Back to nature

This weekend, I went to a camping party. Escaping from the revelry for a little while, I found a quiet place, listened to the sounds of the woods around me, stared up at a night sky packed full of brilliant stars and marveled at the wonders of nature.\nThen, rather than try sleep on the cold, hard ground, I went home and had a wonderful night’s rest on the soft bed in my climate-controlled apartment. \nNow, not to disparage anyone’s love of the great outdoors, but this got me thinking about how, as a human, I’m grateful for our ancestors’ efforts toward insulating us from the elements. Over thousands of years, we’ve moved from caves and trees to secure, comfortable dwellings; we’ve gone from hunting and gathering to establishing a reliable and plentiful food supply; we’ve clobbered our predators and we’ve significantly extended our life spans. Not that it has been an unblemished record of success (and I’m sure some enterprising reader will see fit to detail the low points for us), nor has it been uniform (there are, after all, a lot of people without the blessings that we take for granted) – but I certainly wouldn’t exchange my lifestyle for that of a person 100 years ago, much less 1,000 or 10,000 years ago.\nAll this is at the center of a debate that has been swirling in environmental circles since 2004, when Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger published an essay titled “The Death of Environmentalism.” Now, the debate is rolling again, with the recent publication of their book “Break Through: From The Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility.” Nordhaus and Shellenberger have criticized much of the environmental movement’s approach to global warming, saying that it has focused on humans as an alien bane against nature which must be constrained through lower living standards to prevent an apocalypse. Instead, they argue that humanity is just another part of nature, which reacts to the environment in the same way as any other species, by adapting to it or manipulating it for our benefit.\nThus, global warming is still a problem – threatening to change the environment in ways hostile to our survival – but the solution comes in harnessing our ability to innovate and change conditions, rather than turning the clock back to a less favorable lifestyle that emitted less carbon dioxide. To this effect, they have recommended a moon-race-style program of government investment to spur markets to develop lower-emission, more efficient technology, rather than regulations to limit energy consumption.\nWhile I’m sure Nordhaus, Shellenberger and myself would find plenty to argue over – but, as I sit in my well-lit, 72-degree habitat with my coffee imported from some distant place, staring at the electric-powered device that brings me information on any topic from every far corner of the world, I must say I’m inclined toward their approach.