In the past, the state of the environment was of more immediate concern to the average person, creating public support that fueled many successes. When Henry David Thoreau asked, “What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?” he was one of the first people to make us think about the connection between our individual lifestyles and our use of nature.

Sentiments like Thoreau’s led to the creation of the national park system as a place where average Americans could escape the rigors of city life and enjoy our planet’s beauty.

The boom years of environmentalism during the 1960s and ‘70s were caused in large part by individual concerns over the unappealing state of the environment. From the Dust Bowl to DDT to last year’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the U.S. has a long tradition of public concern causing important advances in environmental protection.

The global scale of environmentalism today has diminished that old feeling of individual relevance, though, and therefore, the public support needed to fuel reform also has diminished. The effects of climate change cannot be seen in local communities such as litter and smog can be.

To make up for this, activists use things such as buzzwords and pictures of dying polar bears to make people sympathize with this global problem. However, these images never can create the same individual concern that seeing a local park poisoned does.

Therefore, the environmental movement today does not garner the same concern from average citizens that it once did and needs to do again.

This distancing of environmental issues from the minds of average Americans has affected the cause negatively in numerous ways. At the top, political leaders do not see environmental concerns as pressing to their constituents and therefore find it easy to write off the entire issue. At the bottom, individuals are not motivated to change their daily habits in environmentally supportive ways.

Rather, individuals see environmentalism as a topic for U.N. conferences and the depths of academia. This distancing effect then is detrimental to the advancement of environmental causes at all levels.

It would be easy to mistake me as overly idealistic and against educating the public on global matters like climate change. However, I realize people must be made aware of the global nature of climate change and that there has always been difficulty in getting a majority behind environmental causes.

For environmental progress to be made, though, public concern must once again be roused in the face of these difficulties.

The only way to do this is by reconciling the global scale of environmental problems today with the average person’s inability to find relevance in such cosmopolitan concerns. To once again gain the support of the public, environmentalism today must be presented differently. People must be shown that taking action in their own lives and communities is beneficial in the fight against such global specters as climate change.

Although it’s clichéd, the starting point for changing these ideas is in the classroom. Maybe teaching more about events such as the burning of the Cuyahoga River, the recent oil spill in the Kalamazoo River or the toxic stamp sands of the Keweenaw Peninsula would help foster this local connection. Various other sympathetic groups also could make the individual connection to these problems the focus of their awareness campaigns.

Closing the distance people feel between themselves and the land can be done by anything that makes us understand the planet’s health to be a consequence of our local efforts and individual habits.

Wherever it comes from, the best way to raise awareness about environmental problems is by fostering a feeling of individual connection to these international problems. Now, environmentalism is buried in buzzwords and cosmopolitan ideals that can’t relate to the average citizen. However, with a small shift in the environmental discourse throughout time, this issue could be brought to the forefront of the national consciousness, right up there with the economy.

Public doubt could turn to public support if we all just could be made to realize what we do in our own backyards is an important part of what happens to our planet.

Christian Hokans is a State News guest columnist. Reach him at hokansch@msu.edu.