The common sense thing to do

The New York Times has a interview of Barry Commoner today.

First off the man is 90 and  able, still living an independent life. Maybe I’m a little traditional, but I can’t help but respect people who’ve been around that long and seen so much. Not to mention having lived through most of the 20th century as an able bodied and involved thinker.

Commoner is worth mentioning because he was a big part of the movement to bring politics in touch with the environment. He published a pretty seminal book in the 1970’s called The Closing Circle which highlighted the importance of thinking of our environment as a complete cycle in which our every action had a reciprocal reaction/effect. He initiated the concept of ecological economics — the idea that there is no free lunch with our relationship with nature, that what we do has a cost somewhere in the cycle that we too belong to. Without his ideas I don’t think there would have been the MIT “Limits to Growth” ideas or, more importantly, the now commonly held and believed notion that the environment, our planet, isn’t finite.

I recommend reading the interview not because you’ll get a feel for these ideas — you wont, in fact I don’t think it will make sense to a lot of people who aren’t familiar with his concepts — but because its an insight into how to live a more conscientous life. As he puts it he’s not an “eco-freak”. I would agree with him that people who live lives that are so off-the-grid or whose identity is so bound up in their ability to prove they don’t harm the environment don’t bring, or bring very little, that is constructive to the table to solve the world’s environmental problems. Its a brand of self-righteousness that I find particularly unappealing.

Commoner’s philosophy is simple and direct : we should prevent problems before they arise because once they happen its much harder, if not impossible to fix them.

The problem is I don’t know if I agree with his take on how to prevent problems. An interesting comment he makes is on the use of DDT to stop malaria in Africa — he’s against it and believes that economic aid is a more usefull tool and better for the environment. Sure, theoretically, but economic aid wont act as quickly as DDT, and if the use of this pesticide saves the lives of people who will go on and become productive members of society than it becomes part of a bigger solution.