Disappearing Nature

Many Westerners and most Americans tend to think of the future in a time span that seldom exceeds two or three years at the outside. We have a genuine blind spot that seems to prevent us from contemplating a future that’s more than a few years distant. Most people would say that’s simply part of our cultural make-up but I actually believe it may be a fundamental aspect of human nature that we’re reluctant to examine. We focus on the here and now to the exclusion of the longer term. Why worry about food or water availability twenty or thirty years from now when we have plenty today? That’s why, eventually, all of the Earth’s natural environments are doomed. I don’t mean “eventually” in terms geologists love to use, like a giga annum, or one billion years. I mean in less than four or five generations. I can hear the outcry from here: “Four or five generations? Are you absolutely out of your mind? Who cares what’s going to happen in a hundred years?”

By this point I’ve probably lost 50 percent or more of my readers, who I know from experience are an unforgiving lot with almost zero tolerance for what they regard as yet another whacko rant. But, I ask the few more tolerant readers who may remain to stay with me for just a short while as I work through what is a difficult and vexing challenge.

As an entirely practical matter, as of early 2012 almost no natural environments remain anywhere on Earth. What we have before us today are quasi-natural, or even pseudo-natural, environments that have been altered by humans in ways that range from marginal (e.g. in ocean depths exceeding 7,000 feet and in the vast expanses of Antarctica) to substantial (the much abused Everglades) to absolute destruction, and here you better be thinking about the ecosystems that constituted Manhattan Island in the 1400s or Western Europe when the Gauls and Visigoths were trying desperately to free themselves from Rome's dominion.

Perhaps I should start with the direct impetus for this latest discourse, which was an article published on 2-5-12 in the Los Angeles Times about how a number of environmental organizations I once greatly admired and respected have abandoned the environment for will-o-the-wisp energy gains. I’m specifically referring to organizations like the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club, and the Center for Biological Diversity that are in the process of sacrificing huge tracts of desert for solar power.

What is happening is both simple and enormously chilling. A number of nationally prominent environmental organizations, such as the ones mentioned above, have jumped into bed with the federal government to allow and encourage the solar power industry to engage in industrial-scale solar development on 21 million acres of arid and semi-arid public lands in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah. That public acreage is more than the federal government has opened for oil and gas exploration over the last ten plus years. In other words, instead of acting as advocates for the protection of public lands and working to reduce our current patterns of energy and resource consumption, instead of leading a public outcry demanding an investigation into the adverse environmental effects of large-scale solar development on sensitive desert lands and threatened species, environmental groups have willingly and almost silently caved in and agreed to the sacrifice of thousands of square miles of desert to satisfy our ever increasing demand for more and more power.

No matter how many or how few solar projects will eventually be built, many hundred square miles of public land will be systematically altered and many thousand miles of electrical transmission corridors will be constructed through sensitive public lands. To be blunt, the environmental organizations in bed with the solar power industry are modern Judases who have betrayed the environment and those who have spent their lives advocating for the protection of the remaining sensitive quasi-natural ecosystems that remain.

That betrayal is yet another step in the eventual destruction of every large-scale natural and quasi-natural environment in America. The eastern and Midwestern forests fell to the demands of the lumber industry and agriculture more than 150 years ago. The Great American Prairie is but an almost forgotten memory now covered in pivot irrigation plots draining the Ogallala Aquifer’s lifeblood. And today environmental organizations have thrown the Mojave and Sonoran Deserts and other Western public lands under the bus to preserve our “In Growth We Trust” way of life. It is sickening and revolting.

America has willingly shackled itself to the familiar and comfortable “In Growth We Trust” development model wherein we believe we MUST continue growing or our entire way of life will almost instantly cease to exist and we and our children, grandchildren, and their children will be flushed down the veritable toilet into a new Dark Age where roving gangs of bloodthirsty bandits abound and life degenerates into one crashing wave of mindless chaos after another (which is the fantasy of many right-wingers and is why they provision their basements with a year’s supply of food and guns and ammunition). And that is why we continue to build non-sustainable cities that devour habitats, rely on non-sustainable agriculture that destroys ecosystems, and continue wiping out species after species with studied nonchalance and callous indifference as we rip the very last resource from the Earth.

We simply can’t be bothered to care or to examine what it is we are doing, much less consider ways we can change that behavior. “We did the best we could,” is the pathetic whine from all too many traitorous environmental organizations.

So, let’s all pile into our monster SUVs and head to Florida or California to play in the sun and sand like the spoiled children we are while enough gasoline is around to get us there and back. Let someone else worry about the future. We'll be too busy enjoying the good life while sucking up that great renewable solar power that will run our electric shavers, garage door openers, air conditioners, and electric tooth brushes we use three times a day to make sure our teeth are sparkling white and healthy. Too bad millions of acres of desert will have had to bite the dust, so to speak, for solar power to flourish. Oh, well, such is life.

My heartfelt belief is that there is no way to change that scenario. Absofuckinglutely none. As a species we are too indifferent, too stupid, too narcissistic, too short-sighted to change our profligate behavior. Like the Easter Islanders, we are too busy cutting trees to build monuments to our grandiose egos to see that in X number of years all the forests will have disappeared (yeah, that’s a metaphor). I’m just glad I’m in my late 60s and won’t be around to see the inevitable result.

As an aside, do most Americans ever wonder about the two and a half billion plus people in Asia who are determined to enjoy the same lifestyles upper-income Americans have today and reflect on exactly what that means in terms of resource and energy consumption? I’ll be kind enough to answer that rhetorical question for you: No, they do not and will not until crisis is right around the corner and we finally are forced to open our eyes and face reality. Once again, it’s part of human nature.

Here’s another aside: few of us recognize the cultural bias we reveal when we use the word “green” to indicate environmental values. Desert, of course, isn’t green so is therefore, in many eyes, an expendable wasteland that off-road vehicles and their brainless drivers and the solar power industry can destroy with gleeful impunity. As one idiot commenter succinctly put it to the LA Times in response to an article about developing the desert for solar energy, “It's the stinking desert, so what?"