Dear HCN,
Once a talented surgical
team ready to save the world, the environmental movement has
devolved into a school nurse dispensing sterile advice and used
band-aids.
Warning that “time is short,” editor
Paul Larmer’s plea for the West as “an island besieged” (HCN,
1/21/02: The American West is an island besieged) presents a brief
shopping list in search of “a few more victories.” Gone are the
days when visionaries understood that environmental impact is the
total of three multipliers: population, technology and consumption.
Now every technological breakthrough in efficiency and waste
reduction is instantly cancelled by an avalanche of population.
Today’s Sierra Club calls for higher density development that
further removes people from nature while rejecting the obvious:
that population increase in the U.S. is due solely to the
demographics of immigration, which at current rates, according to
the Census Bureau, could double the nation’s population in just 50
years.
A perfect snapshot of band-aid
environmentalism can be seen a few pages away from Larmer’s
entreaty in “A neighborhood for Aspen’s ‘middle’ class.” There a
wealthy ski-town land developer finances a Worldwatch Institute
conference and turns a 22-acre plot into a “North Forty”
subdivision whose residents are itemized as two architects, a
property manager and a builder. Stand back, death and taxes, the
developer tells us that “growth is inevitable.”
John Walker
Coaldale,
Colorado
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Band-aid environmentalism.
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