Living Greener: Too many view the environment in the abstract

THESE days, every billboard and Hollywood blockbuster urges us to “save the environment,” something I’m all in favour of, since the environment is where I keep all my stuff, and I’m rather attached to it.

Too often, though, they portray “the environment” as a distant abstraction to be preserved like a museum piece. Too rarely do they mean it literally; it’s the trees and weeds and insects around where we live, and how many of those could most people notice or name?

How many people would notice if, one day, they weren’t there anymore?

This isn’t just a thought experiment. Lizzie Jones at the University of London tested this by asking people to estimate the populations of various bird species and comparing them to the real populations.

Then it got interesting – she asked the subjects, who ranged from their 20s to their 80s, to estimate what the population used to be when they were teenagers. Since the younger you are, the fewer years have passed, you’d think the youngest participants would have the best estimates.

In fact, the opposite was true – perhaps because older people used to know the natural world better than we do today, or perhaps because they could see more of a change in their longer lifetimes.

Daniel Pauly at the University of British Columbia called this “shifting baseline syndrome,” where everyone thinks of the “normal” baseline as whatever they grew up with; he cites photos of fishermen in Florida over decades, who posed equally proudly with ever-shrinking catches.

I know many young people who get fired up about the abstract “environment” of their slogans, but most, I suspect, don’t understand what they’re fighting for, as they have no idea what has been lost.

To take another example of this, if you asked a group of schoolboys or office workers to navigate by starlight, many would have no idea that such a thing ever existed.

We depend entirely on GPS signals from orbiting satellites to get anywhere, and when those satellites bang into an orbiting piece of gravel, are hacked by a hostile power, or simply degrade, we will have no backup.

Until a century or so ago, however, that was how everyone navigated, from Polynesian explorers to the Mayflower. It was how many ordinary people found their way across countryside at night, whether Bedouins over deserts or Boy Scouts through the state park.

The stars figure powerfully in every religion and mythology ever created and they embodied the lore that bound communities together.

A desire to understand the stars better pushed early civilisations to create the first mathematics and steps toward science. And all these observations were made with no telescopes or equipment.

Every year brings more sophisticated computer-generated imagery from space, but as with all things scientific, they have grown hopelessly distant from ordinary humans. In his article ‘Sky Readers’ in Aeon magazine, physics professor Gene Tracy recalled attending a lecture on an X-ray source in a distant galaxy measured by equipment on a suborbital rocket.

When a student asked where in the sky the galaxy was, the lecturer was flummoxed. He genuinely didn’t know; he had never thought to look up where you would step out of the lecture hall and point to it.

Even if modern city-dwellers wanted to study the constellations, most can’t see them because of the urban glare. 

Tracy wrote that in 1994, after an earthquake cut power to most of Los Angeles, the Griffith Observatory received phone calls from spooked residents asking about “the strange sky.” What those callers were seeing were stars, perhaps for the first time.

Then again, we could say the same about many things. Most people today don’t believe me when I say that Irish children roamed miles from home safely, or organised games without supervision, or kept alive traditions centuries old, or that ordinary workmen once read Plutarch and Thucydides, or continued to thrive for months when banks were on strike.

Modern people don’t feel the aching loss that they should, because they never heard of such things, and have trouble believing they existed.

They would more easily believe in a lost civilisation of Atlantis or a vast conspiracy of lizard-people than look up the actual lost civilisation whose ruins are all around us, which their grandparents inhabited, and whose books are readily available in the library.