Forum aims at Utah Valley environment

Utah Valley's only locally based environmental organization is taking aim at local cities.

"We need to make our elected officials more accountable," forum president Jim Westwater told those gathered. "We need to make them more aware of the environmental consequences of the decisions they are making -- and not making."

Westwater said he has already written a letter for members to distribute to local cities, but would like Forum members, over the next few months, to make presentations to the respective councils in the cities where they live.

In an interview after the meeting, Westwater said the idea "grows out of a need." In his own community of Spanish Fork, for example, there is no recycling and the city continues to support coal-fired power plants, he said, noting he believes city officials want to do good work but often are not versed in the environmental consequences of their actions.

"Almost everything a city does has an environmental impact," he said. "We need to ask important questions of ourselves, like how does this impact the ecosystem we are a part of? How does it affect our quality of life?"

Westwater said he was not clear on how such advisory boards would fit into established municipal practices. When asked if he was advocating for a new layer of government -- for example, a review after the planning commission but before city council consideration of community development projects -- Westwater said he was not sure how the advisory boards would or could function.

"They would give environmental concern a voice," he said, noting the boards should meet regularly and poll residents for their opinions on local environmental issues.

"It seems like an awful lot of government relates to development and how are we going to grow and become more prosperous," he said. "It's the economy and dollars that seem to be the main concern. I'm not an expert in the ways cities operate, but they don't adequately take into consideration the environmental impact of their decisions."

Thursday's speaker at the Sierra Forum meeting was David Keller, an associate professor of philosophy and director of the Center for the Study of Ethics at UVSC.

Keller gave an overview of the birth of environmentalism in 1949 with the publication of Aldo Leopold's landmark book, "A Sand County Almanac." In the book, Leopold becomes the first philosopher in the Western world to say ecosystems are worthy of moral consideration.

"In the Western world that was a revolution," Keller said.

Before this philosophy was born, animals had sometimes been treated like machines, he said. Leopold wrote that man was simply a part of the food chain.

"What happened to our privilege of being at the top of the food chain, just below the angels?" Keller said. "We are in the food chain with bears and squirrels. He is looking at what our ecological importance is."

This land ethic, as Leopold called it in the book, has ramifications for all human activity, Keller said.

"We have fabricated 100,000 chemicals that do not occur in nature," Keller said, referring to the Web site StoryofStuff.com, which Forum members viewed before Keller's speech. The Web site maps where consumer goods come from and where they go after disposal, and advocates for sustainable consumerism.

In the end, Leopold teaches that an action can be judged as right when it preserves the community, not the individual, Keller said.

"We have a new ethic, and that ethic is that actions are right in so far as they are ecosystemically beneficial," Keller said. "It is a non-economical argument. Aldo Leopold is suggesting we found public policy not on economics but on ecology... Framing public policy only on economy is short-sighted and unwise, and instead we need to frame the economy on the lessons of the science of ecology."