Commentary: Why All The Hostility Towards Environmental Action?
I’m confused (which is pretty much my natural state).
Before going any further, I have to admit that until I started paying attention to the research and development of alternative fuels with my two websites, I was paying little attention to environmental issues.
There’s no real excuse for that, so none is offered. A chance phone conversation with an old high school chum in the Midwest sparked my interest in ethanol and, eventually, the entire alternative fuels picture. That led to my establishing two websites: one a collection of links to news stories on research and development of alternative fuels; the other a podcast site covering the same topics. That’s when I first paid attention to the immensity of our environmental problems.
On April 1st of this year, a misunderstanding on my part led me to Green Options, and my eyes have been opened even further. And that has led to this state of not understanding the hostility some people have to cleaning up our environment.
What can it hurt to use less electricity, burn less gasoline by driving less, developing and using alternatives to fossil fuels, saving our forests, cleaning up our waterways and oceans? You and I know the drill here, so what can be so wrong that some local, state and federal lawmakers, to name only a few of a long list of dissenters, oppose our efforts? Do they have something to gain from our living in what is slowly becoming a toxic wasteland? Is it politics, money, power, a way to get noticed, or have they just been blind-sided by the promises of big industry and big profits? Maybe it’s a combination of all of that, but in any case, at the best, it's irresponsible.
A glaring case in point, the recent actions of Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn(R). Even today, 45 years after Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring
Carson's biographer Linda Lear, in response to Coburn's actions, stated that "Rachel Carson never called for DDT ban", or that pesticides never be used. She simply advocated for the responsible use of synthetic chemical pesticides. The United States banned the use of DDT in 1972, but not the manufacture or export of the chemical. It has and is being used in many countries, including Africa as we said, with somewhat limited results especially on mosquitoes that carry infectious diseases like malaria. They adapted quickly and have become resistant to DDT. Yet Coburn continues to beat his anti-Carson malaria-death drum.
This continuing knee-jerk reaction to Silent Spring by chemical companies and some of our lawmakers confounds me, especially after all these years. Some have said her book so aroused public awareness of synthetic chemicals and their impact on our environment that public pressure resulted in establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Could that be part of the reason?
We've all witnessed the scorn heaped on the efforts of so-called “tree huggers”. Environmentalists have been branded as “nut cases”, and Al Gore has been accused of trying to create a panic with his movie An Inconvenient Truth
On the matter of global warming, let's give mother earth her due: she too has moods. Our planet is, after all, a living thing, constantly evolving as it has since its fiery beginning. My purpose here is not to debate global warming or offer any conclusions: there's enough going around without my input.
It all comes back to the same thing: what’s wrong with doing some industrial-strength house cleaning? Who is threatened, and why is there so much hostility? Or is it not so much a case of threat, as it is something we seem to have a lot of in this country?
It reminds me of a panel from cartoonist Wiley Miller, who's Non Sequitur is one of my favorites. It portrays two men sitting in a bar, one with a drink in his hand and a dour look on his face. He's watching the TV set on the back bar, with a smiling news commentator displaying a large arrow pointing downward. Around a bend in the bar is another man, a big smile on his face, his hand clutching a mug of beer. He says, "Yeah, I used to get depressed watching the news, too. Then I discovered the miracle of apathy." Is this who we are?
It took more than 4-billion years to create this beautiful planet, and we've managed to trash it in slightly more than a century. We call it progress (and in some ways it is), but in our rush to have more as quickly as possible, we've ignored our moral obligation to provide responsible stewardship of our environment. It just may be that we are the only sentient life forms in the entire, limitless cosmos. What a shame it would be if we destroyed ourselves by depleting our home of its natural resources, and failing to clean up our messes. Life would flicker out, and no one would notice. Our world would be empty, spinning aimlessly in the black void, a remnant of our carelessness. Humanity would never have existed; there would be no legacy to pass on.
How very sad that would be.
Additional Resources:
Wikipedia: Rachel Carson
The Time 100: Rachel Carson
Senator Coburn (R-OK)
May 28th, 2007 at 7:36 pm
I have heard some very prominent politicians claim that the environment doesnt need to be saved because Christ is going to come back and take all the Christians away to Never-Never land (obviously they dont put it quite like this, but the message is the same). Apparently, We are incapable of destroying ourselves. Only A diety can do that.
Of course we all KNOW if we look deep into our hearts that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is the One True God, so of course all that talk about Christ comeing back is nonsense.
May 31st, 2007 at 6:45 pm
Max,
This is a great question. I have a thought that is a bit from left field but seems to fit the emotional reaction to all this. The best book on existential psychology is “Denial of Death” by Becker (he was dying of cancer as he wrote it.) He posits that the denial of death is a major force in our lives. We work to separate ourselves from the animal world of eat and be eaten. The more we control our environment, the farther we can push this animal reality from our minds. In a most interesting point, he says the longer we live, the more we fear and avoid death. The more comfortable we are, the harder it is to allow the ugly side on nature in. Why does so much of science fiction depict protective cocoons..
To admit we have an obligation to the natural world, to admit that we are part of the natural world including death, to admit that our actions can produce our own death is intolerable. Better to be irrational, deny and get angry.
I’m not sure that this possible insight brings us any closer to a plan of action. It does show that we are pushing against powerful emotional issues.
June 3rd, 2007 at 2:45 pm
Rachel Carson’s 100th birthday remembrance certainly brought out a diversity of viewpoints. Was she a visionary who eliminated toxic chemicals from America’s environment, or was she a crack pot whose radical actions are responsible for millions of malarial deaths?
I hope that the 200th anniversary of her birthday will put her accomplishments into proper perspective. In a day in which any chemical that could be safely manufactured and used was approved, she pointed out environmental and human health problems of persistent organic pollutants (POPs), chemicals designed to kill, occurring beyond their manufacture and use points. The process of democracy at its finest allowed the analysis, debate and banning of these chemicals over two decades. There is no other arena in history where man has reversed a technological course for environmental reasons. Yea human race!
The use of PCB, DDT, toxaphene, chlordane, heptachlor, Lindane, Aldrin, Dieldrin, hexachlorocyclohexane and hexachlorobenzene were banned in the developed countries because they were suspected of causing cancer or were acutely toxic in the environment. Yea Rachel!
As these bans were pursued in developing countries, argument focused upon malarial vector (mosquito) control. Why? The real battle should have been the use of DDT in general agriculture. When developing countries banned agricultural DDT, what did they use to control pests? Toxaphene? Banning DDT on grains and its discriminate use for mosquito control would avoid the spread of DDT in dangerous quantities and controlled mosquitoes. The DDT ban fight became a smokescreen for the use of all the other POPs.
Now toxaphene, probably the most used pesticide on the planet, circulates through the air from its uses in developing countries and pollutes cold, clear waters from the northern Great Lakes to the Arctic. Lake Superior, a lake the size of the state of Maine with depths going to below sea level … its waters if spilled over the continental United States would cover the area to a depth of six feet … is frightfully polluted with foreign toxaphene. Its trout harbor 5 parts per million of toxaphene, ten times the level that would classify them as hazardous waste!
Arctic polar bear and killer whales are on the edge of survival or decimated by “banned” pesticides and PCBs. PCBs and pesticides circulate through our air in hundreds of millions of molecules per breathful quantities … amounts that are now being connected to asthma, diabetes and cancer. Inuit ingest 15X a tolerable quantity of poisons.
Rachel Carson was on the right track. Unfortunately, her work is not complete and the planet is still at risk. See the web site coldclearanddeadly.com for more details.
August 23rd, 2007 at 7:59 pm
What you fail to see is that many “treehugger” environmentalists are often naive, short-sighted, and often self-serving with their propositions.
Take the anti-diesel groups in California. Many want to ban large diesel-powered semi trucks in the name of pollution reduction. These same people do not want to ban diesel powered cars or RVs. Semi trucks travel across the country and banning them in California would have interesting effects. Either California gets no pickups and deliveries, or trucking companies have to buy trucks that will only be used in California.
Environmentalists used scare tactics to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt about nuclear power. That has kept the nuclear power plants from being built in the United States for decades. They also are working against coal plants. I ask them and you where will the electricity come from? Solar cells which last less than 20 years and are not efficient enough to provide for everyone? Wind power which is inconsistent, noisy, and kill birds? And what of the industrial waste from the creation of those items? Where will the electrical power you use come from?
Take statements such as this: “It took more than 4-billion years to create this beautiful planet, and we’ve managed to trash it in slightly more than a century.” If it took more than 4 billion years to create this planet, why do environmentalists only look at the last 100,000 years or so and call it “normal”? That is not even a statistically significant time frame.
Then, there are the militant environmentalists who burn homes, sabotage equipment, and endanger the lives of people. People who would harm humans at the expense of animals. People who would impose their extreme moral code on others People who physically attack those that do not follow their extreme morality.
95% of all life on Earth has been wiped out in the past. And, yet, life is abundant now. You speak as though the end of humanity would be the end of all life on Earth, but that is wrong. Even the end of all mammalian and reptilian life, would be less than all life on Earth. Life finds a way. Life goes on. Life on Earth will not flicker out until Sol goes Nova in a few of billion years; time enough for another intelligent species to evolve.
Environmentalists are their own worst enemy. They propose drastic, costly action with no concern for how the action will harm or cost others. They are abusive and violent and then justify their violence and intolerance with a philosophy that places animals before people. You and your ilk show an arrogance that is beyond the pale and then wonder why you are, at best considered annoying and at worst despised.