Rules are what make humans the way they are and they are also what make and what have made the world the way it is. Rules have made humans progressive and intelligent but they have also made us restrained and complacent with exploitation and global atrocities which are caused by rules. Formal and informal, rules, as described by Steinberg (2015), author of Who Rules the Earth (2015), are “invisible to our most powerful satellites and microscopes alike” (Steinberg 2015,12), but they shape every aspect of our daily lives, from the way we interact with others to where we walk, drive, and belong. Steinberg (2015) argues on behalf of the rules in a positive way—he contextualizes them in an environmental setting to show that to make a significant environmental change, institutions need to be reformed and environmental elitism is not a viable way to empower the masses because the flow of knowledge is disrupted.
Stubborn politicians and materialistic intellectuals and environmental scientist whose hubris advocates for nothing but exclusion and small scale, individual change deniers are not rulers of the earth in a positive way, and Steinberg (2015) qualifies these arguments in chapters and sections throughout his book. Individual decision making, specifically related to the environment, was something that was frustrating to grapple with once I finished AP Environmental Science my junior year of high school. Being left to develop these thoughts on my own, the only thing I thought about my individual decision making and everyone else who claimed to be green like I did was that it was severely ineffective in the broad scheme of things; driving a Subaru and asking for a plastic cup at a restaurant instead of a styrofoam one was not going to change the spew of unregulated emissions that delivered by car from Japan to the United States. I was hungry to learn about what large-scale changes were happening and which ones need happen.
However, upon reading Who Rules the Earth (2015) and other texts in ENVS 160 and listening to various opinions about the environment and decision making, I have been able to examine an array of ideas to discover that change is possible through large scale change in both policy and perspective such as revising “the rules governing how energy is bought and sold” (Steinberg 2015, 268), or helping U.S. Citizens realize that the “protection of wild spaces became a part of what it means to be American” (Steinberg 2015, 222). A large-scale revision of previous thought and the revision of policy and governance, from Steinberg’s (2015) perspective, is essential in protecting the well-being of both humanity and the natural world which encompasses and nurtures our lives.
Furthermore, a major discrepancy that Steinberg (2015) brings light to is the gap between environmental elitists such as scientists and the consumers or masses of people who have the most impact on the environment. In a section titled “Bridge Research and Action,” Steinberg (2015) states “Unfortunately, the flow of knowledge about the root causes of environmental problems is blocked by a mile-high partition separating the producers from the would-be consumers of research”(Steinberg 2015, 269), which is problematic because this disrupted flow of knowledge does not encourage discussion, rather it promotes an environmental hierarchy which at the end of the day does nothing to progress societal cooperation with the science discovered. In essence, the availability and education of what can be done to promote environmental action and change is severely hindered by an elitist mindset which is riddled with selfishness and closed-mindedness.
Ultimately, environmental change will occur at the roots first, however, a new tree will need to be planted, one where the roots are not to far from the leaves of knowledge. Old rules need to be thrown out, new rules, like seeds, need to be planted and will grow into a lush canopy of knowledge. The roots symbolize the common people; the masses whose carbon footprints are what are diagrammed in environmental studies books world wide, the trunk is the sturdiness of environmental thought and the bridge and connection to the top of the tree, where the leaves represent the new information and ways in which policy can benefit the environment. Steinberg (2015) lays out my idea of a tree in revealing the ways rules shape the environment, the ways in which institutional change is necessary, and how knowledge should be spread evenly.
Steinberg, Paul F. 2015. Who Rules the Earth?: How Social Rules Shape Our Planet and Our Lives. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.