"The spirit of capitalism is the spirit of an irreverent exploitation of nature, conceived as a treasure-house of riches that will guarantee everything that might be regarded as the good life/1... Greed of the sort that pillages Earth is a form of the will-to-power -- particularly flagrant sin in the modern era." /2
-- Reinhold Niebuhr, 1941
Earth's resources cannot be misused or abused to the extent that present and future generations are left inhaling more toxins than oxygen, are drinking slime rather than H2O, or having to defend themselves against those whose stomachs growl more loudly than those whose food they would kill to steal. Caring for the environment is a means to achieve the survival of Earth's present population.
For that reason alone, environmental sustainability must not only be sought for, but fought for.
Here is just a sample of what we're up against: The Environmental Protection Agency is about to issue new rules to assure the availability of safer drinking water across America. The oil, gas and coal lobbies joined by the Farm Bureau are up in arms. They complain that the rules would serve to reduce their profits if they were to be required to conduct their drilling, mining, transport and waste disposal in a responsible manner. Avoiding the central issue, the lobbyists insist that the proposed rules are nothing more than "a federal overreach." Conservatives in Congress are quick to agree.
It calls to mind the Texas legislator who recently introduced a bill that would allow the reintroduction of more fatty foods in school lunches in defiance of federal guidelines notably advocated by Michelle Obama. "It's not the French fries. It's freedom," saith he.
The effete way to seek environmental sustainability is something like going to confession periodically and, after the promise of a few Hail Marys and Our Fathers, to be given absolution and to hear the most na�ve words ever spoken by one human being to another: "Go and sin no more."
Even Henry David Thoreau couldn't do it. He would sojourn at Walden Pond pretending to have found a sustainability of sorts, but only if he could repair to his mother's abode for a frequent dinner.
I have known people who signed on to one of those frontier-like things whereby they agreed to be dropped off in some wilderness or another with not much more than a sharp knife and sufficient raiment to brave inclement weather plus a few rations. There they sojourned for some days and nights eating what could be plucked from tree or bush, or pierced and skinned with the knife. Out they came at the end, ruddy, happily soiled and headed for the nearest motel to luxuriate in a hot shower.
Of them I can only say that I am amazed and envious, all the while knowing that I could not bring myself to do what they had done, in that I am so very much like the lot of us who are not about to abandon the hot air furnace, central air conditioning, electric lights, the comfortable automobile and the thousand and one conveniences and comforts that have come to define life on Earth for the fortunate. Taking one of us with the other, it is clear that we do not feel pressure to give up much of what we enjoy, knowing that any social consensus to do so is far from being realized.
In the dictionary at my desk, "environment" means "that which encircles or surrounds." The sense is that we cannot escape it. We ourselves are part of that which surrounds us. We're it. We imbibe it. It interacts with us. With every breath we take, it enters us. With every exhalation, we breathe into it. With every step we take into a forest, other bio-forms are affected. With every discharge we cause to be made in any body of water, other life forms are affected.
As Joan Cook (no relation), a Michigan thinker and writer, puts it: "We are actually a biological village on two feet ... we are all made of sunshine and mud pies, treetops and sludge, eagles and worms and everything in between."
Looking at it that way, we can see that environmental sustainability is at base taking care of ourselves. It is doing no harm to ourselves. It is, therefore, doing no harm to any life form that is part of what encircles or surrounds us even as we do not wish to have harm done to ourselves by anything other life form. The Golden Rule?
Well do I remember as a boy of around 12 years old watching a neighbor walk out of his tool shed with a large axe in hand. He advanced upon a lissome birch tree, and with not more than two or three mighty strokes, he felled it. It was late summer, and the leaves on that birch were golden, its bark a mellowed white. I will tell you that I felt every blow of that axe.
It turned out that he wanted to build a table with legs of birch wood. Gone for a table he didn't need was a tree that by its very being there had awakened in my young self a sense that nature was more than just a biological-botanical happenstance and that the tree's existence was no less important than my own.
Many years later, I came across this bit of verse by Robert Frost concerning another birch tree and never forgot it: it was there to be admired, And zeal would not be thanked that cut it down ... It was a thing of beauty and was sent To live out its life as an ornament./3 Without ever having heard at that stage of my life the word "environmentalist," I became one.
Certainly some things have gone too far for amelioration in our time or in that of the next couple of generations. In some ways, parts of the planet are so damaged that it would take a very long time for them to be restored, if restored they could ever be. That means our desire for their being sustained must be rethought and remodeled.
Of course, we must tend to the simple tasks of conservation. But also and just as important, we have to look to the world of electoral politics and join with groups whose leaders understand that until elections are separated from money, and campaigns consist of aspiration based on information rather than base schoolyard taunts, the environment will be at risk. Soulless men will still cut down the tender birch. Oil, gas and coal interests will continue to lay pipelines under precious rivers, streams and farmland, and blow off the tops of purple mountain majesties, oblivious of the ruin that results.
It is, in a way, war. Seeking environmental sustainability is one thing. Fighting for it is another.
1/ Nature and Destiny. New York, NY. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1941. 20
2/ Nature and Destiny. 191
3/ "A Young Birch." Complete Poems. New York, NY. Henry Holt and Company, 1957. 517
This essay is an abstract of a lecture given at C3Exchange in Grand Haven, Michigan, on May 24, 2015.
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