Over the past weeks studying environmentalism here at L&C, I’ve learned three key things about how policies regarding environmental issues can be made. 1, Identifying environmental issues involves subjective, cultural, and educational boundaries, which make the measurements of these issues hard to communicate across cultures. 2, Communicating scientific information from the scientists of the world to the public and policy makers is a source of frustrating miscommunication and leads to a lack of understanding about the issues policies aim to solve. 3, the final hurdle to policy making comes down to the cultural barrier of borders, which unnecessarily divides humans into subcategories of cultures with varying levels of development.
These three keys follow a logical approach to conquering the hurdles encountered when implementing coordinated environmental policies between all nations.This approach assumes that it is necessary for all countries to be included in the efforts towards the environment. I believe that with enough effort and attention, the human race can unite as a single entity to accomplish mindful use of materials and space across the globe to achieve a balanced and safe world. The three key lessons that I’ve learned are all integral pieces that we can use to create a policy to solve environmental issues on a global scale.
First, in order to recognize an environmental issue that could be implemented as global policy, all nations would have to agree on the definition and risk of the issue. Why We Disagree About Climate Change, by Mike Hulme, is entirely about how this barrier is nearly impossible to break. Identifying environmental issues involves subjective, cultural, and educational boundaries. These differences are inherent to separate historic developments of cultures. These differences give each country a different sized ruler to measure environmental issues with. The broadest difference of cultural interpretation of our natural world comes from the origin of the meaning of nature to different parts of the world. Historically, different nations perceive nature as a different entity. Nature was created and discovered alongside the early development of culture. Western civilization views nature as non-physical and non-interactive with human life, which separates the effects of nature with everyday life. In a polarizing contrast, eastern civilization has a history of anthropomorphizing nature, which allows empathetic connection to the wellness of natural mechanisms such as the air temperature, the sea levels, and the natural fires (Hulme 2009). These differences in identity of nature cause miscommunication when regarding the mechanisms of nature. An abnormally hot climate can manifest as global warming to one culture, while to another it manifests as an angry god and requires a completely different solution. Without the ability to agree on the intentions of nature’s natural phenomena, cultures cannot approach environmental issues in the same way.
My first lesson included an additional cultural barrier. Even if cultures could agree on the significance of nature, they’d encounter another cultural barrier when measuring the risk of specific issues. The construction of risk assessment is a cultural development that comes from historical context. The historical differences of cultures provide different context for the perception of risk. Without the continuity of risk as a measurement, cultures cannot effectively communicate about how dangerous they perceive these environmental issues (Hulme 2009). This issue causes an inability for cultures to agree on what issues are priorities and results in a lack of metric to evaluate environmental risk with.
Not only do cultural barriers exist when implementing environmental policy, but intellectual barriers exist as well, which leads to my second lesson: Scientists across the world struggle to successfully inform the public and the policy makers of the complexity surrounding the issues that they attempt to solve.It is essential for the public to understand the scientific results in order to reliably support the policy makers. There are several methods in which scientists can inform the public. Scientists expose their information to the public in two basic ways; they either communicate their results in a single flow of information to the public or they allow for a two way dialog. This means that the public can either be informed of complex scientific issues without the ability to communicate back with the scientists, or there can be an open conversation (a two way flow of information) to allow for context and explanation to occur between the scientists and the public. The single directional model is titled the deficit model, while the two way model is titled the dialogic model.The one way flow of information in the deficit model gives the public a single chance to understand the material. The public can misunderstand or misinterpret the information as a result of the complicated issues and language presented by the scientific community. A new model under the same category has been introduced in some contexts to solve the misinterpretation that results from a lack of context. This new model is titled the framing model, which accounts for a diversity of public audiences to allow for better context and framing of environmental issues. However, this model still implements a one way flow of information. As a critique to the lack of conversation, the dialogic model allows for a two way exchange of information and explanation (Hulme 2009). In any case scientists hold the most understanding of the issues at hand, but are not qualified to implement change. This causes the need to relay the information to another community, resulting in an intellectual game of telephone. Policies will never encompass the entire details of complex environmental issues as long as these models persist.
In my final lesson, I learned that with the concept of borders in the way, our world will never be able to work as one entity to conquer an issue that involves the entire human race.
Our world is composed of beautiful environmental variation. From the peaks of mountains to the grasslands and rainforests, there is much in this world to observe and cherish. These environments, while created for all of life on earth, only belong to specific groups and categories of people under a fictional concept vainly created by man: Borders. These borders designate that certain geological constructs (and all products of) belong to the country in which they reside. To the same logic, all issues concerning these geological sites are the responsibility of that same country. However, the effects of these issues are not simply contained to only the geological cite that they come from. The effects can be detrimental to the entire world’s ecosystem by adding to the carbon and waste pools of the entire ecosystem. Therefore, each country’s waste products are not simply that country’s responsibility. Every country is responsible for the wellbeing of our world, and it takes 100% effort from every country to allow for these problems to be resolved.
The final lesson I learned in ENVS is that some countries simply do not have the resources to care about environmental issues. In fact, most countries are too concerned with internal issues to even have a radar for issues that affect the entire globe. The human development index (HDI) of countries is a great illustrator of countries priorities. The variation of countries abilities to apply their resources economically to focus on environmental policy causes the inability of 100% devotion to environmental issues. Many countries don’t have the luxury of being able to focus their efforts on this issue as first world countries do. They are preoccupied with internal issues such as hunger, education, and sanitation. To raise GDP, these countries would have to use counterintuitive tactics. The goal of raising GDP would be to allow these lower developed countries to have less internal conflicts to solve. This would allow these nations to focus their efforts and economy on environmental issues. Unfortunately, ways of increasing GDP for the intention of environmental wellness are entirely counterproductive. The mechanisms involved include tourism, or multinational help, which requires travel. Planes are the number one source of carbon in the atmosphere and are severely damaging to the ozone layer. Air travel contributes to the environmental crisis, and is therefore detrimental to the very issues that these plane rides indirectly aim to remedy (Hulme 2009).
Environmental issues exist without the categorization of countries. These issues (like greenhouse gasses, ocean surface temp or CO2 levels) are products of every citizen of the world. If the world was able to successfully break the barrier of cultural difference, entirely new issues would lay in the path of success. The scientific findings would have to be properly relayed to the public without misinterpretation or disagreement. Lastly, the policy makers would have to be able to convince the entire world to contribute to the solution, which is impossible with so much developmental variance among countries. Environmental issues exist without the categorization of countries and states, and therefore so does the solution.
Citations
Hulme, Mike. 2009. Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.