As aftershocks from Katrina continue to resound, and literally hundreds of people have been made aware of the environmental issues of long standing along the Gulf Coast, it amazes me that I'm still seeing people dismissing them.
I guess it shouldn't surprise me overmuch. No matter how many Manhattan-sized chunks of ice calve off the Arctic glaciers, no matter how many studies show ocean and land temperatures rising, there are those who say that global warming is bullshit.
But there was one whacko writing in the National Post today who went further. I can't tell you his name, because to read the Post online, one must already have a subscription. (Aside: what brain-dead airhead dreamed that policy up? If I wanted a subscription to a newspaper, I'd get one...to a newspaper.)
This whacko, whatever-his-name-was, started off saying that "erosion is a natural process". From there he leapt to the startling observation that environmentalism is a "pseudo-religion"... an "anti-humanist" one. Environmentalists, says the whacko, only care about nature, never about man. He insinuates that Greenpeace won't rest happily until most of the human population of the planet is dead.
This is bullshit in exactly the way global warming isn't.
Those who hold this view believe that Man is superior to Nature. Further, that it is man's sacred duty to subjugate Nature.
More bullshit. As to the first assertion, just ask the surviving New Orleansians whether Man and his works can stand in the face of Nature. And as for the second--
Well, I'm not sure we can. To subjugate, one must stand at a remove...and we are inextricably a part of Nature, not apart from it. Every time we screw around with Nature on a large scale, she comes back to bite us in the ass. Drain the wetlands along the Gulf? No problem...until a Katrina comes along. Deforest the hillsides and plains of the Middle East? No worries...until the ground turns to salt before your very eyes. Burn the rainforests? Happy farming...for a year or three, until the soil just dries up and blows away.
There may be some extreme environmentalists who truly believe that humanity is a cancerous lesion on the skin of the earth, but most of them wish only that humans would learn to walk more lightly on the land. If that means redefining our economies, is that really such of a much? I suppose it is, if you're one of the priveleged few..."few" being the operant word. There are over a billion people on this planet living in some variant of New Orleans--and most of them are seeing their environments raped by large corporations who pay them slave wages and therefore claim to be working in their interest. Yet more bullshit.
The grim reality is that the environment is deteriorating fast. This is not pessimism or whinery; neither is it speculation. Those of us with eyes can see the signs: this has been the -est year in the history of the world. You name a superlative, somebody on earth has seen it recently. The wettest, dryest, warmest, stormiest year on record. And not a one-off, either.
We need to acknowledge these realities and take steps to mitigate them. Not just weaning ourselves off oil. We need a renewed emphasis on local economies of scale, a concerted effort to freely share resources, a concentrated, massive plan to alleviate Third World poverty--giving them access to fresh. clean water would be a start (and that does not mean bottling it up and selling it to them, Nestle!)
There is so much to do...and all environmentalists ask is for recognition of that fact. Is that too much to ask?
Is it?
No comments:
Post a Comment