Enviro-Myths You Can Stop Believing

ANN ARBOR, Michigan - We recently participated in an environmental festival at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, the largest indoor shopping center in America. After speaking with thousands of parents, children and teachers, we were appalled at the public's wealth of environmental misunderstanding. Here are some examples.'

One: Recycling is the key.

Actually, recycling is one of the least important things we can do, if our real objective is to conserve resources.

Remember the phrase "reduce, reuse and recycle"? Reduce comes first for a good reason: It's better not to create waste than to have to figure out what to do with it. And recycling, like any other form of manufacturing, uses energy and other resources while creating pollution and greenhouse gases.

Rather, we need to make products more durable, lighter, more energy efficient and easier to repair rather than to replace. Finally, we need to reduce and reuse packaging.

Two: Garbage will overwhelm us.

The original garbage crisis occurred when people first settled down to farm and could no longer leave their campsites after their garbage grew too deep. Since then, every society has had to figure out what to do with discards. That something was usually unhealthy and ugly - throwing garbage in the streets, piling it up just outside of town, incorporating it into structures or simply setting it on fire. Today we can design history's and the world's safest recycling facilities, landfills and incinerators.

The problem is political. No one wants to spend money on just getting rid of garbage or to have a garbage site in the backyard. The obvious solution is to stop generating so much garbage in the first place. Doing so requires both the knowledge and the self-discipline to conserve energy and do more with less stuff.

Three: Industry is to blame.

No, it's all people's fault. Certainly industry has played a significant role in destroying habitats, generating pollution and depleting resources. But we are the ones who signal to businesses that what they are doing is acceptable -every time we open our wallets.

And don't just blame industrial societies. In his recent book "Earth Politics," Ernst Ulrich von Weizsacker wrote that "perhaps 90 percent of the extinction of species, soil erosion, forest and wilderness destruction and also desertification are taking place in developing countries". Thus, even non-industrialized, subsistence economies are creating environmental havoc.

Four. The earth is in peril. Frankly, the earth doesn't need to be saved. Nature doesn't give a hoot if human beings are here or not. The planet has survived cataclysmic changes for millions upon millions of years. Over that time, it is widely believed, 99 percent of all species have come and gone while the planet has remained.

Saving the environment is really about saving our environment - making it safe for ourselves, our children and the world as we know it. If more people saw the issue as one of saving themselves, we would probably see increased motivation and commitment to actually doing so.

(R.M. Lilienfeld, W.L. Rathje"Six Enviro-Myths You

Can Stop Believing" the New York Times, May 1996)