Rationing Care: Human Issues versus Environment Issues

Describing an acquaintance’s research about factory farming and environmental degradation, a person I recently met declared, “I feel like people only care about animal and environmental issues if they don’t have any “people” issues to care about.”

Her friend looked at me and clarified, “she means, if they’re white.”

Not long ago, I doubt I would be as intrigued as I was by these perspectives. On principle, I disagree when passionate, justice-minded people deride their peers’ causes as less important. Not only is comparing struggles obnoxious, but it’s silly: a consensus will never deem one struggle the most “important,” so that seems to be a terrible metric for rationing care. People will devote mental and emotional energy to whatever passions matter to them, and as per a cognate of the law of comparative advantage ¹, the resultant synergies do more to create a justice-filled world than if everybody focused on the same effort.

But my new acquaintances’ comments relied on another presumption that I’ve recently been working to erase from my psyche: that environmental and human issues are divorced from one another; so by focusing on the former, you abandon the latter. I imagine this thought lines the undersense of many, if only due to subliminal messaging: each time we topple a tree to raise a home, fill our bellies with a chicken’s breast: we fasten our well-being more intimately to nature’s sacrifice. A choice for nature is rendered an act of self-harm: deviant, distasteful.

I wonder what our world would be like if, instead, our human collective consciousness understood nature’s well-being as a precursor for our well-being. Let me defend this as (my) Truth.

First, climate change in a nutshell: greenhouse gases–mostly due to burning fossil fuels for electricity and transportation, but also from cattle and dairy farming, burning down forests, etc.–trap heat within Earth’s atmosphere. Thus it induces the oft-cited consequences: increasing global temperatures, rising sea levels, heavier rainfall in some places but drier, hotter interim periods, more damaging hurricanes and typhoons due to hotter oceans, more frequent coastal flooding ² .

In human terms? A 2012 report predicts that without drastic action, over 100 million people will end up in extreme poverty by 2030– largely people in developing countries, erasing decades of progress ³. The annual death toll of climate change-induced malaria, diarrhea, heat stroke, and malnutrition is estimated at a staggering 250,000 by 2050 ⁴. Another 25 million to one billion persons may end up displaced; and in a world that does not yet recognize people fleeing for environmental reasons as “refugees,” that is a terrifying thought. ⁵

Even without statistics, realizing a capricious planet could exert a human toll is hardly surprising. Less apparent are the socio-political costs. Yale historian Timothy Snyder takes us back to Hitler’s Second Book, where Hitler warned that hunger was imminent and any new technologies–irrigation, fertilizer, –could not preserve the German standard of living. Lebensraum, Germany’s expansion by conquest throughout Europe, was rooted in a belief that more agricultural land was necessary — as was extermination of the Jewish people, whose ideas posed a threat to that mission. Snyder predicts that climate change will induce ecological panic of similar contours. Political powers will invoke food and water scarcity as grounds for exploitation, identify scapegoats to purge from the population, and vindicate genocide ⁶ .  

I believe him. The pervasive “us or them” philosophy seems to glimmer everywhere I look. Trump’s successful fearmongering relies almost exclusively on warning Americans that their safety is at risk by the presence of Blacks, immigrants, Muslims; protecting the “American” way of life requires cleansing those threats. His rhetoric succeeds because it normalizes what people want to believe: that to save themselves, they can trample on others’ liberties without consequence. Imagine the weight of those ideas in an climate – apocalyptic  scenario: spurred by people aching for a full belly. 

Returning to the people who focus their work on environmental justice, “as opposed” to partaking in social justice causes? By encouraging adoption of greener technologies, flying less, eating less meat, keeping a forest upright: they’re doing their part to prevent deaths, violence, and human exploitation. And by embodying the idea that uplifting humans should not demand degrading non-human life, their work undermines the insidious us-or-them mentality that inculcates all oppression.