Progress, Our Greatest Product

I remember the first Earth Day, over thirty years ago, as the day our society began to wake up to the fact that there was an environmental problem. That year I was moderator for the sophomore class at the high school where I taught, and my kids decided to take on an Earth Day project. They settled on cleaning out a stream in a nearby city park, a stream that was full of old tires, beer and soda cans, shoes, plastic bags - the usual effluvia of American life. They also made banners and posters for the school to raise awareness of Earth Day, the dawning awareness that people had to start paying more attention to the way they treated their environment. As moderator, I of course had to accompany the kids on their project. It was wonderful to see their horror at what they pulled out of that water; the nasty oozing garbage with which they filled bag after bag totally grossed them out. And when I pointed out to them that we were only working on a small section of the stream, their indignation knew no bounds. Sometimes I think about those kids, and wonder if that experience left its mark on them, changed their awareness permanently, or sank into the general miasma of the high school years.

That was more than thirty years ago. Those kids are in their mid to late forties now. Given the fact that this all happened in Dallas, TX, in a Catholic school, many of them are probably conservative Republicans. Holding jobs, raising families. And in those thirty-plus years the benchmark of environmental caring has steadily climbed from picking up litter and doing some recycling to wondering how much longer the planet is going to be able to last and working to stem the tide of anti-enviro legislation, calling attention to global warming and the steadily approaching moment of global oil peak.

What if thirty-five years ago we had all known that our bodies and our children's bodies carried a deadly toxic load from the chemical pollution of daily life? What if we had known that the continued suburban sprawl of all our cities would spawn more and bigger fossil-fuel burning vehicles traveling more and more miles of highways, spewing more and more CO2 into the atmosphere? What if we could have seen the toxic waste that some company ten miles upstream had dumped into that stream where rusty old cans, rotting tires, and slimy workboots were offending the kids' sensibilities?

All the problems we are concerned about today were already present then, but all we could see was litter. And that is the real problem. That we only believe in what we can see right now, this moment. Because global warming isn't happening overnight, people doubt it. Because even though it's costing more than it's ever cost before to fill up our gastanks there's still gas in the pumps, the oil company truck still pulls up to fill the heating oil tank for the winter (wait until we see those bills!), no one has declared any national emergency or rationing - yet - we find it hard to believe that the days of pumping oil into our tanks will come to an end. And sooner than most people can even imagine, I fear.

These two things, global warming and peak oil, are going to cause changes greater than any that have yet been seen during recorded history. Yet, few people even begin to envision what it means. Al Gore gave an impassioned speech in San Francisco during the week of Earth Day last spring, when mayors from major Americans cities came to meet, exchange ideas, learn ways to make their cities more eco-friendly, more sustainable. During that speech he said this:

"We are witnessing a collision between our civilization and the earth, a transformation of the relationship between our species and the planet," Gore warned. "Is it only terrorists that we're worried about? Is that the only threat to the future that is worth organizing to respond to?"

I ask you the same thing, is it? We have a department of Homeland Security, but no Department of Planning for Global Change. Our administration refuses to take any real action to prepare its citizens for a life so different from the one they're used to living that the result will be utter devastation and chaos. My guess is that the majority of people will have no idea how to sustain life when running to the mall in the Escalade is no longer an option.

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