Save the People First — Why Fixing Society is the Most Important Conservation Project
If everyone just focused on the same thing, making people the healthiest and best versions of themselves, then wouldn’t everything else we care about take care of itself? That’s something that I always think about, and it’s the first thing I thought when I opened the latest issue of Nature Conservancy and read a note from the Colorado State Director about a project in Pueblo, CO to save the Southern High Plains.
Just the other day I was talking to a participant at a We Don’t Waste mobile food market (where we distribute food recovered from retail stores for free to people in need) about his time growing up in Pueblo, and how dangerous it is. He told me he was stabbed twice, and shot as many times, while trying to break up fights. Although he was never a gang banger, gang banging was one of a few options growing up in Pueblo. His brother did turn to gangs and is doing time in prison as a result. Pueblo has one of the highest crime rates in the United States. The crime rate in Pueblo is 4 times the rate in Colorado and the United States.
So when I read about efforts to save the Southern High Plains, which to be clear encompasses more than the areas surrounding Pueblo, and think about what this 35 year old latin man who telling me, I just wonder what the more important project is? Which project is going to pay bigger dividends in the long run? Fighting to conserve nature, or fighting to improve the lives of the people? For me, all the money we spend on the symptoms of the disease is money wasted.
Nature is under attack because society is broken. Chronic disease is rampant and on the rise because society is broken. Drug addiction, homelessness, and mental illness are major issues in every major city because society is broken. So is the most effective way to protect nature by pouring billions of dollars into a system that’s broken, or does it make more sense to pour billions into trying to actually fix the system? Does it make more sense to invest billions of dollars into drugs that treat (not cure) disease, or invest in the system that’s making them sick in the first place? Invest in homelessness, mental health, and substance abuse, or invest in fixing the system that creates these circumstances?
Protecting the Southern High Plains, protecting the planet, is a great thing, but if most of the population is too sick, depressed, stressed, poor, overworked, to enjoy it and care about it, then really what difference does it make? If the majority of the population is too burdened to worry about nature and the impact that their actions and the actions of others has, then will we ever actually make a dent, or will we always just going to be fighting an uphill battle? As long as most people don’t even have the basic necessities to survive and thrive, then nature and the bigger picture that is the interconnectedness of us all is never going to matter, and protecting the environment is never going to be on the top of most people’s minds.
My guess is that the people of Pueblo, and every town and city across America like Pueblo, would love for some organization to come and protect them the way we protect plains, oceans, rivers, mountain ranges. My guess is that if we protected all the people then all the people would be incentivized to protect nature. If we protected all the people first, then we would all have enough capacity to hold the companies accountable who do the most damage to the planet. We would all be in a position to demand change from our lawmakers.
I don’t know if my theory is right, but I do know that the current path we’re on, the fragmented and disjointed approach to solving the worlds problems, is definitely not working. And therefore maybe it’s time to make a change. I think if you save the people first, and give them hope, then they will instinctively want to save nature, and do all the things we currently fight in silos to accomplish. Because at the end of the day if we can strip away all the noise and ailments that modern society piles on us we’ll realize that we are nature, and that we are worth protecting.