Lazy Sunday's

Maniates makes the argument that main stream environmentalist theories do not encompass the problems of the environment and thus allows Americans to slip into the habit of apathy and lazyness when it comes to matters of the environment. Maniates states that there are certain things we can do to change our impact on the environment, but they are not enough. For example he states “Avoiding the worst risks of climate change…may require reading U.S. carbon emissions by 80 percent in the next 30 years” (Maniates). The US is not embracing environmental change and damage, and instead of important environmentalist being aggressive about the world’s fate: they produce stories like “It’s Easy Being Green” or “The Lazy Environmentalist,” which shows an unrealistic approach to environmental change. Maniates states that we can not afford to be the lazy environmentalist, these problems need to be fixed now.

I do agree with Maniates argument comparing the environmental movement to Civil Rights. Where would we be if MLK gave a speech on the easy way to not being a racist? We need to be realistic and take a tuff stand on reducing our impact on the world. At the same time, I think that Maniates could have given some advice on how to heads towards a tuff environmental policy in the US. It is pretty obvious that we are not realistically headed in that direction and we are going to need large social changes to get people to stop consuming at this rate. I think its important to come up with large dynamic environmental plans, when writing articles like these, because at least the article gives you some direction of where to go from here. The reader knows that we have to reduce carbon emissions, but we don’t know how to get policies changed in the US.

-Tracey Swan