Chris Bright
The environmental and social challenges we face today—from population to pollution to ecological decline—are enormous, but not intractable. As history demonstrates, people are capable of fundamental change for the better.
A barrier to change is that damage assessments often have an air of unreality because they bear little obvious relation to life as we ordinarily live it. A great deal of environmental degradation cannot be seen. Large economies tend to displace the ill effects of behavior from the behavior itself. Few of us ever encounter the toxic waste, soil degradation, or unsustainable mining and logging that support our collective consumption patterns.
It is not that hard, however, to envision the paths that reform will have to take. For example, in the energy economy, the path to reform leads away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy sources, and in materials production, away from primary reliance on mining and more on recycling.
Despite the obvious need for change, and despite our obvious technical competence, it can still be hard to believe that real, fundamental change is possible. And yet such change does occur, even though it can be difficult to appreciate because it is so readily taken for granted. For example, who today remembers the campaign to eradicate smallpox?