For some reason I was having trouble just using the comment box to reply to everyone's comments... it was asking me which account I wanted to post under, and when I selected my google account, it wouldn't work. Hmmm.... if anybody know what I'm doing wrong, please feel free to share!
Anyway, I appreciate everyone's comments!! In particular, to address Katie's remarks... while I agree that it can be extremely difficult sometimes to maintain a positive outlook (oh the eco despaaaiiir!), and I see your point about how helping people to become self-sufficient can create additional strains on already scarce resources, I think that the social captial in these types of situations outweighs the economic and environmental costs. One of the points of the H2O Project (at least how I read it), was to not only provide third world countries with basic, clean drinking water, but to teach them how to utilize and access it in a sustainable way. Education plays a huge role in these types of endeavors. Showing people how to best utilize resources in different ways not only pays dividends in their own lives, but the lives of their children and grandchildren after them. I think the long-term outlook of this is to ensure that people have the tools they need to provide for themselves and their families, and teaching them to do so in a way that will put the least stress on their resources will eventually lead to an equilibrium, or self-sustaining lifestyle.
I very much agree with your statement that "education plays a huge role in these types of endeavors", and in the H2O Project I think it did. But I can't help being Debby Downer.
ReplyDeleteWhat about Leopold's example of the southwest Wisconsin farmers and the topsoid conservation effort put in place by the CCC? After the initial 5-year contract in which they were forced to use conservation methods: "The farmers continued only those practices that yielded an immediate and visible economic gain for themselves" (Wheeler, p. 23).
So education helps, but in order for sustainability to work it requires certain prolonged behaviors even when the payoffs are far off and perhaps never realized by this generation.