The article in the url below asks the understandable question “Why Bother?” in relation to tackling the overwhelming issue of climate change. Having watched Al Gore’s documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” the author is underwhelmed—not by the danger at hand, but by Gore’s call to action. Having sketched a vision of a global calamity, Gore then implores the audience to go home and “change a light bulb”:
“That's when it got really depressing. The immense disproportion between the magnitude of the problem Gore had described and the puniness of what he was asking us to do about it was enough to sink your heart.”
Hence the question, “Why Bother?” The author identifies his widespread feelings of ambivalence and powerlessness as rooted in the central role in our economic model of comparative advantage. As a cornerstone of economic theory, comparative advantage enables widespread prosperity through task specialization and economic growth. The author argues, however, that it is this “task specialization” that distances us from broader solutions to societal-wide problems, such as climate change:
“Virtually all of our needs and desires we delegate to specialists of one kind or another -- our meals to agribusiness, health to the doctor, education to the teacher, entertainment to the media, care for the environment to the environmentalist, political action to the politician.”
By being removed from the ability to imagine our own meaningful contribution to radical change, any solution in an area outside our expertise becomes someone else’s problem. Because we each know how to do only one thing well, we are unable to contemplate doing anything beyond that skill. As a result, we are increasingly more likely to rely on someone else (with expertise in the necessary area) to solve the problem for us. Yet, fundamentally, the problem of climate change is one of the aggregate effects of our day-to-day lifestyle decisions:
“… the climate-change crisis is at its very bottom a crisis of lifestyle -- of character, even. The Big Problem is nothing more or less than the sum total of countless little everyday choices, most of them made by us (consumer spending represents 70 percent of our economy), and most of the rest of them made in the name of our needs and desires and preferences.”
Given the scale of the task, the author’s solution, for each of us to make a garden, seems a bit flippant. The article is instructive in its critique of our economic model, however, and its underlying purpose, to reinstate a connection within each of us between cause and effect, is important:
“For Berry, the ''why bother'' question came down to a moral imperative: ''Once our personal connection to what is wrong becomes clear, then we have to choose: we can go on as before, recognizing our dishonesty and living with it the best we can, or we can begin the effort to change the way we think and live.''”
Take care
Dave
Bill Werther & David Chandler
Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility
© Sage Publications, 2006
http://www.sagepub.com/Werther
Why Bother?
By MICHAEL POLLAN
3403 words
20 April 2008
The New York Times
Late Edition - Final
19
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/magazine/20wwln-lede-t.html
