Manhood and the Fate of the Earth
    Versions of the following short piece, by my husband Andy Schmookler, were published in newspapers around the country.
    The United States faces two kinds of threats to its national security. One is from external enemies, the other from the degradation of the biosphere. Over the years, our leaders have been willing to spend billions to counter cold war enemies or to make war on terrorists, but to divert us from environmental disaster, they’ve scarcely lifted a finger.
     And in our current presidential campaign, while the threat of terrorism receives a great deal of attention, we still hear very little about climate change as a threat to our security.Â
    Why is that? Why is it that, despite the fact that there’s scientific consensus that global warming might bring about catastrophic consequences for human life on this planet, such a threat gets so much less attention than threats from other groups of people that might do us harm?
    At the heart of the answer, I suggest,  are deeply ingrained ideas about manhood in America. There are some concerns that it is thought manly to attend to, while others are sissies’ stuff.
    The image of the warrior is central to our idea of manhood. So it’s always manly to prepare to fight an enemy, another man whose power can hurt us. But showing concern for environmental dangers–which means being willing to limit our own exercise of power in the world–does not look so glorious in American eyes.
    Thus, while it’s manly to make worst-case assumptions about an enemy’s capabilities and intentions, one who looks at worst-case environmental scenarios is derided as a “Chicken Little.”
    While the business of guarding what’s ours seems manly, the task of caring for what’s been entrusted to us sounds, in our culture, suspiciously like women’s work.
    There’s good reason why warriors have long been the heroes of civilized societies. For millennia, it is from outside enemies that the greatest threats to social survival have come.
    Only in recent generations has this begun to change. Now, the explosive growth of industrial technology has so altered our relationship to this living planet that it is from the destructive impact of our own peacetime activities that the gravest threat to our security may now come.
    Meeting this sudden new challenge requires new virtues of us, but our ways of thinking change far less quickly than has our impact on the biosphere.
    There is another ancient image of what a man might be. It is the image of the good steward, the man to whom the care of things can be entrusted. We will not again be secure until the good steward seems to us as manly as the vigilant warrior.
October 20th, 2008 at 11:37 am
Thanks to both of you for sending this out into the world.
October 21st, 2008 at 7:44 am
The really dramatic part of environmental danger is that those who deny it now will not be able to fix it overnight by passing a bill in congress when it becomes obvious to them.
I wonder what it would take to get environmentalists to write a really good bill now and have us push it on our congressment to pass. Such bills always seem to be denying ourselves something that one faction or another want. How I long for a peacemaker to join us together in the common cause. It takes someone who sees through misinformation and seeds of distrust that are sown by the factions. We really need to P.U.S.H.