Stewardship: It's our responsibility.

I think that people resist taking responsibility for our environment because they have no hope for a good outcome. The trends of the last few hundred years indicate that we will fill up the landscape with buildings and roads and parking lots and landfills, we will use up all the clean water and we will dump our trash and our pollution pretty much anywhere rich people don’t have to see it.

If we take just a minute to think about reversing these trends, we are immediately faced with what seems to be an insolvable dilemma. Consider the Chesapeake Bay, which is choking to death in our waste, for example. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t want the Bay to be clean and beautiful with lots of fish and crabs and birds around. But start talking about turning things around and the conversation tapers off as we start to realize that’s it is our houses and roads and toilets and farms that are filling it with nitrogen and sediment and death.

It seems like we can’t have a good place to live without destroying it.

But we have to figure out how, don’t you think? To do that, we have to start with the rock hard principle that we need a healthy environment and a healthy economy. Anyone who wants one without the other isn’t in the real world.