Discuss: Environmental Amnesia

“Superfund sites are the nation’s worst toxic-waste sites. There are 1,305 of them, and they are named for the “super” fund of money put together by Congress in 1980 to clean them up, a trust that went bankrupt five years ago.”

Ah, ‘the economy’ at work on our behalf. Use-it-up and throw-it-away, and let the citizens pay for the cleanup and/or absorb the risk of living near it. I wonder how many CEOs live atop former waste sites?

I was delighted to have an apricot tree in my back yard in San Francisco, and knew from other trees in other yards that the neighborhood (Potrero Hill) had once been an orchard. It never occured to me to think about the pesticides that might have been used there. This was before the first Earth Day, and we didn’t know much. Now we do, and it may well be grief, or a need to feel in control of our lives, that makes us focus on water bottles instead of water tables.

I am so heartened by Steingraber’s insights once again.  I have heard/read people in resource development talk about how little land is truly inhabited in our nation.  There seems to be no genuine concept of how much land, i.e. watershed land, of varying qualities, is needed to support this inhabitation, at its various densities. (The cynic I am would say it is ignored, but unfortunately, in this case, I don’t think the knowledge is commonly there, either in industry or the public.) Besides alternative low polluting energy sources, we so need to focus on availability of water fit for human consumption in this nation and worldwide. A better sense of the environment and the limiting factors for a decent life I think would hasten good public policies and practices.

I was interested to see that the things the author says that Americans are more concerned with—the water bottles, the toys from China, the pesticides on fruit—are all items we buy and use, for the most part, inside our homes and offices.  it seems to me that until we start spending more time outside—playing and working—to see fields and mountains, streams and forests and rivers and animals, we will not truly see how the environment affects us no matter where we stand.  TV is not killing anything except our spirits, our waistlines, and our family relationships.  For some incredible reason, we allow these essential elements to be sacrificed.  TV seduces us ironically to remain in our closed and comforting structures where available food and the right weather influence our choices to NOT go outside so that we can watch, but not interact, with the world on many channels.  How can we worry and be responsible for and about environmental concerns if we never feel rain, never walk by a dump, never see an animal slaughtered, never ride a bicycle, never garden, never . . .?  We all need to get out more.

“Our unremembering is a wall against grief.” Indeed. When I have a asked people to remember a time when they felt the glory of the natural world, they return to childhood schoolyards, streams, bushes in the back yard. When I ask what those places are like now, I see the grief for the water that is now undrinkable, the house that has turned into a power station, the school abandoned.

Our outdoor time is less glorious now, or maybe we notice more—the constant noise of trucks and planes, the bitter smell of petroleum, the soil we’ve been told carries too much toxins to plant carrots in. So we stay indoors and fret about the water bottles and the water.

It’s time to reclaim our imperfect surroundings, to go out into the vacant lots and collect the weeds, to glory in the soot-laden sunsets. We’ll begin to take care when we let ourselves fall in love again.

Perhaps change is in the offing as a “forced-choice”.

Endless economic growth is the shibboleth of the rich and powerful in our time.  But the days of reckless domination of the Earth and its environs may be numbered, it would appear, because the idolatry, the magical thinking, the wishes and the selfish intentions that have driven endlessly expanding large-scale corporate activity and insatiable wealth accumulation could be about to run their course. The plans of the economic powerbrokers and their bought-and-paid-for politicians for ‘manufacturing’ “bubbles” and big-business boom times could lead the family of humanity to be threatened by the inadvertent loss of life as we know it and the unintentional destruction of the Earth as a fit place for human habitation by our children and coming generations.

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population,
established 2001

Virtual mountains of scientific evidence indicate that a contradiction exists between the finite physical reality of the world we inhabit and the cornucopian fantasy widely espoused by so many economists assuring us Earth is a sort of maternal presence, like an ever-expressive teat at which the human species can suckle from now onward.

Perhaps the contradiction between fantasy and reality is better posed in the form of a question about oil deposits.

Is oil a depletable natural resource with limited availability for human consumption in our time or is oil an essentially unlimited product of a planet that indefinitely can produce resources for human benefit without regard to Earth’s physical limitations?

I agree with Natalie-Parker Lawrence here.  There is a huge disconnect operating—we are now more knowledgeable about our concrete purchased items than our own literal backyards. When I taught poetry to college students and would say the word “nature,” they would tell me they had to “travel out west to see it,” completely divorced from the idea they were a part of nature, of the watershed down the road, the wooded areas filled with wildlife that define this city, the falcons nesting on the classroom building outside.  We’ve got to start teaching our children, from a young age to be stewards of the natural world and,as Sandra Steingraber pointed out, to consciously pay attention to our environment.