Want to Save the World? Get Out of the Way!

I’m going to call this post “politics,” but it’s really just a chance to laugh at myself. I’ve been frowning and chuckling at myself alternately since I read this article in the New York Times. I finally decided that chuckling was better.

The good people of Salina, Kansas don’t believe in global warming. This puts local environmentalists is the dilemma of the hellfire and brimstone evangelist preaching to a crowd that doesn’t believe in hell. My first great enemy is my frustration. I am aghast that they are unmoved by the nearly complete consensus among scientists. The logic by which they substantiate their beliefs makes me more angry than sad, since it draws on my own religious tradition. Here are some samples from the article.

Only 48 percent of people in the Midwest agree with the statement that there is“solid evidence that the average temperature on earth has been getting
warmer,”a poll conducted in the fall of 2009 by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press showed— far fewer than in other regions of the country. The Jacksons already knew firsthand that such skepticism was not just broad, but also deep. Like opposition to abortion or affirmations of religious faith, they felt, it was becoming a cultural marker that helped some Kansans define themselves.

We see here that less than half the people in the Midwest—land of my birth—believe that temperatures are getting warmer. Intellectually, that’s discouraging. Further, they seem to take it as a way of defining themselves, so to believe otherwise runs the risk of being called up before the Un-Kansas Activities Committee. Neither of those is the difficulty confronting me. The difficulty confronting me is to get past questions of environmental logic and find a political logic. Why is it so hard?

It wasn’t hard for Nancy Jackson. Here’s the way the conversation went at dinner one night.

Wes Jackson: How can these farmers, who will suffer from
climate change, be unwilling to take steps to avoid it?

Nancy Jackson (daughter in law): Why does it have to be
about climate change? Why not identify issues that motivate them instead of
getting stuck on something that does not?

Now there’s a thought, right? Identify issues that actually did motivate them rather than the ones you think should motivate them. And are there such issues? Sure. There was a lot of enthusiasm for other values: thrift, patriotism, spiritual conviction and economic prosperity.
Those sound pretty good to me. We can change our use of energy and our source of energy so that it costs less, so that it serves the values and needs of our country, it reduces damage to the earth—which after all is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof—and it makes us all better off economically.

Does anyone see a lack of motivation there? These aren’t apathetic people. They want to leave the land better off than they found it. That’s as much a self-definition in Salinas as cultural conservatism. It seems to me that if you take those values and build a program that is consistent with them, you can have a very successful program. It was successful, as the Times article notes, reducing the use of energy by 5% where the standard for success has been 1.5%.

But the cost is high. At least it is high for people like Wes Jackson and me. You have to be willing to put down a tool that doesn’t work and pick up a tool that does work. That’s not cheap. You have to get past despising the views of these people and past being angry at how willfully ignorant they are. That’s not cheap either. How do I know I’m educated if I can’t make fun of people who don’t rely on the people I think are reliable, in this case, the climate scientists?

But if I really want to results these amazing Kansans achieved, my first job is to get past the motives I think they ought to have and let go my embarrassment—to get myself out of the way entirely—and do the things that work.