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La Marguerite 
That’s an interesting conception of Earth Day. Your approach reminds me of Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah.
The Jewish year ends with the month of Elul, a month which is supposed to be one of growing self-examination. Then there is Rosh Hashanah, celebrating the new year with a feast, and Yamim Noraim, ten days which end in Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, when Jews fast for 25 hours (from before one sunset to just after the next), even taking no water, and do not bathe; it’s also a Sabbath, with no working or spending of money.
In Judaism, there’s a difference between sins against God (like breaking the Sabbath) and sins against people (like theft, etc). For sins against God, silent repentance is enough. For sins against people, reparations must be made: the thief returns good plus some, kind words must be given to make up for cruel words, and so on.
So the new year begins with celebrations of life and the richness of the world, with a feast, and then come ten days when we assess ourselves, looking back on the past year, and finally on the tenth day we fast and hold a Sabbath, not so much to atone as to focus our minds. By denying ourselves the everyday pleasures of life, we can focus on the pleasure we’ve denied to others.
The idea is not to reproach or berate ourselves, but to improve ourselves. Rather than saying, “I have done wrong, and am a vile person,” we say, “I have done wrong, I am sorry, and will make up for it.”
Ten days to think, one day to repent, and the rest of the year to do good.
Earth Day was first celebrated in 1970, and much good has followed it, including the creation later that same year of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
For some perspective, I would offer the following comments. First, the world’s population in 1970 was just over 3.7 billion, so we have added nearly three billion more to the planet since then. Second, the U.S. population in 1970 was around 203 million, to which we have added another 100 million or so.
Though it was not known at the time, 1970 was the year in which oil production in the U.S. reached its peak; since then it has declined considerably. The combination of declining oil production and a growing population sent the U.S. on a lengthy and continuing journey to find oil from elsewhere to import. Today crude oil prices are at all-time highs, the U.S. has been bogged down for more than five years in a war in Iraq that most believe was at least in part stimulated by oil, and food scarcities are emerging around the globe.
We do not know how many people Earth can support, or at what standard of living that support might be, but we do know that there are problems today that need our attention. Earth Day gives us time to pause and reflect, but it also needs to give us some new directions.
Though voluntary acts are well-meaning and may be helpful, we need to consider ways in which we can change the incentives and disincentives that people respond to in their lifestyle choices, from rewarding conservation over waste to creating more wholesome and thriving communities where people might be happy to live closer to where they work and play. People behave rationally, so we need to take advantage of that and quit giving them mixed messages that lead them to make choices that aren’t the best for others or the environment.
We need to encourage congress to remove all subsidies for the production and use of fossil fuels, so that consumers see their real costs. Better yet, we need to cap emissions and set in motion a cap-and-trade system that would gradually diminish our use of fossil fuels.
We need more encouragement for consumers to choose walking or biking over driving in cars, especially those without passengers. If we could just add one passenger to each car on the road, we would have less congestion, use less fuel, and clean up the air. One bus could replace 40 or so single-occupant cars, and modern technology should allow urban areas to develop flexible bus schedules that would help. In some downtown areas, e.g. Portland, buses are free, a real incentive to get out of your SUV nowadays.
We need to rethink trains. Last I knew, the average speed of a train in the U.S. was around 55 miles per hour. In Japan and France the fastest trains move at close to 200 miles per hour, and throughout Western Europe intercity trains cruise along at close to 100 miles per hour.
We cannot predict the future, but as we look at record crude oil prices we should at least be prepared to see our auto-dependent culture enter a period of shock. Prudence suggests that we begin to prepare for a world in which gasoline is no longer cheap, and this should be one them that gets our attention not just on Earth Day but on every other day from here on.
I really don’t know how to reduce the many aspects of my daily behavior to a number on a scale. If you take an objective perspective, each of us has different brain-wiring, which results in all future actions, including actively working towards changing existing brain-wiring. Properties of the brain result in a huge amount of psychological dimensions.
I think that I excel the most at a high level of self-efficacy and understanding of what is going to make me happy. My general mindfulness is pretty low, compared to what it could be of course, not compared to the general population.
I think the most important thing is to remember that your brain is plastic, it’s constantly changing. The general direction of change is towards your intention. You change in the person you want to become.
I think that in some sense, if you actually have set your mind to becoming a perfect steward, you’re already a ten. In another way, most of us are not even close, and none of us will ever become one. But I think it’s the striving that matters most. If everyone would strive towards this goal, the whole world would look different.
‘People behave rationally, so we need to take advantage of that and quit giving them mixed messages that lead them to make choices that aren’t the best for others or the environment.’
Absolutely, Peter.
I ‘d like to tie your statement with Meryn’s:
‘I think the most important thing is to remember that your brain is plastic, it’s constantly changing.’
I have said this before. Rather than berating people for how bad they are towards the Earth, we need to listen carefully to what they are telling us through their attitudes and behaviors. And treat that information as clues for what to do.
Thanks Kyle for the religious context. I do believe there is a lot we can borrow from religious and also psychological practices, to help foster greater environmental consciousness in individuals.
I’m currently reading about storytelling. The most interesting thing I think is the notion that all people have a personal story where they live in. This story is how they see themselves and determines their future plans.
First, we need to get a general sense of what story most people are living in, and then we need to provide people a more appealing story than that so that they choose “our” story instead of their current one.
This makes me wonder what the common themes in our unique life stories are.
Yes. This links to some of the work done in the field of narrative psychotherapy. I wrote about this in an earlier post, a while back.
It would be interesting to do a video patchwork of all these personal narratives, amongst representative sample of folks. Great idea Meryn!
I agree with Meryn (#5) and Marguerite (#6). It would be very interesting to understand the similarities and differences among the “stories” within which a variety of people live. How they see the world and themselves relative to the world. I have lots of thoughts on this, of course. That said, people probably think/assume that the “stories” of others are very similar to their own, in terms of how they see the world (and themselves in it). I’m not talking literally, of course. We all know that one person might have come from Texas and another from Germany, or that one is male and another female. I’m talking about things at a more conceptual, paradigmatic, “unexamined assumption” level. It would be quite interesting to “see” how others “see”. Of course, to do that excercise on a small scale, among people you know, might well require some truth serum or a decent supply of wine. People don’t often talk about how they “see” the world in an open way, these days, I think.
Anyhow, I think the idea is a very good one.
[…] 23, 2008 by lamarguerite All the Earth Day circus put me in no mood to celebrate. Still, last night I attended an Earth Day event, sponsored […]