Yesterday was the 120th birthday of the Sierra Club, founded on May 28, 1892 by John Muir with a goal to "do something for wilderness and make the mountains glad." The Club originally focused on protecting and enjoying the Sierra Nevada range of California, but has grown throughout the years to become the best known environmental group on the planet.
Muir dreamed of wilderness untrammeled by human footprint. Today, the Wilderness Act protects not only Muir's beloved Yosemite but spectacular, lonely, wild lands throughout America. But, just as the Sierra Club has evolved beyond a focus on the Sierra Nevada range, environmentalists' visions have evolved.
We are in the Anthropocene Age - the Age of Man, an era marked by humans' influence on the planet. We can't protect the entire planet from the human race. Instead, we interact with it, for good (sustainably) or worse (skyrocketing carbon emissions). Visionary environmentalists focus on how we interact with the physical world. Do we tread lightly? Do we trample over what was precious? Or do we blaze smart new trails?
One of the smartest new trails in California isn't a footpath, but a train: electric high speed rail that can take Californians from Los Angeles to San Francisco in less than half the time is takes to drive. Governor Jerry Brown sees it as his legacy, just as his father built the California higher education system. Voters approved it as Proposition 1a, but second thoughts are being fostered by NIMBY/Blue Dog Democrats such as Alan Loewenthal and tea partiers (with, one suspects, ventriloquism support from fossil fuel interests). The bullet train's environmental benefits are legion, from cars removed from the road to development of smarter local transit options.
Yes, the train will be expensive. Yes, building it will increase carbon emissions for its first 30 years, whines the Wall Street Journal. Yet high speed rail is becoming a litmus test for environmentalists contemplating the Anthropocene.
A couple of examples highlight the difference between easy environmentalism - preservation of pretty places - and environmentalism in the Anthropocene. Darrell Issa (CA-52) has introduced H.R. 41, to protect the Beauty Mountain area, but he'd never be confused with an environmentalist. And near me, a local RINO-turned-independent candidate for Congress, Linda Parks (I-CA-26), developed an environmental reputation because she worked on open space preservation. Yet she considers high speed rail to be a "costly boondoggle."
Open spaces matter a lot. The human spirit needs the idea of a place to roam far from roads and civilization. However, the human spirit also needs civilization. Preserving open spaces while ignoring environmental impacts of the built world is not the hallmark of a true environmentalist. The Sierra Club supported Proposition 1a. Clear-eyed environmentalists in the age of the Anthropocene will eagerly set forth on the trail of California's high speed rail vision.