Realistically, the U.S. Government hasn’t got a philosophical grasp of how to bring the nation much less global ecosphere into a state of recovery. One shouldn’t expect the Dept. of Agriculture to manage national forests, wetlands, badlands, meadows, plans and tundra etc. Neither should the Depts of Energy, Health or E.P.A., nor N.O.A.A. or the C.D.C. be expected to cover national issues related to restoring verdancy to the national portion of the ecosphere and make a substantive effort to reverse anthropogenic heating of the atmosphere. A new federal department of environmental health should be legislated into being.
It isn’t that the E.P.A.- the Environmental Protection Agency has done a bad job. Their role is too narrow and limited to anti-pollution recovery and select conservation generally. That paradigm is not sufficient for developing environmental health for the nation in an era when North Slope Alaska temperature can reach 90 degrees in August (e.g. Deadhorse 89 f) with much warmer years ahead. Most politicians don’t understand the nature of the problem of habitat and species loss and the maladaptive mass effects of the tool kit used by 8 billion humans on the world environment. Envision 8 billion chimpanzees driving fossil fuel vehicles on the Earth, polluting sky and oceans with aircraft and ships, chemical wastes and sewage, flotsam, jetsam and forests cut, deserts paved with heat absorbing asphalt and exterminating inconvenient species that survived habitat loss and trophy hunting.
Philosophically speaking there are numerous approaches for tackling problems of environment habitat loss, pollution and atmospheric heating catalysis by human machines. The political economy matters; an equation concerning how to restore ecospheric health requires the political economy as an element. Plainly there are innumerable ways to change the nation’s political economy to one that supports restoration of environmental health. Perhaps a philosophy of political economy department could be made a part of a federal Department of Environmental Health.
Good political leadership can be difficult to discover and elect. Insiders may perpetuate their own interests and dominate important offices elbowing out competence. In 2024 the Democrat party had no competitive primaries and the presentation of new environmental ideas was thereby aborted. One insider-Joe Biden, selected his protege V.P. to run and party elites rubber stamped that. Candidate Kamala hasn’t significant classical or environmental economic experience A healthy, positive classical economy is required to afford upgrade to ecological economic policies. Once the classical economy and business are collapse choices are taken away, opportunities lost. That would mean the future of adaptive ecological economics would be bleak and destroyed. Demographics of all would experience downturns challenging to survive.
Government is not the only way to affect the condition of the ecosphere positively. Often of course government policy has affected the ecosphere negatively. In the present era private enterprise has sometimes been a leader in positive adaptation to ecospheric health of the political economy. An example was Tesla’s leadership in transitioning to electric cars away from internal combustion engines. Electric cars are becoming commonplace around the globe; yet of course the changes required for a well adapted to present environmental challenges political economic requires far more than the elimination of carbon monoxide emissions to the thin air humanity breathes.
The Democrat Party has no philosophy of ecospheric health restoration. They are instead spoilers exploiting environmental issues just enough to get environmental voters into their demographic based political agenda. I wanted to write something about that phenomenon.
The Democrat Party is not a party of ideas. It is instead a party of Demographics designed to appeal to a majority of voters. It is thus a party of pandering to special demographic interests to win elections bringing the main idea of Democrats to one of electing demographically approved politicians to prosperity. Joe Biden was a case in point. In 2016 he campaigned on a 3 trillion dollar environment recovery plan in order to low-ball the bid from rival Democrat primary candidates. Fixing the ecosphere for 3 trillion would have been super-efficient.
The Joe Biden environment plan was not ineffective to start with. It was eventually reduced to 1.5 trillion and much of that went to Demographic kick backs unrelated to ecospheric recovery. Kamala Harris has a little of a notion of how to bring about ecospheric recovery as did Joe Biden.
Democrats apparently have little prospect for winning both houses of the federal legislature again. When they had that in 2017 the first order of business should have been to pass a tax increase on the rich. Biden instead went in the opposite direction. There is no question that a vast 33 trillion dollar and increasing public debt can be the first stage of the breakup of the U.S.A.. Vast public debt is risky, yet Democrat plans to spend trillions-as high as 60 trillion dollars, to repair the ecosphere are especially dangerous for national security. A political economy designed to pay off public debt and restore the environment simultaneously is requisite. Is that even possible?
One of the troubles with Demographic based politics is that while focusing on special interests nearly exclusively it lets substantial public interests in macro-economic and environment fail. It leads to something like Aristotle’s political cycle for democracy degenerating in to tyranny. Some Democrat elites of course have a covert-overt approach to solving the overpopulation of the world demographic challenge made locally (nationally) worse via the vehicle of mass illegal migration to the U.S.A. The elite approach brings a method to the madness of actual voting booth party choices. Their idea is that the traditional family structure and way of living of billions of souls is mal-adaptive for the survival of humanity on earth. Sociological studies have shown that as poorer societies become prosperous and women prosper in those second and third world countries they have fewer children. Thus making those poorer nations prosperous is the theoretical solution to global over population when the maximum planetary sustainable population of humans in the present family unit structure is just 2 or 3 billion.
If world resources used in the present way of classical economics can sustain just 3 billion humans at maximum, and while the present classical economic way of living degrades the ecosphere and exhausts natural resources a change to new economic methods is requisite for human sustainability. Flooding the U.S.A. with illegal migrants in order to provide cheap domestic labor, keep wages down and concentrate wealth is believed by the elites as a way for poorer nations to increase their standard of living as illegals living and working in the U.S.A. send part of their earnings home. Remittances to poor countries purposed to cut down on population growth global seems a very inefficient way to make poor nations prosper rather than direct investment in poor countries with new ecological economic procedures. Yet as I may have mentioned, there are no comprehensive ecological economic policies or transitional methods in the Democrat or Republican parties. Democrats rely on the invisible hand of evolution guided by party elites and Republicans on the invisible kleptomaniac hand of Adam Smith’s capitalism as interpreted by a dark pool, dark matter Karl Marx.
A solid understanding of the discipline of environmental economics and classical economic are foundational for implementation of timely, innovative measure in government and the private sector to attack the challenges-related and interlocking challenges, of habit degradation, species extinction, human land use/zoning, oceanic acidification and warming and environmental heating. Plainly a lot of education is involved. Also plain is the capacity of contemporary information systems to bring that knowledge to the public. A Democrat Party focused on just getting politicians elected and rich who will kick back some support and pork for constituents hasn’t developed realistic ecospheric restoration paradigmata- while Republicans are more focused on business.
The best environmentalists might hope for is for Democrats to actually develop philosophical awareness of comprehensive approaches t restoration of ecospheric health before the 2028 Presidential election. Presently there is no Democrat philosophy of the political economy in regard to ecosphere restoration. Neither is there a snowball’s chance in hell of getting such an imaginary creatures through the political zoo of D.C. politics.
I remember during the Velvet Revolution era of a wish to receive a particular military service ribbon- a beautiful green and white one for being stationed in Antarctica. I was disappointed though, and could not even locate one in military surplus stores to wear on a Vietnam era field jacket in the forest of rural Alaska. A Department of Environmental Health would not be like a new federal Department of Imaginary Military Service and Imaginary Veteran’s affairs made to make people without military service feel good about themselves. Rather, it would provide the government’s part in developing a rational political economy to optimize resource use and to promote economic and lifestyle zeitgeist methodology for environmental health.
A philosophy of national and global environmental health has a large number of possible structures that might serve to restore the ecosphere to a salutary status. There are a lot of possible plans that might cost a lot (trillions) and be ineffective too. There is an opportunity cost for investing in plans that don’t work- like hanging a spacecraft up in space that can’t return to Earth, its better to have a plan that will work right the first time, and cheaper too.
So I believe its time to bring out a cliché and adapt it to the challenge of discovering or building the right approach to restoring the ecosphere to health; measure twice and cut once. For developing a righteous plan for restoring ecospheric health including a supporting political economy a comparable cliché would be to consider with philosophy a thousand plans for environment recovery and apply just one. Yet get it done with a purpose for the scale of the problems are increasing all the while.
