environment.  How is it being made?  What is it being made out of? By whom?  And most of all, for how long will it be useful?

·         Environmental policies often end in bulky documents that cloud the stalemate between polarized politicians with complex loopholes that invariably favor corporate interest above public needs—if for no other reason than because few beyond large corporations can afford the attorneys needed to decipher the policies.  

·         Local level efforts will accomplish greater levels of environmental, and even economic restoration, but only if and when global and national policies relax the reigns on business and environmental regulations that are misunderstood, inequitably enforced, and prone to favor special interests at the expense of people and the planet.  Large governments should focus instead on more narrowly defined efforts that simply protect rights of all to life and liberty.  

·         Changing the political process may start with changing the nature of politicians and those who support them.  These changes should start with the way we teach everyone.   We need to move away from the linear programming that fosters multiple choice standardized testing models, and move to more holistic thinking that considers many good options and justifies solutions based, not only on focused, immediate goals, but also on the impact decisions will have on the community at large today and in the future. 

In closing, I acknowledge that my own views are imperfect. Rather than promoting these ideas as dogma, I’d like to challenge you to simply consider how more multidimensional problem solving might impact your own efforts.  What would be the benefits?  What would be the risks? How would new ways of thinking impact the way you interact with your environment, and your food system.  What other ideas do you have that will help increase enduring availability of clean air, clean water, healthy soil, and the kind of equitable social environment that ensures fair access to safe, healthy, and nutritious food?