Imagining the American Community Environmental Services: A Vision for Environmentalists and Elders

A new institution would foster engagement and results. More than twenty years ago, the noted bioethicist Daniel Callahan castigated gerontologists and other advocates for the aged for having brainwashed older Americans by "modernizing" old age. The agenda of gerontologists, he said, "was to project the process of aging as utterly diverse and individual, the aged as varied (like any other age group), and old age as a time of renewed vigor, growth, self discovery, and contributions to the community; a time of vigorous engagement, not disengagement" (Callahan, 1987, p. 35). In contrast to his gerontological villains, Callahan envisioned for older people "their own unique and valued role" [which] "can be achieved only through recognition that old age is the last phase of life, that it cannot go on for long, and that death is on the way" (p. 49). More recently, he has buttressed this vision by proposing that the National Institutes of Health stop funding research on diseases that predominantly kill people age 65 and older (Callahan, 2000). In this article, we firmly cast our lot with those Callahan called "modernizing" gerontologists rather than with him. We sketch the outlines of a new institutional arrangement intended to promote extensive engagement of older Americans in contributions to their communities throughout the nation. More specifically, we envision a substantial role for the present generation (and future generations) of older Americans in combating climate change and protecting and improving the environment in a variety of other ways. We imagine the creation of an organization we would call the American Community Environmental Services, which would deploy large cadres of older people and some younger people, both as employees and as volunteers, in careers devoted to achieving short- and long-term environmental goals. The Rationales Our vision of American Community Environmental Services is stimulated by a confluence of long-term trends and issues that are presently coming to a head. Some of these have been noted by Karl Pillemer and Linda Wagenet (2008) in an issue of the Public Policy and Aging Report and are articulated in this issue of Generations by Pillemer and his colleagues. First, the environment has finally become a "front burner" issue. The range and significance of environmental concerns have grown substantially since Rachel Carson (1962) published Silent Spring, a book that raised environmental awareness among an unprecedented portion of the American public and helped set the stage for the environmental movement. In the many decades that have followed, the federal government's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and numerous regional, state, and local government environmental protection entities have been combating and redressing the consequences of the pesticides that Carson inveighed against, other hazardous chemicals, and a of pollutants and toxicants. Generations of school children have been educated to help conserve the environment by recycling paper, glass, and other materials. In recent years, however, a number of authoritative international scientific consensus statements regarding climate change and its global consequences, from sources such as the synthesis report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2007), have exponentially escalated our understanding of the gravity of environmental challenges we must confront in the United States and throughout the world. Climate change (which in the view of some may be irreversible within the next few years) portends future droughts, famines, and rising seas. Such potentially grave consequences of climate change have even been incorporated in the planning of the U.S. Department of Defense, the State Department, and the National Intelligence Council (Broder, 2009). Combating climate change, and other aspects of protecting and maintaining the environment, will require the active participation of large cadres of Americans- and citizens throughout the world- as well as strong governmental leadership and the development of "green" technologies and industries. …