With apologies to Barbara Mandrell

*I wrote this originally in October of 2008, before we knew the outcome of the election, the extent of this recession, that Copenhagen would fizzle (shoulda seen that one coming) and that many of the suppositions made in “Hot, Flat, etc.” would be put in storage because there wasn’t any damn money to fuel the consumerism engine.  They haven’t been proven wrong, however.  They are just hibernating, waiting for the rainy season to return.

Obviously, I am still waiting for the Obama administration to step up.

And now we have this unbelievably horrible oil well run amok in the Gulf of Mexico, (which anyone with more brains than Sarah Palin knew would happen eventually); corporations and communities are looking at Great Lakes water with impure thoughts and intent; and the Asian Carp Spill is just waiting to happen in the Chicago Sanitary Canal, a spill of biological pollution that will kill the Great Lakes as surely as the BP oil debacle is killing marine and estuarine food chains out in the Gulf of Mexico.

We nattering naybobs have been trying to point out that environmental oversight is a pretty good use of the federal government, and we should insist that that work happen in an unhurried, non-biased way.

But we’re a nation of addicts, and we don’t care if the trash gets carried out, the dishes washed, or the baby’s diaper gets changed as long as we don’t run out of oil.  You won’t hear that coming from the Oil Cartels because they only want to make money, and addicts are a crucial part of their business plan. You won’t hear that coming from the majority of politicians, because addicts are the best liars on earth.  They lie so convincingly that they have fooled themselves into believing that everything is just fine and normal.  But even the most casual observer sees things are neither fine nor normal.  As with other sorts of addicts, the afflicted seek to deflect responsibility away from themselves by blaming others and attempting to undermine the authority and qualifications of the researchers and doctors who spend their lives understanding the illness and prescribing cures. That’s why all the talking points of the anti-environment, anti-government, pro-business as usual crowd slam academia and scientific experts.

“Cigarettes won’t hurt me, that’s just something the government says so that they can increase the tobacco tax.”

“There ain’t no global warming!”

“Drill Baby Drill!”

(btw – Just because they are sick, doesn’t mean that they are not also morons.)

So with no further ado, here is an almost two-year-old piece that you can plug the BP oil well failure, diversion of Great Lakes Water, and the Asian Carp time-bomb into in all the appropriate places, it still rings true.

I‘ve been fuming for a good while now about the state of the global ecology, and how it’s been like watching a train wreck film one frame at a time.

No, that’s not quite accurate.

It’s been like being the psychic in a crime drama who really does see what is going to happen next, but no one listens because everyone thinks that you are crazy. You know what is going to happen, but there isn’t anything you can do to stop it. And I’m not the only one who feels this way. There have been thousands of writers, professors, research scientists, reporters, resource managers, parents, gardeners, even economists and other real-life psychics trying to point out that a crash is about to happen only to be given a condescending look and told that we shouldn’t worry, the professionals are in control of the situation. And we should take our medicine more regularly.

And so I’ve been doing some fence sitting of late trying to decide whether to say anything or not, and have decided that I really must point out that

By “We” I mean the folks with a basic environmental education and a comprehension of some simple ecological principles like, “Don’t fill your bed with poop.” The folks who have been called tree-huggers, eco-nazis, granola bars, Woodsy the Owl, wacko, and worse by proponents of unbridled growth and industrialization. You know, “Free Market” types.

I’m not going to use any political labels, they tend to have a lot of gray area anyway, but we all know who you are. The men and women who pursue short term gain without thought of how the pursuit will impact things down the line not just for you, but for the community as a whole. The men and women who think that the future will take care of itself and that technology can figure out how to fix whatever you break before the shit hits the fan.

You aren’t going to invest in the research or implementation of said technology. That’s someone else’s job. And it better not be funded with YOUR tax dollars. The government is the problem here, not you. All the government wants to do is tax you, limit your freedom to do as you damn well please, and leave early on Fridays.

But when the aforementioned fecal matter does contact the rapidly revolving air circulation device, who you gonna call? Well, you probably won’t call anybody because you will be laying low hoping no one notices how badly you fucked-up, but we all know that the government is gonna get involved in cleaning up your mess somewhere down the line.

When the government has to clean-up after you it suddenly doesn’t seem like such a bad idea for them to pay for the job with those tax dollars we were talking about earlier, does it? Never mind that the money comes from all of us taxpayers collectively, this is a bigger issue, your sorry ass needs saving! It may be a government agency doing the work, or it may be one of the various regulatory agencies forcing you to either clean up your own mess or pay someone else to do it. The issue may end up in one of the government courthouses to be sorted out, and God willing, someone may have to spend some time in jail (another government institution) thinking about what they have done. (Not that it will help correct your attitude, but it will help the rest of us feel better about the whole thing.)

This is all bass ackwards, but it’s been SOP for as long as any of us can remember. There has always been the belief, at least in our Western tradition (Western civilization, not the old west), that there is enough elasticity in the global system to permit us to recover from whatever stupidity we inflict upon the world. We will never run out of resources, we just need to keep looking around and we’ll find what we want/need.

Hot, Flat, and Crowded , by Thomas L. Friedman (Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008) is a good explanation of why that model was wrong, and explains that we don’t have all that much play in the global ecology or economy any longer. Mr. Friedman, Foreign Affairs Columnist for the New York Times (a title that probably sounds juicier than it really is) has obviously done his homework for this book, and I hope that it gets read, and more importantly understood, by the right people.

However, (and this is the exasperating part) the basic premise of the book has been around for ages! We live in a closed and finite system. (Think really big aquarium.) All of our actions have consequences, many of which can be predicted and avoided. You don’t even have to resort to math in most instances, its all been worked out for you. You just need to do your homework, or hire someone who did their homework, and plug the variables into your business plan. You need to create another heading for “environmental impacts.” There may be none, but you need to ask the questions and plan how you will handle any impacts that you cause. Yes, it may well increase costs. And so does cleaning the place periodically, repairing stuff that breaks or wears out, and taking out the trash.

The problem is that greed and arrogance cause lots of people to think that the fundamental truths of the universe won’t apply in their instance, or they just don’t care so long as they get theirs. There is also the problem of ignorance of the ramifications of their actions to take into account. But why is ignorance of natural laws an excuse when it isn’t for any cultural laws? Break banking laws and you are in deep shit. Deplete or compromise our life support system and no one bats an eye. At least they didn’t until very recently.

Just this week no less a giant of our national economy than Alan Greenspan conceded that the free market approach in banking screwed the pooch. He’s said before that the US has “abandoned the notion that we should leave crises to be resolved solely by the marketplace,”. Now the markets are less free and banks, insurance companies, and mortgages are being socialized. (In a neo-con administration, no less!) I want to emphasize that this happened in the financial sector, one of the most scrutinized, traditionally conservative industries on the planet. Millions of individual fortunes and billions of lives have been adversely effected world-wide by this failure to protect the common good. Now world leaders are scrambling to clean up the mess and are spending unbelievable sums of money to do it. We need those leaders to realize that the banking crisis, huge as it may be, is dwarfed by the ecological crisis we are now in.

It is my greatest hope that the next administration steps up to the plate for our global environment and makes it a priority to require government, business and industry to exercise the same level of diligence in environmental matters as are required in fiscal matters, and that congress has the stones to fund the necessary enforcement and remediation. Because as we all have been so forcefully reminded, without enforcement there is no accountability beyond the next fiscal quarter. And while living through a deep recession sucks, the economy will correct in several years. If we allow the global environment to break down, correction will only happen in the fullness of geologic time.

As Thoreau said over a hundred years ago,

What good is a fine house if you don’t have a tolerable planet to put it on?