Column by George Sibley
Environment – June 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
“Environment” was a word I don’t remember hearing when I was growing up and going to school in the 1950s. It’s a lot different today; our young people are immersed in information about “the environment” from grade school on. This is a commendable change, in my opinion, but there’s a further step I’d like to see in this new awareness, and that is to begin raising awareness of the true nature of the “environment” we live in.
From an ecological perspective, an “environment” is everything in an organism’s surroundings that the organism cannot dictate or change, and therefore must adapt to. For humans, the natural environment is usually pretty easy to define: it’s the basic geography of where we find ourselves. In our case, the environment is mountain-and-valley terrain, generally marginal soils, a climate wet above 8,000 feet and dry below, et cetera. It’s an environment that seems to have some constants — like the mountains that are here for longer than we will be and the dependable dryness of orthographic deserts.
But it also has some disturbing variables. Close to all our minds these days is the reality that the usual dryness can become even drier (just as it has, occasionally in the past, become uncomfortably wetter).
Whatever the natural environment does, however, we adapt; or if we can’t adapt, we will disappear from this environment, like the Anasazi did a few centuries ago, or the dinosaurs an eon ago.
But humans have become a pervasive species on the earth, with large, complex and extensive societies. Thus, the members of any given human community today — Salida, Gunnison, Leadville, or a Denver neighborhood — should realize that we also have a “cultural environment” as well as a “natural environment.”
We’re surrounded by a cultural society that the people of a community cannot change from within, and therefore must adapt to. Here in Central Colorado, we get a lot more of what we need from our cultural environment than we get from our natural environment. Almost all of our food, fuel, material for shelter, and other necessities get trucked in from our cultural environment rather than taken out of our natural environment. The Upper Arkansas valley has a local packing house to keep a little of the food production process at home, but over here in the Upper Gunnison — self-described as “a ranching community” by some — we export our cows in trucks and import our beef in more trucks.
To survive at all here, we have to do complex quid pro quo trades with the cultural environment to keep those trucks rolling in. Generally, we sell off something from our natural environment. Today, that’s mostly somewhat “reusable” amenities to make vacations comfortable and memorable for “visitors.” But even when we initiate those “trade activities” with the cultural environment, we seem to have little local control over our success or failure.
Think of the way that terrorist attacks on global institutions 2,000 miles away can result in bad times in the local tourist economy; or the way stock market fluctuations trickle down into the second-home construction industry locally; or the way changes in the political weather — like the current “revenue drought” — reverberate through our local economy.
What can we do about these changes? The same thing we can do about changes in our natural environment: we adapt, or we don’t. Adaptation of course need not be a passive process of just “learning to live with the way things are.” The conversions from herder to hunter, and forager to farmer, were big active adaptations in response to uncertainties and pressures in the natural environment. Going to coal and oil for our fuel source, when wood became scarce in the natural environment, was another active adaptation that — like herding and farming — actually changed our natural environment in ways that forced further adaptations from us.
BUT WHILE MY STUDENTS know all about global warming and desertification and other challenges we’ve nudged from the natural environment, they seem oblivious to the increasingly oppressive economic and political “climate changes” that are happening in our cultural environment. They cheer when another generic franchise or chain comes to help drain Gunnison; TCBY is the latest. They docilely accept the transition in student financial aid from grants to loans, which leave them indebted rather than liberated by their education (which threatens to convert them into more poor people making transfer payments to the rich).
There’s heavy weather ahead in the cultural environment, but compared to the active way we’ve responded to changes in the natural environment, we’re damned passive about it. The predatory forces operating in the cultural environment all have a good press, of course, which tells us how we’re all in it together….
But probably the first thing to remember about environments is their general indifference to what does or doesn’t survive in them.
George Sibley writes, teaches, and organizes in Gunnison.