Despair is a word I hear a lot these days. There is a daily flood of bad environmental news about federal resource protection rules that once protected our land, waters and atmosphere being ignored, hollowed out, or repealed. The initial response of outrage has been eroded by fatigue and a sense of hopelessness that can lead a rational person to despair. And that is part of the point.
Despair leads to a form of giving up, and giving up facilitates and eases the path leading to the destruction of the entire environmental protection framework. What then is a good environmentalist to do in response to a situation in which we are clearly disadvantaged?
Most importantly, we cannot compromise our commitment to good environmental stewardship.
The goal of taking actions that result in better air and water quality, improved and increased protections for land and sea, and a commitment to leaving things better than we found them must remain at the core of our movement. From there, the environmental community must become more strategic and targeted in our identification of opportunities to make positive change and to leverage these to the hilt.
Here at APCC, we see opportunity to continue progress at the state and local levels. We will continue to speak out against bad policy choices at the federal level, but if that is all we—and you do—we will not have much to show for it these next few years. What we can do is work with the state to implement the recently announced Biodiversity Goals for the Commonwealth. We can continue to pursue local actions that improve water quality by advancing wastewater management and expanded infrastructure. We can push for and promote increased protections for the 60,000 acres of Cape Cod priority natural resource areas not yet developed but not protected (more on that to come from APCC soon). We can each commit ourselves to better stewardship practices in and around our own homes. In short, there is a lot we can do, and not all of it is listed here.
One way, and perhaps the only option we have right now, to fight back is to take advantage of the local opportunities to make things better. Federal policies that degrade the broader environment are bad, but they don’t justify doing nothing at the levels we can still influence. Giving in is a form of complicity, and as a community we cannot participate in that. If you need a little support and encouragement as well as evidence of what some dedicated environmentalists can achieve, please join us at APCC’s annual meeting this Sunday at the Dennis Inn.
Do not despair, the stakes are too high.
