Feeling Green

In his recent NY Times Magazine editorial “The Power of Green”, Thomas Friedman said that green is starting to window shop on Main Street. Change is coming, but not quickly enough. His solution: Green Pragmatism. “I am not proposing”, he wrote, “that we radically alter our lifestyles.” Instead, he proposed a government-initiated carbon tax to push the market in a green direction. Friedman claims that green needs to take Main St by storm, but his solutions walk down Wall Street. He sees a dismal future unless carbon-free technologies hit the China price, meaning the price at which China can produce or purchase them. He is correct in some ways, but we should not shackle ourselves to economic determinism. Rarely has the US fundamentally changed without a shift in philosophy. Before we as individuals surrender green to Wall St, we may need to change ourselves.

Americans see stealing as wrong. We value each others’ hard-earned livelihoods and choose not to jeopardize others’ futures for our short-term gain. Yet too many Americans buy gas-guzzling cars and oversized houses that need excessive heating and cooling. We won’t steal from a neighbor, but what of our children? With every pound of CO₂, we destabilize an already uncertain future. We do not need simply new technologies and new consumption patterns – we need Green Ethics.

Aldo Leopold, forefather of American conservation, drew the foundations of a green ethic. “A thing is right,” he wrote, “when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” Adoption of his thinking would obviate Green Pragmatism altogether. Yet his message has lain dormant for sixty years, because only now are we seeing the consequences of fossil fuel addiction. Green is emerging, but we can no longer wait for generational change. Luckily, expanded fossil fuel use is not the only change since Leopold’s day. Green can walk down Main St and Wall St, but it can fly down iStreet. The Green Ethic, which a few million Americans have read in print, can double its readership in a week as it flashes across our desktops. We now possess both the motivation and the means to go green. Green pragmatism claims that our future depends on today’s and tomorrow’s technology. Our ethics may as well.

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