The Environmental Sciences Student

I spoke with a fellow parishioner today about our children. This well-meaning, socially aware good fellow (an attorney) was extolling how well his son was progressing in his Ivy League undergraduate education. And, I asked, what was he studying? Environmental sciences. Ah, I said…that’s an interesting and certainly timely field of study: had he been of a technical or scientific bent in high school? Not really. Did he enjoy studying the sciences? Not really. Was he taking any scientific courses, like physics, biology or chemistry? Not really. In fact, he really wasn’t very interested in “hard” sciences at all and did not plan on studying any of them. So…what did he plan to do with an “environmental sciences” degree? Go to law school. He wanted to make policy, you understand. He was going to make the world a better place.

So, in an age where everything involving the environment demands a basic scientific knowledge, whether it be understanding the engineering challenges of alternative energy; the underlying geophysics, chemistry and biology of climate change; or the physics, engineering and biology needed to address the Gulf oil spill disaster, the term “environmental sciences” has now been degraded at the Ivy League level to a hack policy-making discipline where know-nothings can expound their ideologies free from the tyranny of facts.

I have a degree in one of the "hard" sciences and I get terribly frustrated by the liberal arts majors who have an easy, and wrong answer for everything.

If we are left to wonder why the government is so absolutely inept at dealing with real-life disasters, perhaps it is because “policy” has become politics divorced from material reality. It has become lazy: it’s so much easy to huff and puff utopian ideals and solutions when one need not trifle with facts and consequences. Solutions appear so much simpler when distilled down to simplistic “just plug that d*mn hole!” rhetoric and blithe “solar and wind power” propositions.

I want to make these a-holes walk to work, write with pencils, read by candlelight, cook on wood stoves, take cold showers, live in un-airconditioned houses, and grow their own food in the backyard. Anyone who has lived through the results of an extended power outage knows how fragile our pampered lives are and how much we depend on cheap, reliable energy to live in the comfort we have become accustomed to.  And no, dammit, the answer is not windmills.