What Kind of Idiots Are We?

The weather has finally broken here in the Great American Desert. It is far too early, but after a spell of frigidness, hearing the birds chirping and watching the snow melt away and feeling the sun actually warm on your back puts one in a mind of Spring. That’s where my mind was this weekend, throwing the ball to Parker in the back yard.  It was a joy to feel like the outdoors wasn’t trying to kill me for a change, but I am certain that some more bone chilling is on the way some time before April.

No, the outdoors isn’t trying to kill us, at least not anymore than it ever has been since mankind first hopped down out of the trees. The planet doesn’t necessarily have it in for us—it has it in for every living thing. Life is harsh. Weather, of course, is just the half of it. The whole circle of life or the whole system, if you will, is fraught with peril.  Predators search for prey, parasites look for hosts, Justin Beiber looks for neighbor’s houses to egg—it is a mad and dangerous world, left to its own devices.

However, having crawled down out of the trees, mankind has sought to alter the environment as we have seen fit.  And there is little seriously denying that those alterations have made existence that much more difficult for everything on this planet, be it a beast of the soil, a bird of the air, or a fish of the desperate sea (if I may paraphrase Jolie Holland).

Global warming notwithstanding, it is no secret that industrial, agricultural, and social choices made by humans have had drastic and usually detrimental effects on the natural systems and rhythms of the planet. From the melt down of nuclear plants to the discharge of waste into waterways, from the belching of the earliest coal plants to the damming and diversion of rivers, the things that have been done on earth have clearly made it a different place. More often than not, that “different” is a negative. Sure, somebody makes money somewhere along the line, but (and, yes, I am oversimplifying) that is more often than not the only indisputable positive to be gained from mining, deforesting, harvesting, terraforming, building, flooding, carving, etc.—and the benefit of that positive is debatable in itself from a Marxist perspective (which is not the perspective I am taking, today).

It would take an encyclopedia to catalogue the destruction of our ecosystems, but, on the optimistic side, many people are working to reverse much of the damage that has been wrought.  Recently, however, a couple of incidents have reminded me that too many powerful people have no real interest in ensuring the long term health of our surroundings. First, I read a story about tailing ponds in Canada, a byproduct of the tar sands oil mining that is going on up there. Granted, the incident that I was reading about occurred four years ago, but that doesn’t really matter. The point of the story, to me, is that the tailing ponds are so toxic that migratory birds that land in them die. So, to keep the birds from landing in the ponds, the oil companies have installed ingenious devices that use radar to detect the incoming birds. When a flock of birds is detected, the devices activate a moving model of a peregrine falcon, which is meant to scare away the birds. I will admit that this is a brilliant solution to the plan. Kudos to human/Canadian ingenuity. I just wonder if the thought ever crossed the mind of anybody trying to solve the problem that maybe the whole idea of having a bunch of toxic ponds anywhere was a good idea to begin with. I know, we need the oil…but, you know what? Maybe we don’t. I mean, when does the cost become too high?

The second item that got me going on this little jeremiad was the chemical leak that ruined the entire water supply of the city of Charlestown, WVA. If that is not a sign of impending environmental apocalypse, I don’t know what is. I don’t want to sound like a Chicken Little. I try to avoid that sort of overreaction as much as possible. However, some of the more infuriating revelations of this story is that a) the holding area where the chemicals that leaked were being stored had not been inspected by regulators for 23 years, b) Freedom Industries, the company that was storing the chemicals, knew the holding structures were faulty, and c) the government was unconcerned with the chemicals being stored because they weren’t deemed dangerous enough to monitor. I will leave the righteous indignation up to you.

We are good at holding people accountable, since it makes good press and good politics, so someone will be held responsible. Someone will be fined. Someone will lose a job. Some law will be changed (or at least debated). But that won’t change the fact that an immensely preventable spill of 7500 gallons of a “non-toxic” chemical made the water supply of an entire city non-potable. I don’t want anyone to think I am about to run off and join some Ellen Page-style environmentalist terrorist group. I just get rundown by so much of what people perpetrate on this planet in the name of money, or from just plain negligence.

The irony of both of these incidents is that we wrought the damage upon ourselves (and migratory birds (and fish (and aquatic plant life (and probably insects and amoebae and paramecia and who knows what all else)))). It is hard enough to hang on to life here on earth as it is. We have survived saber-tooth tigers, ice ages, earthquakes, meteors, tsunamis, diseases, poor posture, and the 70s. But I don’t know how much more we can take. We are slowly destroying the only home we have. What kind of idiots are we?