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?"
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