Recently, Treefen asked me in a comment what I mean when I describe myself as a disillusioned environmentalist. Although I’ve thought about the environment a lot, I’m not done thinking about it, so my current position is still full of contradictions. However you asked, so here goes.

My father raised me to be very outdoorsy, and I grew up very much a tree-hugger. I started a neighborhood ecology club at age 9. At age 20, I organized a clean-up day for an abandoned field in my town. The mayor showed up, and there was much rejoicing.

I think the problem with my attitude back then was that I eventually wanted things to be not better, but perfect. I was hoping we’d clean everything up (atmosphere and lithosphere), invent completely green technologies that would maintain the ecosystem in a constantly balanced and self-replenishing state. Eventually, we’d only use energy and resources that are completely sustainable.

Well that’s nice.

But then in university, I started a degree in Ecology, and that’s when it happened. I became keenly aware of exactly how dire the planet’s situation is, and how my idea of ecological perfection could never realistically be. It was like being placed in the total perspective vortex. I realized that even if everyone in the world instantly became enviro-conscious, we could probably only slightly slow the decline.

Now, this is where I come off sounding horrible. The urgency of the situation didn’t increase my motivation, but rather I started thinking that all this time I’d been cleaning up after everyone else, but that nobody cared, or cared enough, for it to make any sort of significant difference. I wasn’t sure I really wanted to spend my life fighting a losing battle, feeling unhappy, desperate, angry, frustrated at everyone else for happily consuming, but eventually wasting my breath.

So I switched programs from Ecology to Biology. And my advisor’s exact words were “Shame on you”.

Am I totally anti-environment? Of course not. But right now I’m just doing the Reduce, Reuse, Recycle thing in my own life, cleaning up after myself, trying to minimize my personal contribution to the problem. But I’m not comfortable with this. It’s not enough.

I’m still trying to find a comfortable position and level of involvement in the matter. I’m wrestling with the fact that the more involved I am, the more frustrated I become with the situation. Being this little involved doesn’t feel right either. So I’m strangely schizophrenic on the issue.

Someone asked me a year ago, if I was stranded on a desert planet with 100 children, and had to help them establish a new society, what would I teach them? Truth first, but then respect for nature, humility towards the animals and plants they eat, the ground they tread.

I wish we could start over.