What a Way to Treat Your Mother:
Women and the State of the Planet

Julia Langer

Space photos have recorded easily observable and rapidly changing conditions on earth in the past few years - the Amazon rainforest and Lake Chad are dwindling, while over Los Angeles and Moscow great umbrellas of polluted air grow ever larger.

The 40 women who participated in this workshop described these changes as, among other things, irresponsible, short-sighted and unimaginative. Many expressed feelings of confusion, apathy and powerlessness. One woman said,
“I find I am afraid on two levels - first, for what we are doing to the earth, and second, in response to the ridicule and hostility I face when I keep trying to make environmental action part of the school where I teach. I am called a fanatic!”

Julia Langer underlined the importance of creating opportunities to learn from one another and to be supportive of these types of individual struggles. She suggested that we begin to harness our “free-floating” concerns about the environment, by becoming more knowledgeable about the actual problems and their causes, as well as potential solutions and preventive measures.

Among the most critical problems facing planet earth are global warming, toxic substances, population growth, and soil erosion. Julia suggests that global warming, which sounds almost cozy, particularly in Canada, should more appropriately be called climatic catastrophe. The scale of this problem subsumes all others. In Canada, for example, the carbon dioxide generated per capita is the second highest in the world. We need to reduce our use of fossil fuels, take into account the real long-range costs of our energy consumption, and make energy efficiency the overriding objective in the design of everything from household appliances to public transit.

Impending climatic catastrophe is compounded by toxic substances that pervade our environment and threaten one third of our population with cancer, by population growth, and by the continuing erosion of irreplaceable topsoil. For example, the spiralling relationship between ozone depletion and increasing carbon dioxide levels is based, in part, on the function of the world's oceans. The plant life in the upper layer of the ocean is a major absorbing sink for carbon dioxide, but the loss of the ozone layer will decrease the growth of these plants, leading to a further increase in the level of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere.

To envision sustainable solutions to these problems, the group defined some key changes that will be needed in terms of research, attitudes, and the roles of business and government. For example, there should be more incentive for researchers to look at alternative social and technological solutions to current environmental problems. We must realize that there is no such thing as a quick fix, and start looking at long-term strategies. Business must be involved, not just as environmental marketers of a new consumerism, but as effective economic analysts. Government too, must expand its legislative and regulatory role, for example, by creating a carbon tax which more accurately reflects the true environmental cost of pollution and resource depletion.

Employing this new long-term perspective, some decisive and achievable goals were outlined for the next 30 to 40 years:

* the development of economic and technological systems that are not dependent on fossil fuels:
* a lid of eight billion on the world's population:
* a world agricultural system that, among other things, reforests marginal lands currently being converted to farming:
* a reversal of the trend towards increasing urbanization:
* a world free of the pervasive contamination of toxic substances: and
* a world which values and protects our supply of fresh water.

Finally, we must take care to transform the world in a way that addresses social problems of poverty and inequality at the same time as we devise economic measures to reflect accurately the environmental costs of development. We must find creative ways to convert obsolete industries, such as auto and weapons manufacturers, into needed technologies and programs. We will be helped and encouraged along the way by our successes. For example, reforestation will both save the soil and decrease the level of carbon dioxide in the air. Our tasks must be both concrete as in tree planting, and imaginative, as when we envision the world we would like to create.

For a free booklet on Women & the Environment, billed as “a feminist perspective on the environment as a women's issue” and containing practical tips for the “Green Consumer”, write The Ontario Advisory Council on Women's Issues, 880 Bay St., 5th Floor, Toronto, Ontario M7A 1N3 or call (416) 326-1840. One copy per person, please.

Julia Langer, Executive Director, F.O.E. Canada
From Women & Environments, Winter/Spring 1991

(CX5098)

 

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