A living wage

We were recently discussing conservation salaries with a professionally environmentalist friend of ours. This person is the executive director of a non-profit and was saying how it is important to pay people a "living wage" for their work, a competitive salary to keep the best and brightest in the field.

Well, we've never been the kind of people who are conservationists for money, and our definition of "living wage" has changed a lot as we've seen how few wages people can live on. Besides, "living wage" basically means "middle class" existence in this context, and many environmental problems are actually caused by the middle class. The super rich cause a lot of problems because of how they got super rich, but it was middle class spending that let them float to the top of the pyramid. Rich people cause fewer environmental problems simply because there are less of them. The middle class ambitions of gadgets and big houses and sprawl and swimming pools and SUVs and Victoria's Secret inspire poor countries and poor counties to fall all over themselves (and the environment) to facilitate production and development of these consumer goods, in the hope they will rise up to the middle class themselves. It's a vicious cycle.

But back to ragging on enviros: It seems as though some people basically work as environmentalists to have their cake and eat it too: that is, to work all year on climate change issues and then, when their two weeks of vacation roll around, fly off to some island to snorkel and see the corals before they bleach. Sure, they might buy their carbon offsets in order to feel better about their trip.

And we know how well those work.