Missed Opportunities

The problem, simply put, is people.  The problem is always people, at least where environmental issues are concerned.  One way or another, at the root of the problem you always find a person or a community or an entire culture that’s doing something damaging, whether they know it or not.  And so, it’s easy for an environmentalist to start to think of  humanity itself as the enemy, or at least every member who doesn’t seem to share our concerns.  But this kind of thinking is a slippery slope, and ultimately counterproductive.  While it’s true that people are the ones causing the problems, people can also be the solution.  After all, every environmentalist out there, at some point, made the decision to start changing their own behaviors because of their concerns for the effects they were having.  People don’t often change their ways, and they don’t do it easily.  That’s why it’s our job, as the ones striving to solve these problems, to make it easy for them to go along with what we’re doing, even if they don’t agree with us or even understand what we’re doing.  Unfortunately, environmentalists already have a tough job.  We tackle tasks that seem insurmountable, or that may already be a lost cause.  But it’s our responsibility, as the ones seeking change, to see to it that other people are not treated as the enemy.  We have to take those people who are causing problems, and turn them into part of the solution.  We have to make the transition from the status quo to a green culture easy and painless, if not actually appealing, for those who don’t share our views.  It may be tempting to just dismiss other people as the enemy, and it’s certainly easier.  But that kind of thinking leads to confrontations and animosity.  Treat someone like they’re the enemy, and they’ll respond in kind.  A battle of cultures and values is exactly what we do not want to have to fight.  We’ve got enough trouble as it is.  In the long run (which is, after all, what environmentalism is concerned with), the best, and sometimes only, solutions will involve reaching out to people on the other side of the table and helping them as best we can to make things easy for them, to make sure they don’t suffer as a result of solving these problems.  If we treat people with respect and compassion, rather than making a confrontation out of it, we may well find that some, at least, are more than willing to be flexible in order to help us achieve our goals.

This is a lesson that came to me via direct observation of an environmental battle going on nearby while I was in college.  There was a copper mine in a neighboring community that was nearing the end of its useful days.  It was, in fact, about the only mine left in an area that once had experienced a sort of copper rush akin to the gold rush days.  The owners had proposed a way to extend the life of the mine, however.  They planned to turn the conventional mine into a solution mine, pumping huge quantities of sulfuric acid into the remaining deposits that had too low of a copper concentration to be worth digging out.  The acid would then be pumped back out and the dissolved copper would be reclaimed.  It’s a proven mining technique for certain situations, and it has the added benefit of requiring minimal surface disturbance, as opposed to the ugly scars many other mines leave behind.  However, not everyone thought this was a great idea.

Many people in the surrounding communities had concerns over this new process.  The primary concern was that it wasn’t clear if the acid solution would be contained to the ore deposits, or if some of it would make its way into the water table and eventually contaminate the surrounding lakes and rivers.  This wasn’t just an environmental concern, as fishing and other outdoor recreation was an important part of the local economy.  The quantities of acid that would be involved were large enough that if even a small percentage leaked into the ground water, it could potentially have consequences to the surrounding ecosystems.  The mine, of course, insisted that this wasn’t going to happen, but the issue was never settled to anyone’s satisfaction.  In fact, I doubt that anybody really knew for sure how big of a risk this would be, if any.  That doubt was enough, for me, to oppose the mine, though I was busy with school and college life and never got directly involved.  Many others did, however, both from the college and from the community at large.  People protested, and some went so far as to blockade shipments of acid to the mine once the project actually started.  Eventually the EPA took notice of all the fuss and got their hands in the mix, complicating matters greatly for the mine.

This went on for some time, mostly in the background as far as I was concerned.  Then one day there was a flurry of excited students running around the campus, cheering and talking excitedly.  The owners of the mine had decided that the delays caused by the controversy and by the EPA’s involvement had caused the project to no longer be profitable.  They were closing down the mine for good, and would start reclamation work on the site.   The environmental community declared a victory.  We had won, it seemed.

While I was certainly glad to hear that this questionable mining method had been halted and the surrounding wilderness would be protected from any further pollution from the mine, something about the way people were describing the outcome bothered me.  “We won!” they cried.  If “we” had won, then who had lost?  It came to me very quickly then.  The miners lost, and big time.  I asked around, trying to find out what had been done to secure new jobs for the miners, what had been done to give these people an alternative to what they had come to rely on, and I came up with nothing.  Nobody, including the mine owners as far as I could tell, had been thinking about the miners or their community.  The mine had been one of the few sources of employment in what was otherwise a sparsely populated and economically depressed area.  Every common, average joe who had been counting on the mine to help support themselves and their families had just lost their livelihood.  Businesses in the town itself would likely suffer as well, without money from the miners to help support them.  Environmentalists had won, but other people, specific individuals who themselves had not intended any harm, had lost.

That’s not to say that I changed my mind about the mine.  I still think it should have been closed down.  The risks were unclear, and the potential for harm was significant.  It wasn’t worth jeopardizing the watershed, not without a lot more information and some solid plans for how to deal with any problems, and it just wasn’t feasible for the mine or anybody else to spend money on researching those issues.  However, there was more to that situation than just groundwater pollution from the mine, and we, as environmentalists, failed to address these other problems.  I don’t for one second buy the argument that economics should ever trump environmental concerns, but there’s also no doubting that economic needs are involved with these issues, and it’s something that seems all too easy to forget.  The economic situation of those mining families was put under great stress by our “victory”, and it was therefore our responsibility to make amends.  It was up to us to see to it that they had somewhere else to turn to to support themselves, to help them find a way of making a living that wasn’t at odds with environmentalist values, and we not only failed, we never even considered the problem.  Those people were on their own, in a tough situation, and the people who helped put them there didn’t seem to care one bit.  There probably was no easy way to help those people, but we should have tried.  We should have at least made an effort, we should have shown the community that they weren’t the enemy, that they were victims in this as much as the local environment had been, and that we wanted to help them out as much as we wanted to help preserve the watershed.  It was our responsibility to put forth the effort, regardless of how much good it really did.  We prevented one big mess, only to create many smaller messes, and we called that a victory and then walked away from it.

Aside from the moral, ethical concerns of leaving the miners to find their own way after causing them to lose their jobs, there were likely some more practical repercussions as well.  While it’s entirely unclear how much of a role the environmental activists really had in getting the mine shut down, and how much of it would have happened regardless of what we did, we nonetheless had been a very vocal and visible presence throughout the whole process.  The environmental community had proudly proclaimed themselves to be enemies of the mine, and proceeded to fight their battle.  I doubt that anybody ever thought of the miners as the enemy, since nobody seemed to consider them at all.  The mine itself was the enemy, and the owners by extension.  Looking at it from the other side, though, it seems likely that the miners did see us as the enemy.  We were the visible component of the forces opposing the mine.  The EPA may have ultimately been the real force behind it, but that’s an abstract entity, something distant and diffuse.  The local environmentalists, the hippies, the tree-huggers, and other names I won’t mention here, were the face of the opposition.  We were the ones who could easily be singled out as causing problems for the miners, and from their point of view, we were fighting them personally, attacking their livelihoods.  That wasn’t our intent, but that doesn’t matter.  How many of those people, who before may have been utterly indifferent to environmental causes, came to view environmentalists as the enemy?  How many of them hate us now for what they feel we did to them?  And having established that we were their enemy, how many other environmental issues have they decided to oppose, simply because of their perception of us?  We may have won the fight over the mine, but in the long run, given the animosity it created, it’s possible that we did more harm than good, both in regards to those specific people, and to our own cause.

We missed an opportunity, and a great one at that.  We could have taken these people and, rather than make enemies of them, turned them into allies.  Imagine what the reaction would have been if we, the crazy, long-haired hippies, had shown more concern for the well-being of the miners than the mine owners did.  We could have stepped in and helped them find other work, maybe even better work.  We could have tried to actually create new jobs in the community for them.  We could have raised money to help them relocate if needed.  We could have at least shown that we cared, that we were concerned, and that we bore them no ill will.  If we had done that, if we had gone out of our way to befriend these people, without even trying to convince them of the need for environmental action, they would have come out of that situation with a much different view of us and our movement.  They would have seen us as decent folks, rather than the enemy.  They may have still thought we were crazy, but they wouldn’t hate us.  They may not have agreed with our goals, but they couldn’t oppose our methods.  If we had made ourselves advocates of the miners as well as the environment, we would have had the battle halfway won.  We could have not only put even more pressure on the mining company, we could have also won the support, or at least reduced the opposition, of a group of people who otherwise may never have even considered our point of view.  Maybe, just maybe, one of them would even start to pay more attention to environmentalism, to become concerned in a way that they otherwise wouldn’t have, because they never thought about it, or because they thought they were on the other side of the battle lines.

I never took part in any of the demonstrations.  I never held a protest sign, and I certainly never helped to block the rail lines supplying the mine.  I had too many other things on my mind, and there were plenty of other people willing to do those things.  But I supported the cause, if quietly, and now I feel that I, too, share the blame in the aftermath.  After all, I did as little to help the miners as the ones who were out there, chanting and parading.  It’s likely that many of those people who lost their jobs had seen trouble coming as soon as the conventional production of the mine started to wind down.  It’s possible that they’d been looking for other solutions to their economic needs anyway.  It may not have been quite as dramatic as I’m presenting it.  But that doesn’t really matter.  The opportunity to extend our hand to them was still there, and the responsibility to make sure that they were taken care of still fell on our shoulders.  However, that would have been a lot of work.  It would have, in fact, been much harder than simply protesting the mine and causing trouble for them.  It would have been harder mentally, as well.  Environmentalists are, after all, just people, and people have a tendency, sometimes even a need, to see things in black and white.   Dismissing the mining community, or even hating them, was much easier than trying to see them as fellow humans in need of aid, or as potential friends and allies.  And so we ranted, and raved, and stirred up trouble, and took no responsibility for the results, because it was so much easier that way.  But we shot ourselves in the foot.  We needlessly made enemies for ourselves and our movement, when we’ve already got more obstacles than we know how to deal with.  We came off as thoughtless, angry, and arrogant misanthropes.  We should have been caring, and thoughtful, and eager to help those we were inadvertently affecting.  We took the easy path, but not the best one.

That’s not the way forward for our movement.  That’s a struggle, a battle, and one that we don’t need on top of everything else we face.  In the long run, we probably did more harm than good in working to stop that mine.  The safety of the watershed was ensured, at least for the time being, but how many people came out of that situation with a mind that was closed to our point of view?  How many people went on to oppose everything we stand for?  How many have since voted for politicians who clearly intended to act counter to our goals?  Worst of all, how many people suffered directly because we put them out of work?  That last one could at least be answered definitively, but nobody cared enough to follow up and find out, so I can’t answer even that question.

We need to do better.  We need to BE better.  Better people, better neighbors.  Showing outrage over environmental injustice isn’t enough.  We also need to be concerned with social injustices, and we need to be aware that our actions may create new injustices, which we are then responsible for.  We like to think of ourselves as enlightened, for seeing problems that others don’t acknowledge, but enlightened people don’t scorn other people just for being in a bad situation, for taking what work comes their way, or for just failing to see everything the same way.  Enlightened people embrace all other people, despite their flaws, despite what trouble they may have made for our causes.   Most of us probably didn’t get involved in environmentalism because of our concern for our fellow man, or because we liked helping other people.  I suspect many of us are probably anti-social by nature, introverts and socially awkward.  I certainly am.  Well, tough luck.  It’s impossible to untangle the social issues from the environmental ones, and if we want to face the one, we must be prepared to deal with the other.  We can’t decide that we’re going to help the environment, but not our fellow man, just because that’s easier, because that’s what we’re comfortable with.  When we get involved, at all, in any way, we take on the responsibility to look after those affected by the issues we’re concerned with.  When we fail to do that, we do everyone a disservice.  In the end, it’s also self defeating.  Our biggest challenge, and our clearest path to success, is to win over hearts and minds.  It’s all about people, not only because they are the cause of the problems, but also because they will be the solution.   We need to be ambassadors and diplomats, not just soldiers.  We need to show compassion, respect, and consideration for not just those we oppose directly, but also those whose lives we inadvertently change.  If we can do that, we’ll find that some people, if not most, are willing to return the favor.  We’ll find others willing to take us seriously and treat us with respect, and the path forward will be so much easier.