Compromise, Hell!

Wendell Berry | Orion Magazine

Oak Fork, Letcher County, Kentucky

"Can we actually suppose that we are wasting, polluting, and making ugly this beautiful land for the sake of patriotism and the love of God?"

In Our Backyard (A Monsanto Introspective) from Namreblis Ekim on Vimeo.

Letter to a Good Friend Who Calls Me an "Environmental Wacko"

August 14, 2008

Dear Friend, Andy;

Yesterday was my boyhood friend, Nick’s birthday. He is seventy. We became friends in high school. We spent a lot of time at each other’s home, and were essentially adopted by each other’s parents. After high school, he went to Pepperdine and I went to USC. We still spent a lot of time together, but after graduation, he went to dental school in San Francisco and I joined the Air Force.

We saw less of each other, of course, but still kept in touch via PO Box – no email back then. Once he sent me photos of the cadavers the dental school students were dissecting. Another package contained teeth molds he’d made. I got back to LA on leave and went to see him in SF. We went to see a movie about a man who was a career officer in the Royal Scots Regiment, but could never live up to the legend or expectations of his father. A great movie. Can’t remember the title.

Nick was anxious to get away from big city life and settled in a small community in northern California called Avila Beach, where he opened his practice. He bought some property there, which he intended to build on, but when Avila Beach started booming, he sold to a developer, made a bundle of money, and moved to San Luis Obispo, a sleepy little college town roughly midway between SF and LA.

When I talked to Nick yesterday to wish him a happy birthday, he told me that he and his wife, Hedy are planning to move again. “SLO has gotten too big. Traffic is awful,” He said.

I found it hard to believe. The place was idyllic. A little hippy, as you’d expect in a college town, but nice, laid back, unspoiled. Now traffic clogs winding roads that were never laid out to accommodate the population growth, air pollution is creeping up aided and abetted by smog seeping over the hills from LA and Santa Barbara, fishing stinks, as does the air and water. Too bad, but that’s progress.

There’s lots of progress in California. The population of the state has grown from just under 16 mil when Nick and I graduated from college, to well over 36 mil now, not counting undocumented aliens, who, as the name indicates, are not documented. Some estimates of illegals in California reach 3 million, but the number varies from day-to-day, as they are rounded up and deposited back on the Mexican side of the border and take a day or two to get back. They generally start out in San Diego county, whose population has more than doubled since Nick and I drove through there in 1960 on our way to Tijuana, where we hoped to improve our Spanish language skills.

I blame growing up in California for turning me into an “environmental wacko.” You see, I was born there way back in 1938. You can’t even imagine what it was like there then. In the spring, you could smell the orange blossoms, in the evenings, you could smell the night-blooming Jasmine. I could lie on the lawn at night and see the sky lit up with the billions of stars. In the morning, I could look out across the valley and see the San Gabriel Mts. It took us a while, but we could catch the “Red Car” electric streetcar and go to the beach, cross the sand without stepping in blacktar goo, and swim without worrying about used needles bobbing about in the surf. I watched the Hollywood freeway being built at the bottom of the street on which we lived. I wasn’t smart enough to realize what the implications were when it went in and the Red Cars went out.

I’m afraid Nick isn’t moving far enough from SLO – he’s just moving north fifty or so miles to some out of the way place NW of Paso Robles. Another 10 years and he’ll want to move to Nevada, except there won’t be any water there.

But thanks for sending me the op-ed by Daniel Henninger, a conservative columnist who’d rather be clever than objective. Despite Henninger's snarky word invention, the United States absolutely must transform its economy in order to survive and thrive in the world to come. And the transformation should have started long ago – changing a consumption economy into sustainable economy will take a generation, be costly, and be painful. Corporate America will fight it every step of the way, because they are invested in the way things are, not the way they should be. Your conservative credo of letting unfettered market forces take care of things became untenable when corporate earnings started exceeding most countries GDP. Corporations pay to let democracy work for them, not you. Henninger’s “environmania” is not “messianism,” its righteous indignation.

Why you’d want to trust corporations to operate in your best interests is a mystery to me. Try to picture the boardroom of a corporation and look at the people around the table. They are not abstractions. They are people whose livelihoods depend on making money for the organization for whom they work, not on making the world a better place by providing products and services that work to better the lot of mankind and, in the process, making the organization a profit. That would be socially responsible. Forget about it. Corporate officers actively work to circumvent regulations and, when it suits them, break the law. I could give you examples (like Halliburton destroying evidence in the Gulf Oil spill), but you know the history of corporate greed and corruption. You just choose to ignore it, because the facts don’t jibe with your view of the conservative landscape.

You are so skewed in your thinking that you’d relieve corporations of any tax burden. “Why should they pay taxes? Their employees pay taxes.” Well, you might be surprised to learn that revenues from corporate taxes have fallen to historically low levels, due to subsidies, tax cuts, and a wide variety of avoidance strategies, such as moving headquarters to foreign locations. Our effective corporate tax rates are significantly lower than the rate in many other developed nations. The corporate operations are still employing our highways, waterways, airwaves, and polluting whatever they please, but they aren’t paying any taxes to do it. But not to worry, our budget deficits and national debt are now projected to be so enormous that you won’t have to worry about a transformation of our economy. It is in the process of transforming and the result ain’t going to be pretty.

You might as well send a note to your grand kids and tell them about what a great life you had and say you’re sorry they won’t be able to enjoy the same benefits you had – you used them all up. And oh, by the way, send them the Henninger article. I’m sure they’ll get a charge out of reading it, just as I have, and they'll ask themselves, "Were people really this stupid?"

Yep.

Richard

We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.

The Ecological Crisis: In Search of a Solution

Today, the dramatic threat of ecological breakdown is teaching us the extent to which greed and selfishness—both individual and collective—are contrary to the order of creation, an order which is characterized by mutual interdependence. (Pope John Paul II, 1989)

There are those who argue that America would be foolhardy to suffer under a self-imposed cap and trade policy in an effort to limit green house gas emissions when China has been building new coal-fired plants at a rate of three per month and, it is estimated will, by 2020, generate roughly the same amount of electricity from coal as the United States does from all sources combined. Why should we saddle ourselves with what amounts to a tax on CO2 emissions when China, and for that matter India, and probably other developing countries will continue to use cheap coal?

The irony of the argument for doing nothing, although it recognizes the reality of an interconnected and therefore, interdependent world, is that it is promulgated by global warming deniers. These people, represented aggressively by the Heartland Institute, among others, with support from major players in US industry, have all along denied the human element in global warming, but in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary are now changing tactics. Basically, their argument boils down to, They're doing it. Why shouldn't we? To label this argument juvenile is to give it more credit than it is due. These people are not ignorant of the facts, they simply choose to distort or ignore them in order to further the ends of complicit industrial partners who can't imagine a future in which their bottom line isn't the promised land to which all humanity aspires.

Let's face the facts. The United States, a country just two hundred and thirty-three years old, has pumped more green house gases into the environment cumulatively since 1850 than any other country, including the combined countries of the European Union. America's cumulative contribution to GHG emissions is four times that of China, and fifteen times that of India. China did overtake the US in 2007 as the World's largest emitter of CO2 from fuel combustion, but the per capita CO2 emission in the US is five times that of China. In 2007, the United States alone generated 20% of world CO2 emissions, despite a population of less than 5% of the global total.

The United States has been an industrial powerhouse creating a standard of living for its citizens that is the envy of the world. America's scientific and technological achievements are second to none. Americans on the whole, are one of the World's most generous people. It is now time for America to translate its productivity, its science and technology, and its generosity into comprehensive, wide-ranging action to rescue our imperiled planet.

In his 1989 message, Pope John Paul II made the point that "the newly industrialized States cannot... be asked to apply restrictive environmental standards to their emerging industries unless the industrialized States first apply them within their own boundaries. At the same time, countries in the process of industrialization are not morally free to repeat the errors made in the past by others, and recklessly continue to damage the environment through industrial pollutants, radical deforestation, or unlimited exploitation of non-renewable resources."

The Pope points out that "The earth is ultimately A COMMON HERITAGE, THE FRUITS OF WHICH ARE FOR THE BENEFIT OF ALL. God destined the earth and all it contains for the use of every individual and all peoples (Gaudium et Spes, 69). It is manifestly unjust that a privileged few should continue to accumulate excess goods, squandering available resources, while masses of people are living in conditions of misery at the very lowest level of subsistence. Today, the dramatic threat of ecological breakdown is teaching us the extent to which greed and selfishness—both individual and collective—are contrary to the order of creation, an order which is characterized by mutual interdependence.

The Pope goes on to say that "There is an order in the universe which must be respected, and that the human person, endowed with the capability of choosing freely, has a grave responsibility to preserve this order for the well-being of future generations. THE ECOLOGICAL CRISIS IS A MORAL ISSUE. Even men and women without any particular religious conviction, but with an acute sense of their responsibilities for the common good, recognize their obligation to contribute to the restoration of a healthy environment. All the more should men and women who believe in God the Creator, and who are thus convinced that there is a well-defined unity and order in the world, feel called to address the problem. Christians, in particular, realize that their responsibility within creation and their duty towards nature and the Creator are an essential part of their faith." Evangelical Christian leaders have published their own call to action on global warming.

Pope John Paul II conveys both the critical need for action to rescue the environment, but also the moral responsibility we all have for doing so. He makes it clear that countries and their leaders must work hand-in-hand to overcome the obstacles to effective action. Those obstacles include, among others, distrust, greed, selfishness, and apathy.

According to Pope John Paul II, modern society must take a serious look at its life style. This, I think, is particularly true of American society, where consumerism has been for so long now, the engine that drives the US economy. After former President George W. Bush signed into law an economic stimulus package that, among other things, provided $600 to individuals, there were some who voiced regret that people seemed to be saving the money rather than spending it. The fact that on average, the US tax payer was burdened with nine to ten thousand dollars of annual debt didn't seem to matter. Our commercial sector creates products that are designed to be thrown out, and packages them elaborately in plastic, and cardboard, and paper, and cellophane, and rubber, and we throw that out, too. If America continues to be a throw away society, we are likely to find ourselves throwing away our future.