How to get politicians and policymakers to care about the environment
because our planet is literally dying
Okay Mr. Trump, if that statement is true and you honestly believe that it is a made up thing, then can you please explain to me how there are frequent water shortages, more hurricanes in the Southeast and the Caribbean and more drought and wildfires in the Southwest?
The fact is, a lot of people, not only Donald Trump, do not believe that climate change is a thing. Nonetheless think that anything that has to do with the planet as an ecosystem is a problem in the world. We are stuck in this type of thinking where if we do not see the effects of something right away, then it is not really a thing to be concerned about. But that is not the type of thinking we should have, at all.
As I thoroughly described in my past article “It’s not that slow,” slow violence is real and is super prevalent in our world today. Slow violence is a term that was introduced by Rob Nixon that means “violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous but instead incremental, whose calamitous repercussions are postponed for years or decades or centuries.” He writes about the injustices of slow violence and how “insignificant” they are to policymakers and everyday people that really do not know anything about the environment and how what we do is killing the planet slowly, but surely. He poses the question in his text about slow violence “how can leaders be goaded to avert catastrophe when the political rewards of their actions will be reaped on someone else’s watch, decades, even centuries from now?” And this is true. No one in the higher up is going to care about even trying to make an effort to fix the earth if they see no extrinsic rewards to it — they might feel like if they do something for the environment, they might not get credited for it, or they might not get money or anything like that.
People want to be immortalized, especially people like Donald Trump that are so power hungry. They are not going to help the cause that will give them no immediate recognition, so how do we turn this problem around?
Well, I have a solution for that.
The first step we need to take to get policymakers and politicians to care about the environment is to go out and vote for these problems, because if we do not do this and do not care enough about these environmental issues, then neither will our policymakers or politicians. By going out and voting for environmental issues, they will be brought to light and will most likely gain attention from the people who are in the higher ups and most likely be a priority for them.
The second and probably more hard step to implement is to give politicians extrinsic rewards for making these policy changes on the environment. By having a politician or a policymaker make an effective effort to cultivate something that will change and better our environment, they can get monetary incentives, or even a trip to anywhere they would like to go to. But to someone like Donald Trump, who could have anything he wants whenever he wants, what would this type of reward do for him? He does not need more money, and he can go to wherever he wants to go. How do we motivate these type or people to care about the environment?
This takes us to the third step — giving the person honor whenever the solution is fixed. Let’s suppose that Donald Trump started a company that dealt with climate change, specifically droughts across the nation. The goal of this company would be to give clean water to people who need it, in places where water is scarce and unclean. This company does not automatically stop all the droughts or water problems in general, but over time it becomes more and more effective and ten years after Trump’s presidency, the water crisis has been solved, due to developments of the company and how they improve on Trump’s initial idea. Donald Trump would still get recognition for his start up company — if it were not for him addressing that particular problem, many areas would probably still be in a drought or have unclean water. So he would get some recognition for this idea.
Slow violence is going to catch up to us one day or another, and we are not going to have a way to stop it unless we start taking action on it now. We need to let our voices be heard all over the country and of the world, and let the politicians know that the environment should be in the top tier of problems we need solutions for.
