Ann McElhinney

I had a very difficult time watching Ann McElhinney's presentation tonight without standing in protest. I found her comments to be hypocritical and on many occasions extremely rude.

McElhinney began her speech with a story of Greenpeace and their work to stop a mine. She said the people lied to the general public in an effort to stop the mine from being dug. When asked why they did it, they said that they lied because they cared about the land and didn't want to see the land destroyed. In mentioning this she was preaching against the role that emotion plays in our environmental decisions. The remainder of her speech was then focused on her own personal views and opinions and how she feels about environmental problems in the world. Countless times she mentioned that it is hard for poor people to care about the environment because they have more important things to worry about like getting food and water and avoiding disease. Her primary example of this is children dying of Malaria in Africa because DDT was not being used to repel mosquitoes. DDT was not being used as a result of the harmful effects noticed by environmentalists like Rachel Carson. When asked about an environmental problem facing our world today, she would respond by asking essentially why that issue matters when parents are losing children to Malaria in Africa because the rest of the world tells them not to use DDT. For a person who thinks emotion has no role in our attitudes towards the environment, her own environmental views seem to be heavily influenced by her own emotions.

McElhinney also made a statement that she liked the "stuff" she had and enjoyed the material wealth that our society has brought to her. She likes her Macintosh computer, her washing machine and other material possessions. She mentions that all the environmentalists she saw at a conference were all at a convention speaking against mining and seemed to be oblivious to the fact that mining made the computers that they were using. Her primary concern, after all, is the children dying of Malaria in Africa and their suffering parents. It seems to me that if she knew about the children in developing nations who are being born with birth defects because of contaminated water that results from the recycling of scrap metal from computers, she may not enjoy her Macintosh computer quite as much any more.

Finally, I must say, that I was extremely disappointed in her critique of both our university and the abbot of St. John's. She criticized him for disagreeing with Genesis and thought that disagreeing with the Bible should be extremely offensive to the Catholic faith and that challenging the Catholic faith is behavior unbecoming of a man of God. She then proceeded to discus the problem with "the year of sustainability" and how the students paying for the initiatives of moving towards carbon neutrality had no say in the matter. If every student had to be in support of an on-campus initiative as she seems to be suggesting, their would be no events on campus, including her own speech. Students pay money for events on campus that they don't care about all the time. Apparently, environmental initiatives are the exceptions to the rule.

I hope that this post does not come off as derogatory, I simply meant it as a critique of the presentation. Ultimately, everything in life is about perception and perspective. It seems to me that Ann McElhinney, like the rest of the world (myself included), has a specific perspective based on the facts she has at her disposal. Her speech did a great job of raising awareness of the issue of Malaria and DDT use in Africa and in that respect was extremely helpful. I felt the problem with the speech was that the narrow focus on a single issue was used to assert the relevance of other issues. Each issue deserves its own consideration even if another issue seems to be more pressing. Each individual person has a perspective on what they would consider the most pressing issue of the day. Each issue deserves its own attention rather than ranking the issues on some sort of scale of importance and handling them in order.