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Click for full-size image What are we prepared to give up? The reality is that we have to accept some major trade-offs here. The situation is too grim, too urgent, to duck them.
Okay, here's the plan. Sell Yellowstone to ExxonMobil. Or if that's too much to stomach, maybe hand it off to one of the more enlightened energy giants -- BP, say, or Shell, although getting a foreign ownership deal through Congress might be tricky.
Think of all that geothermal energy going to waste, all of it clean, all endlessly renewable. Set up corporate headquarters at the Old Faithful Inn, lay pipes along the Firehole, drill secondary extraction points in each of the main geyser basins. Surely the surrender of a national park, even if it was our first, is a small price to pay for making a dent in our reliance on fossil fuels and the Saudi royal family.
Well, the votes are in, and apparently this modest proposal has been given the thumbs-down in our readers' poll. Yellowstone is too much to surrender. But then, what are we prepared to give up? Because the reality is that we have to accept some major trade-offs here, and quickly. The situation is too grim, too urgent, to duck them. Idealism may be what gets us up in the morning, yet these days it may not be enough to help us sleep at night.
Take windmills, over which the agonizing has been particularly public. We know that even as they generate all those nice, clean megawatts, they also have an alarming tendency to kill birds and bats. But how many is too many? A hundred a day? A thousand? Four hundred and seventy-three? What if they're common rather than endangered species? Is every sparrow sacred? And then there's the aesthetic question. Personally, I find that wind farms have a kind of chilly, science fiction beauty, especially when seen on a sunlit ridge from two or three miles off. But I'm not sure I'd want one thrumming away in my backyard, especially if I used to look out on an uninterrupted sweep of Adirondack forest or Cape Cod seascape.
Yet in the larger scheme of things, wind farms are small potatoes. What about the really big questions? If corporate greed is already out of control (and former senator John Edwards isn't the only one who worries about that) how do we feel about placing our environmental future in the hands of giant corporations? The argument -- and it has real merit -- is that technological innovation will be our Hail Mary pass, and the lure of further huge profits is what will make it happen. And if global warming truly transcends all other issues, shouldn't environmentalists channel all their material resources, all their political and moral purpose, in that one single direction? If so, does that mean that everything else -- snow leopards, hummingbirds, mountain trails, clean air -- is a dissipation of energy? The kinds of things, in other words, that give the heart its moral impetus in the first place.
These are what politicians like to call tough choices, and an endless stream of them lies ahead. Invest in clean coal or stop burning coal altogether? Green the big-box stores or buy less junk? Follow your dreams or accept the stern restraints of realism?
Fox News, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and their cohort love it when environmentalists wrestle with these conundrums. Our tough choices become their gleeful registers of hypocrisy: wealthy greens fighting to stop the Cape Wind farm, climate experts flying to Bali for an international conference on global warming. Think of all those airborne carbon emissions!
The irony is that many environmentalists make similar lists, even though their purpose is to sniff out lapses in purity rather than displays of hypocrisy. Some people think we should give up air travel altogether, although how we're supposed to function without it, let alone sit down in one place to hash out the details of life after Kyoto, is never fully explained.
Maybe it helps to remember that life has always been a matter of trade-offs. Again, think of Yellowstone. There it is still, in all its freakish magnificence, and we've agreed (more or less) that there's a price to pay for that: three million visitors a year, phalanxes of RVs, highway spaghetti at Old Faithful. But you can look out over the Lamar Valley, straining for a glimpse of a wolf pack in the oblique rays of the dawn sunlight, and still feel those driving moments of transcendence. Learn to conserve that fierceness of the heart, while cultivating an ever-greater hardness of the head, and we may eventually get somewhere.
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