Activate me

I was recently told by a very good friend that I am not a feather, but instead a boulder. (If you're confused about this statement, please read my last post.) My actions do have an effect, she says, even if indirectly. But does this mean I should be taking more strides to do something about current environmental issues. If I alone have the power to affect change, am I a hypocrite for talking about it and not doing anything drastic?

Should I completely give up my car and ride my bike everywhere? Should I only buy local and organic food sold at the city market? Do I need to go to the extremes? ..I don't want to go to extremes. Is that selfish? I'm not sure exactly, but here is an example to help illustrate my point:

In the book for my class, Wilderness and the American Mind by Nash, he discusses the dichotmy of wilderness and humans. In the end of the book, he concludes that humans are intrinsicly separate from nature, or rather, that our population has outgrown nature. I have a hard time following this line of thought. He uses this argument to say that human civilizations should be small islands amongst all the wild lands of the planet and should build their civilizations up and not out. This seems very extreme to me. Why should humans have to sequester themselves from the rest of the bio-community? Now, don't get me wrong, I am all for restraining our destructive tendancies and containing urban sprawl, but Nash's idea gives me an image of human civilizations floating above the planet. This just strikes me as a really dramatic solution. Sort of like a cosmic mother saying, "If humans can't play nice, then they can't play at all" and punishing the population by forcing it to live in little islands of life in the air. That would be like saying, this fish has eaten all the other types of fish, lets put them all in aquariums so they can't harm anymore fish. Sounds ridiculous to me.

Maybe I am just overly optimistic, but I thatthat life on Earth wouldn't remain unbalanced for very long. Eventually the fish population will even out, even if that means one fish replaces another. I also believe that humans will either figure out a way to continue our civilization into the future by living sustainbly in the environment or die off because of lack of resources. I guess that doesn't sound particularly optimistic. That idea I borrow from Thomas Malthus, who I always thought was cleverly pessimistic in regard to the future of our civilization.

Nordhouse Dunes, A Wilderness area in Michigan.

So, back to my point. Segregating the human population from the very planet that sustains them seems very extreme to me and on a much, much smaller scale, changing my life completely also seems extreme. I don't think us humans are all that bad. A lot of us are careless and destructive, but we have obviously made some significant strides in wilderness protection. (Read some of Nash to learn more about this!) And more will come, I am sure. I will be one of the first to vote in higher standard of fuel efficiency or what evey technology savvy vehicle is invented in the next 50 years. But I am not going to give up my car completely (unless that solar-energy floating car comes out - that I would totally go for!). As Henry David Thoreau believed, it is best to have one foot in civilization and one in the wild. It is important for us to appreciate the wild, but we should also appreciate all the amazing things we have done within our own civilization. As members of Earth we are part of the larger biotic community and the smaller human community. Both are important. So, no, I will not become an activist. I will do all that I can without giving up my current life completely, and those little things I do can still have an effect.

...I am going to Jon Stewart's Rally to Restore Sanity, though. Does that count as activism? :)