I consider myself to be an environmentalist, by my own definition.

My definition is simple : I firmly believe that humans beings, at our current level of technology, are powerful enough to completely destroy or ruin the ecological system(s) in which we live, making human life drastically more difficult to sustain and causing civilization as a whole to suffer in terms of quality of life, cultural development, and potentially even rendering the whole globe unsuitable for human life at all.

Believing, as I do, that this is a distinct possibility, then I have no choice but to therefore believe that reasonable measures of law restraining individuals and corporations from doing harm to the very Earth that sustains our lives are quite justified, and no measure of profits, jobs, corporate interest, or individual desire can possibly outweigh the right of the billions of human beings on Earth today, not to mention those yet unborn stretching off into the millennia, to live in a world as least as good as the one we inherited when we were lucky enough to be born.

In short, I am an environmentalist because I am a realist and a humanist. Being a pragmatic realist, I am incapable of accepting any convenient but unrealistic delusion that might let us, as a species, go on thinking that we can do whatever we like to our biosphere and somehow it will have no consequences. That is the thinking of irresponsible children who burn down the family home because they were bored and decided it would be fun to play with matches. It is not how a grownup thinks.

And as a humanist, I care deeply about the fate of humanity and the future our grandchildren will inherit. I want the human race to continue its evolution towards a saner, safer, more just, more enjoyable, more pleasant future and eventually reach outside this home planet to live on other worlds. We can’t do that if we foul our nest before we even have the wings to fly out of it.

So as a humanist environmentalism, I share many of the same goals as mainstream environmentalism, and I have been pleased to see the tenets of environmentalism accepted into mainstream political thinking within my lifetime. Very few people, in this day and age, would remove all environmental legislation and make it legal to dump toxic waste in playgrounds, for instance.

But sadly, the clock is ticking on many environmental issues, and progress towards a sustainable future erratic, half-hearted, and ponderously slow, and we have to start asking ourselves why this is.

Many of the problems are obvious, of course. Powerful vested interests in the corporate industrial word use their vastly superior power and access to legislators and the media to delay, confuse, distract, and prevent having to behave like actual citizens, with responsibilities towards other citizens, not just the privileges.

But I also think that mainstream environmentalism shares some of the blame. Despite the best of intentions and many worthy noble goals, environmentalism is plagued by some attitudes and influences which run counter to the goal of generating the necessary democratic political will to save humanity from its own shortsightedness and stupidity.

Some of them are :

Earth Mother/ Gaia Mysticism. This is a tricky problem to address, because the line between “useful metaphor for discussing the global ecosystem” and “whacked out hippy crazy talk” can be mighty fine sometimes. But in general, going on about Mother Earth, life force, and other Wicca-inspired mystical and poetic talk is simply not going to gain your ideas any traction in mainstream culture. Sure, your fellow greenies will love it, but they are a tiny fraction of the population, and if you truly believe in helping save humanity, you have to leave your cloistered world and talk to people who are not like you at all.

Open and spiteful misanthropy. It is unsurprising that part of the fallout of the realization of the damage we human beings blithely and ignorantly perpetrate upon the very systems which keep us alive is a bitterness and anger towards such a blinkered and shortsighted species. One only has to look at how many of the old-school environmentalists like Doctor David Suzuki have become intensely bitter, angry, and unpleasant people in order to see this effect in action. But misanthropy never sells and it never will. Nobody is going to be led into common cause with their fellow humans beings by a hate filled, bile spewing grump who shrieks and shrills and tells them they are scum for just being human beings. If you truly care about the cause, choke back that bile, put a smile on your face, and make friends with people.

Unrealistic methods. Environmentalists, and left-leaning advocates in general, tend to put a lot of stock in “raising awareness”, and similar concepts. The unspoken assumption is that the only thing between the average citizen and being a greenie just like them is a few pertinent pieces of information, and that somehow, all people who know the right things will come to the right conclusions. And the best way to get that information to the public at large is to do what liberals like to do anyhow, like go to concerts and rallies and protests, and talk to and hang out with and deal with only other greenies, and somehow that will make it all come true, right?

Unrealistic goals. Give up on trying to convince the world to radically change their lifestyle. Yes, it’s possible to change your life and become carbon neutral. All it costs is a lot of money, time, personal upheaval, effort, energy, and willingness to change your whole life. Sure, when you are a twentysomething college student, this seems reasonable and even fun. But most people have lives, problems, bills, kids, jobs, stress, and no room for big changes. Most people are juggling too many balls at once to try to handle changing them all at once. It’s simply not going to happen. You can encourage gradual, easy changes, but those are never going to solve the big problems. The solutions will come from science and government, not pamphlets and blue bins.

Anti-science and anti-techlogy bias. Regardless of whether you believe that science got us into this mess (it did), the truth is that science and technology remain the most effective way to solve any real-world problems, so it is vastly irresponsible to ignore solutions based on science and technology simply because you are angry with them and/or uncomfortable with them. Science and technology got us into this miss, true. But they are also the only things which can get us out again.

Anti-capitalism and anti-business bias. If your world saving plan starts “First, we overthrow capitalism… ” then brother, you are never going to change anything but your Facebook status and you are honestly doing your cause more harm than good. Like it or loathe it, consumer capitalism is the best system we have ever come up with and it is not going anywhere. All you are doing is associating environmentalism with communism in the public mind, and that is pure political death.

Lack of prioritization of goals and/or understanding of the public’s concerns. Most people, when you get down to the nitty gritty of it, don’t care about disappearing species. Tell them the candy striped skunk moth is on the verge of extinction, and they will agree that sounds like a bad thing, but they really don’t see it as a vital issue. Same with disappearing rain forests, the plight of the piping plover, and (in North America and Europe especially) the fate of the world’s drinking water. All of these are problems, but in terms of the future of humanity, they are not as high a priority as, say, ending the global warming trend, and only serve to cement the public’s impression of environmentalism as solely belonging to the freaky hippie greenie types who get all strident about things which don’t matter to people. All environmental arguments need to be put in viserally humanist terms in order to get people to care. This isn’t about some bug they have never heard of. This is about whether their grandchildren will eat.

This is, of course, an incomplete list, and not meant to be exhaustive or fully descriptive. It’s just a place fr me to point out some of the problems that I think face environmentalism due to the lingering aftereffects of having been born (necessarily) out of far-left liberal sources who lack the ability to understand and connect with the middle class mainstream of society.

If we are serious about saving the world, we have to meet people in the middle, not just yell at them from the comfort of the sidelines.