What is "The Environment?"

Before I left for my vacation from my vacation, I was starting to think a little more about how people interact with their environment, looking for good examples that I could make into overly-dramatic National Geographic style one-liners. (I also want to improve my creative writing skills.)

I realized something though... perhaps because it is "too obvious", I never stopped to think just what "environment" means. What is my environment? What is theNenet environment? What constitutes the environment of the various people I encountered on my bike trip? It further dawned on me that how different people define their own "environment", -where they draw their boundaries, may be one of the keys that keeps me from understanding why more people just don't seem to care about "the environment".

So what is my environment?

The textbook defines it as follows:

Suddenly "environmentalism" takes on a whole new meaning that that of the nature loving hippy which is all too often presented in main-stream media. If the environment does not just mean birds and bees, but rather includes the combination of all things and factors external, we are suddenly talking about economic and social issues as well. This complicates the question a bit, but brings it closer to what I have come to know as "sustainability", which by most definitions is based on the interconnectedness of ecological, economic, and social issues.

As far as my homework -describing how the people I saw on my trip interact with their environment- my dog ate it. Well, actually, I don't really feel that I have enough information, after just watching people for a fleeting few seconds as I zoomed by on my bike, to draw worthwhile conclusions.

Maybe an easier example, when talking about how people interact with this larger definition of environment, is this recent Living on Earth article about the town of Chalmette, just outside of New Orleans, where residents face massive oil spills.

The interaction between the oil spills and their current quality of life is painfully obvious. Although I am not living in the immediate vicinity of the oil spill, I can understand, to some degree, the consequences since they effect me and all of society, all-be-it in a different way than they effect the people of Chamette.

What I have trouble understanding though, is how their connection to oil grew so strong. I am not trying to blame or criticize the people. After all, they were in a position that I have never been in. I am simply thinking out loud as I try to understand how and why people interact with their environments in the way that they do -and how is this based on the interaction of natural, social, and economic environments.

As people in southern Louisiana start moving down the long road to recovery from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, some places have to contend with more than muck, mold and debris. There are also massive oil spills. Officials say eight million gallons leaked at more than 50 sites in the region. That's more than two-thirds of what spilled in the Exxon Valdez accident in Alaska in 1989.

Families in Chalmette go back generations; neighbors know each other and value their connections. The main industry was once fishing, then more people took jobs with the oil refineries that grew up against the neighborhood's fences and yards. Now the oil that brought jobs threatens more than a thousand homes.

Sure, I understand it on an intellectual level -how the more immediate need to feed the kids can take precedence over longer-term needs to provide a healthy natural environment, or perhaps how some people may want a bigger house and nicer car more than clean air. Empathetically though... I have trouble putting myself in their position... I have lived a privileged life, never been in an economic environment so bleak to willingly and knowingly allow (and help) the oil company to destroy my immediate natural environment to such a degree in the first place.

The argument [for a law-suit agains the oil company] goes like this: wetlands and coastline once stretched many miles between the cities and the Gulf. But canals for pipelines and drills contributed to coastal erosion, which cost Louisiana more than twenty square miles of wetland a year over the past decade.

The oil and gas industry destroyed that terra firma. Had that ecosystem existed it would have absorbed the hurricane force winds and storm surge.

It's not like they weren't aware of the risks to their physical environment either... it seems like they ignored them, for whatever reason, in favor of an improving economic environment.

Like other businesspeople here, Mustachio had mixed feelings about Murphy Oil and the other refineries. There were the occasional accidents that forced midnight evacuations, and persistent questions about air quality. But then, there were also the jobs.

Then again, I am constantly put in a position to either aid in the destruction of our natural environment for the promise of a better economic environment, or more comfortable (in the short-term) life. I try not to make that compromise, as I am sure they did as well... but I always do, when I choose to take a train all the way to Kyushu for a vacation when I could just as well have had the vacation nearer to Tokyo, or to buy imported raisons when there are no local alternatives instead of simply giving them up, or my fondness for tea heated by natural gas instead of just drinking it at room temperature, or using nuclear generated electricity so I can play with my computer...

I can't deny feeling somehow "better" than people who I see as compromising more, though I do deny believing that I am better. I recognize that a major part of how we interact with our natural environment is based on our economic and social environment. But is that all it is? Another comment that one of the towns people made seems to indicate that our different perspectives on how we should treat the natural environment in relation to economic and social is also based on a differing understanding of a key word...

MUSTACHIO: They generated money for this Parish. And generated sustained life while taking it away from us, in a sense, because it polluted so badly. But we depended on it. Right now, I can't see them doing anything for us, but we'll see. I don't know. All I can hope they can do is buy my property and have me move on, you know, because I don't want to be here. And I think a lot of people are the same way now.

This quote uses the word "sustained" to describe the lifestyle that oil money brought to the community.

Certainly it depends on the context, but when it comes to "life", the word "sustain", for me, has a long-term implication... longer-term than my own life-span. Could it be that the residents actually saw the benefits of the oil industry in their backyard as being something that could be sustained for such a long time, despite the negative effects to the ecosystem? Or, does their definition of "sustain" imply only a few years or decades?

Perhaps the word "sustain" is not where we differ, but rather how we define "life". Being from the privileged background that I am, I would not consider a life plagued with the dangers of occasional oil spills in my back-yard as one I would want to sustain for very long. Then again, I do not live in what I would consider an ideal social environment, with a strong sense of community. This would make it easier for me to give up my own social environment and move elsewhere. Perhaps they had a more ideal social environment, a place they called "home", and placed a lot of value on it -more than they placed on their natural environment.

I guess I will never know, but it was an interesting exercise to take ten minutes out of my day to think about it. And now that I am thinking about it, I can't seem to stop recognizing these interactions wherever I look, or whatever news story I hear. It's not rocket science, it's just something I never really consciously looked for before. And yet, the question remains unanswered... what defines, and how do I interact with my environment?