REMEMBER

Given what today is, the message is all on the Professor and Housewife side of this blog...

Pleading With Their Tormentors Because "Their" Servants and Protectors Are Neither

Want an indication that the environmental battle is being lost?  The National Resource Defense Council’s best answer (and Robert Redford’s) to strip mining on public land is to ask you the citizen to write a letter to the CEOs of the strip mining companies. They aren’t even bothering to ask you to write a letter to your Congressman, or to the President, or the Secretary of the Department of the Interior. 

Perhaps ownership of the country has become nakedly apparent.

50th Anniversary

This year marks the 50^th anniversary of Rachel Carson’s seminal book, Silent Spring.  In re-reading it after all these years, I am shaken, jolted, struck, shocked, and disturbed, all over again.  Why?  Because although we congratulated ourselves at having cycled back half a notch, we have in reality changed no ethic at all.  Sure, there are some bright spots, some successes, and our air, water, and soil MIGHT overall be a bit better than they were then, and yes, certain chemicals are banned (in the US) and rivers are rarely on fire anymore.  But we have no true environmental ethic.  We have slowed down—maybe—our descent into environmental self-poisoning and self-degeneration.  But we haven’t stopped, let alone reversed course.  We produce poisons, and continue to diffuse them everywhere, and they come back to do us in, as individuals and civilization.  When she dedicated her book to Albert Schweitzer, and his quote,“Man has lost the capacity to foresee and forestall.  He will end by destroying the earth,” she hoped we would really wake up.  We merely cracked one eyelid—and, with a few notable exceptions, went right on as before. 

Extraterrestrial and other existence beings must look on us as the most bizarre and unwise supposedly sentient creatures anywhere.  It is bad enough that we are a species that preys upon itself, but we also consciously poison ourselves, our habitats, and our posterity, not to mention the life around us.

Where are you, homo sapiens sapiens (wise, wise, humans)?  Do you really think you are separate from nature? Our self-destructive path is evident, yet we choose to ignore, instead embracing denial, diversion, escapism, and illusion.  We are not stewards of creation, we are monsters—mindless, selfish, destructive monsters.

Something to think—remember that seldom used faculty?—about the next time we have to choose, in another false dichotomy, “between jobs/money/foreign dependence/etc. and the environment.”

General Dislike and General Despising

People think I’m easier on the Democrats because I like them.  Uhm, no, I don’t.  I just despise what their opponents do, and that tends to seem to let them off the hook, but only in comparison.