You can't always get what you want,
But if you try sometimes, you just might find,
You get what you need.
As environmentalists, we need to consider the difference between wants and needs. For example, we all need food, but do we need high-fat, processed, sugar-laced snacks that come to us in petroleum-based plastic wrapping, or in energy-gobbling aluminum foil? Do we need exotic fruits and vegetables brought from thousands of miles away, halfway around the world even? We all need housing, but do we need housing constructed from rapidly diminishing stocks of Redwood and Douglas Fir? We all need transportation, but do we need to drive the heavy gas-guzzling automobiles, pickups, RV's and the like that fill up our highways? Do we need to suck from the bowels of the earth the carbon that we use to fuel those monsters, thus transferring that carbon to the atmosphere at a rate which will undoubtedly suffocate us all within a century? Of course we don't need those things. We want them.
If we are to have any hope of reversing the downward spiral of the life-support system on spaceship Earth, we're going to have to clear up the industry-induced confusion between what we want and what we really need and we're going to have to get real about fulfilling our real needs and trimming back our wants.
We hear a lot about "quality of life," and issues connected thereto. But for most of us that seems to mean the ability to drive two blocks for a pack of gum or a bar of soap, to hang around the house in a t-shirt on a freezing day, to take our refrigerators and our telephones and our television sets and our cooling fans with us when we go camping in the "wild." Can we rethink that?
Instead of requiring three-car garages and sea bass from Chile, cannot "quality of life" mean the adequacy for everybody of the kinds of things we really need?
Can we not fulfill our "quality of life" needs by ensuring that all children have diets adequate for full growth; that there are no more homeless on our streets because there is adequate housing for all; that we can get health care at a cost which we as a society and as individuals can afford; that we are clothed in ways which don't involve the super-exploitation of children in faraway places; and that we can get from one place to another without paving the universe and filling our atmosphere with greenhouse gases?
Yes, we can do that. But we won't, unless a lot more people learn to make the distinction between what they want and what they need.
The environmental struggle involves many fronts: cleaning up the air, cleaning up the water, preserving the forests and lakes and rivers and fields that sustain us, protecting the wild from the encroachments of "civilization;" the list goes on and on. But behind almost all of those issues lurk the basic questions: what do we really need and how can we bring what we want into closer association with what we really need? And that applies from the local to the global.
Copyright Mendocino Environmental Center 1997
Permission granted to excerpt or use this article if source is cited