Triage is a messy business. You choose who to salvage and who to let go. So leave your rose-colored glasses at home. Decisions must be made. Some will lose the one thing you can never retrieve …life itself. Sometimes those decisions haunt the deciders. But when you’re in the thick of it, reality punches you in the face. You can’t pretend that everything is possible.
The question of what to save is front and center again as the Trump administration opted out of saving 26 species, some of which are threatened by climate change. Most of us are outraged. We know that the decision wasn’t based on science. Stepping back from the political fire that issues like this fuel, maybe we need to ask some other questions about the concept of wholesale species protection. I know, I’m treading into sacred territory, but suspend judgement for a moment, and read on.
We’ve entered the Age of the Anthropocene, a time when human dominance over nature has altered the course of life on the planet in profound ways. The war to mitigate the impact of the Antropocene has a simple but daunting goal — prevent catastrophic Climate Change and mass extinction. Like all wars, it will be fought on multiple fronts and will yield a lot of casualties. To win we will need resources, savvy fighters, and a strategy. Maybe most importantly, we will need the courage to challenge our assumptions about the role environmentalists should play as well our beliefs about what or who to save and how to save it.
Those of us who identify as “environmentalists” are poised to become a part of humanity’s battlefield triage staff. Most of us are unprepared. Environmental leaders, from the grassroots to national standing, are in the throes of self-examination as we face demographic changes in our membership, a decrease in environmental activism among youth, and a shift in media emphasis from traditional environmental concerns to worries about the impact of climate change. In 2010 Grist identified the emergence of a new kind of eco-warrior: the Climate Hawk. Hawks, reluctant to adopt the environmentalist label, have a pure agenda: combat climate change with any means necessary, including civil disobedience. They reject focusing on the usual environmental campaigns — like saving whales and polar bears or lobbying to protect wilderness. They wanted to save humanity. Period.
As often happens during transitions, some Hawks, looking for a comfy place to roost, eventually find their way into traditional groups like the Sierra Club. They embrace some of the concerns of the old-fashioned environmentalist but are most energized by combatting the threat of Climate Change. And being a feisty sort, they have converted some of the old guard into Climate Hawks too.
It’s 2017 and the folks who’ve dedicated their lives to preserving wilderness and species of all kinds (let’s call them the Conservationists), sit cheek to jowl with those Hawks, making decisions on messaging, campaign strategies, and resource allocation. Climate Change increasingly dominates the environmental agenda though the groups known collectively as Big Green (Sierra Club, NRDC, the Wilderness Society and others) continue to simultaneously pursue traditional initiatives (i.e. wetland conservation, wilderness preservation, species protection). As we debate what it means to embrace an agenda that combats the looming existential threat of climate disruption, an uncomfortable question arises: How do we do it all? Or from those who are even more heretical: Should we even try to do it all?
