A Personal Opinion on Power and Its Impact on Environmental and Social Issues

All forms of power are interconnected. The same people who hold massive amounts of economic power very often hold equal amounts of social power. Of course, I’m not implying large amounts of power in one facet of life makes or entitles that person to most, if not all other forms of power, but that seems to be the general mindset in America. Instead of listening to experts on social, economic, ecological, and natural resources, the trend is to listen to listen to the most economically or socially powerful person unquestioningly.

The fact that this is such a common trend is a bit worrying.

Power in one facet of life doesn’t immediately translate to knowledge on a subject. Take Donald Trump or Al Gore, for example. If those two had less economic power, they’d likely be ignored. Instead, due to their economic power, they’re listened to more than less powerful but more knowledgeable experts on subjects. It’s generally uncommon to see someone who’s economically powerful and nothing else.

Power comes in a sort of “package deal” a majority of the time. In the same way that women’s issues and environmental issues are similar in many ways, the people perpetuating these issues are also similar in many ways. Due to the fact that a majority of people in power are men, it’s not surprising to find out that women only made up 19 Heads of State in 2015 (UN, Power and Decision Making, 2015). This means most of the time, women have little or no say in what happens to the country.

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The people who do have a say are usually backed by corporations, giving them more incentive to remain in this unequal power struggle. When one entity or one web of corporations has control over the world we all inhabit, the only ones who benefit are the rich. Not only do those corporations get to decide what the world sees, hears, and thinks, they also get control over things people assume are theirs. Food, water, electricity, belongs to the corporation who creates it and makes you pay for it, not the person paying for it. The world’s population needs to begin to learn how to sustain itself. Though many factors in the world are out of our control, food, among other things, isn’t. If a person began to eat home-grown vegetables instead of buying vegetables from a supermarket, for example, the power that corporations have over that person is lessened, if not the tiniest bit. In the film Arise, we see sustainable public gardens popping up in massive cities such as Denver, and even in small, rural places like Dehadun, India, and we see the amazing effect those gardens have on communities.

In Denver, large portions of the home grown food go to elementary schools. Not only does that help students and staff eat cleaner, but it is also just another step toward dismantling the power structures America has in place. It’s not a feasible thing to ask the entirety of the world to change, to pull the rug out from under these powerful entities that control us. However, I feel that it’s feasible to suggest small changes that can at the absolute least improve your individual life, and at the most, continuing to help chip away at the massive structure of power that we previously believed was written in stone. Even the smallest gesture, such as growing an herb garden in your window, can begin a chain of other gestures, all becoming more powerful as they continue to evolve. Reflections and Real Life Parallels As a relatively young teenager, I spent a few years as an advocate for P.E.T.A. While misinformed on that organization’s beliefs, I still enthusiastically helped with protests, demonstrations, anything that I could volunteer for in the area. Causes I helped canvas against included the treatment of elephants in the Ringling Brother’s Circus, the mistreatment of animals for fast food restaurants including KFC and McDonalds. I even spent four years as a vegan, because I couldn’t stand to look at meat after being so involved with animal rights. Since finding out how corrupt P.E.T.A is, I have yet to get back into animal and environmental activism, but the subject is still something I care deeply about.