This simple summation explains much about how America became
civilized and the resulting problems this un-civilizing process have
caused. In this view of the world, human
society is seen as separate from this infinite thing we call environment, and
human needs always come first when we decide how to interact with this outside
entity. The environment is valued simply
for the services it can provide us. In
this model, our problems with the environment are seen as the result of our
limited capacity to tap the resources and or the environments ability to absorb
our wastes. We try to solve any environmental problems
that crop up by looking elsewhere in our infinite supply store for new or
replacement sources of our feedstock or rely on new inventions to increase our
ability to obtain or utilize the resources.
And if waste disposal causes us troubles we focus on increasing the
capacity of the sink to be able to drain the wastes faster or we re-plumb the sink
to transfer the waste from one medium where capacity is being reached, to
another medium with more capacity. And
that has been the history of the settling of America.
America also has a history of practicing the fine art of
denial when it comes to facing the problems this view creates. Denial allows us to continue consuming
resources and disposing of wastes as if the environment has an infinite
capacity to supply our wants. Eventually at the local level the reality of
limits can no longer be denied as resources disappear and wastes begin to cause
serious problems. But with the infinite
environment view, as problems get bigger, denial gives way to the action plan
of simply looking elsewhere to meet our needs or dump our wastes. And the process starts over again. A good example of this model in action can
be seen in the “settlement” of North America by emigrating Europeans. As the original inhabitants of Europe
consumed their own resources as a result of increased population demands, along
with their desire for new resources and products, they set out for new lands in
which to inhabit and satisfy their wanderlust.
Coming to the shores of North America, they believed they had found a
new land of once more unlimited resources there for the taking.
What they failed to acknowledge was first of all that the
land was already inhabited by a society of people who had a very different view
of the world. For probably thousands of
years these native folk had a view of the world where they saw themselves as
part of their surroundings that sustained them and not separate from it or
above it. Instead of learning from these
original settlers the newcomers continued what they knew best, and followed
their model and took the land and the resources from the natives. They also failed to acknowledge that the
country had a west coast, and after what may have seemed like an eternity to
them, they eventually consumed many of the resources between the two coasts and
began to drastically change the look of the land.
A big driver or excuse for the settlement was the concept of
“manifest destiny”. This was the general
belief that conquering the continent was following a Devine plan where
Europeans were called to civilize the uncivilized America’s. It was as if God was willing this settlement
for the betterment of all. And the bible
told them it was so, for God Himself had told the people to “go forth and
multiply and fill the earth and subdue it”.
He told them “you are the masters of the fish and birds and all the
animals. And look! I have given you the
seed-bearing plants throughout the earth, and all the fruit trees for your
food.” And then God looked over
everything he made and proclaimed “it is excellent in every way”. And the newcomers to the Americas who
followed their black robed missionary prophets agreed – it was excellent
indeed.
Empowered with their beliefs Americans found new technologies
that made it easier to subdue the wilderness, settle the land, and turn its
resources into excellent products. Inventions
like the plow and cotton gin enabled gentleman plantation owners to increase
their production efficiency and put their slave laborers to work planting their
fields and picking their cotton. New
inventions like the steam engine could take the slaves place when they were set
free. These same engines could power the
locomotives that provided access to the countries interior and eventually
enabled coast to coast travel across America, along with the near extermination
of the American Bison. And as the
immigrants multiplied, the burgeoning population demanded a corresponding
increase in resource consumption, and hence a need for more land. The resulting increase in conflicts between
the environment and society, and between competing societies, heralded in a new
inspiration – and the new science of economics was born.
The new science was designed to smooth over the conflicts
and define who had rights and who did not when it came to resource
allocation. As governments and
industries become more sophisticated new methods to manage resources,
production, and resulting profits were needed.
Economics was inserted between society and the environment as a way to
optimize their overlaps, and tap into the profits their interactions could
create. The economy and its’ profit generating
potential became the new king of the hill.
Society was downgraded to a distant second seat, and the environment as
always came in last. And to ensure that
we didn’t forget whence this inspiration came, the phrase “In God We Trust” was
forged into our coins.
The role of this empowered middle man was to take the
natural resources from the environment, combined with the labor providing human
resources from society, to create products and services that in turn met the
wants of society. The profits generated
in the process satisfied the owners of the capitol who kept the economy
cranking. And cranking they did – electrical generators,
transformers, and transmission lines began to power Cities and illuminate homes
and businesses. Darkness would no longer slow the wheels of progress, and soot caused
by the burning of oil for lamps would no longer fill the workers noses. With Henry Ford’s assembly line innovations
combined with the internal combustion engines, cars began to fill the streets
and replace the horses and their ever present manure. Oil and its many derivatives became the new
clean fuel of choice replacing dirty wood and coal. So the latest godsend of economics and his soul
mate technology ushered America into a new century of seemingly limitless
possibility powered by economic growth.
As the economy cranked and the century turned from the Nineteenth
to the Twentieth, American society began to attempt to deal with the consequences
of denial. Domestic resources became
depleted and measures were taken to try to protect them from complete loss. National parks and forests where carved out,
and conservation agencies like the Forest Service and Bureau of Reclamation
were formed to oversee the resources.
Attempts were also made to try and procure new resources via excursions
into neighboring territories resulting in corresponding military conflicts. Europe battled over the remaining resources
of those lands and America joined in. The war machine that was needed to produce the
armament for battle helped to fine tune industrial manufacturing
processes. Propaganda used to build
support for wars was transformed into advertising campaigns to encourage
consumers to buy more of the latest mass manufactured marvels.
The optimization and maximization of the manufacturing
process resulted in more and more wastes to dispose of and environmental issues
began to rear their numerous ugly faces.
Use of rivers as dumping grounds for waste resulted in incidents like
the Cuyahoga River fires that occurred on a regular basis on this
industrialized river in Ohio from the late 1800’s to the 1960’s. In the 1930’s,
poor farming practices combined with an extended drought created what became
known as the Dust Bowl that devastated millions of acres of farmland and
hundreds of thousands of people were forced to leave their homes. Air pollution from zinc smelting and steel
mills in Donora Pennsylvania killed 20 people and left over 7000 severely ill
in 1948. Dumping of chemical and other
wastes into an open canal in the first half of the 1900’s created what was to
become known as the Love Canal Disaster in Niagara Falls, New York where the
pollutants contributed to miscarriages, nervous disorders, cancers, and birth
defects in residents who lived nearby in the second half of the century.
These latest batch of problems brought out the prophets to
warn the creators of their folly.
Conservationist Aldo Leopold who
worked his way up the ranks of the Forest Service advised a need for adopting a
land ethic if there was any hope for the future. In a 1938 lecture he gave at the University
of Wisconsin College of Engineering, he reminded the engineers in attendance
that “[…]: our tools are better than we are, and grow better faster than we
do. They suffice to crack the atom, to
command the tides. But they do not
suffice for the oldest task in human history:
to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.” Biologist Rachel Carson’s 1962 book SILENT
SPRING proclaimed that insecticides used to protect our crops were killing more
than just the insects. She began the
chapter “Earth’s Green Mantle” with the reminder that “water, soil, and the
earth’s green mantle of plants make up the world that supports the animal life
of the earth. Although modern man seldom
remembers the fact, he could not exist without the plants that harness the sun’s
energy and manufacture the basic foodstuffs he depends upon for life.” These reminders slipped through the cracks of the
simple economic model the drove the economy.
But the Country kept the faith that the mythical powers of the
“invisible hand” would make sure the economy did the right thing.
And changes were finally made in an attempt to fine tune our
environmental/societal model when a series of sweeping environmental
regulations were enacted in the 1970’s and 80’s. These regulations included the likes of the Clean
Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Resource Conservation and Recovery
Acts. These acts and the resulting rules designed to
implement them operated on the idea that there was a need to control the wastes
that we put into the environment. This
need was identified by the feedback we were getting from the environment that
uncontrolled pollution could be quite harmful to our health and some of the
other non-human life that existed out in the environment. Legal permits and more new technology would be
our savior.
And so the economy went to work developing new treatment and
control technologies and then measuring their effectiveness. Screens and wastewater treatment processes
were required to be installed on the ends of pipes coming from major sources of
wastewater pollution. Similarly
treatment processes were also required to be installed on the ends of
smokestacks to reduce air pollutants. In
both the air and wastewater control methodology, efforts were also made to
account for the assimilation capacity of the environment to attenuate the
wastes. These practices included
building taller smokestacks to take advantage of higher wind speeds to better
disperse pollutants. Wastewater treatment
plants would install diffusers on the end of pipes or relocate outfalls to
stream reaches with higher stream flows to also take advantage of the old adage
“dilution is the solution to pollution”.
Wastes were now required to be placed in designed and lined landfills to
protect the environment from the pollutants that ended up buried in them. And hazardous wastes had to be properly
disposed of. Harmful chemicals like DDT were
banned. The management tools of permits and licenses were also developed and
put in place to makes sure that the sources of pollutants that needed to be controlled
could be controlled and we began to monitor the effects.
The days of simply dumping our wastes in the environment seemed
to be over. New fields, like
environmental: engineering, science, and even psychology began to crop up to
design technologies to control and treat the pollution and understand why we
polluted the way we did. New government
agencies were staffed and given orders to protect the environment and control
pollution through new policies and permits.
Similar control techniques and agencies were developed and implemented
on the resource management side of the economy-environment tap. And an interesting side effect of these new
methodologies where they had a positive impact on the economy – by creating new
jobs and products to manage and treat our wastes. EPA reported that cutting air pollution and
building the economy could go hand and hand as the environmental technologies
industries responsible for protecting and cleaning up the environment was
generating $282 billion in revenue in 2007.
And progress was noted.
Besides the boom to the economy, the cleanup efforts had shrunk the hole
in the ozone layer. The American bald
eagle was removed from the endangered list.
The clean air act was also reportedly responsible for saving 205,000
premature deaths, 18 million child respiratory illnesses, and 843,000 asthma
attacks. And the Clean Water Act was credited
as the reason why rivers no longer burned.
Life under this revised economic model seemed good and could only get
better, or so we thought.
As controls were installed and the institutions that kept
them operating came up to speed, new feedback messages picked up from
environmental monitoring began to signal that we still had problems. Our rivers weren’t on fire, and people could
breathe the air without dying, but problems still existed. We were finding that pollutants in most of our
rivers and lakes made it unsafe to swim in them or to eat the fish from
them. There were stills days were people
were advised to stay in doors to avoid breathing air pollutants. New pollutants that we weren’t aware of and
that our controls were not designed to remove were being detected in the
environment and in us. And warnings of
global warming hit the news.
In the 1990’s and 2000’s, bypasses around our control system
were occurring. These bypasses were
coming from things we hadn’t anticipated in the first round of controls. They included sewage bypasses from combined stormwater
and wastewater sewage systems that couldn’t handle high storm surge flowrates. Nutrients and other chemicals that
conventional wastewater treatment plants could not remove were continuing to
cause problems like obnoxious algae blooms in rivers and lakes. Smaller sources of air pollution known as
area sources were not required to install any controls and get a permit to regulate them. Non-point sources of
water pollution like stormwater or agricultural runoff were ignored and not
regulated. Monitoring using new
techniques was allowing us to detect pollutants at lower levels than we had in
the past. The limits of our technology
and our regulations to remove and control the more and more complex pollutants
our economy spewed out was continuing to allow environmental problems to occur
and grow.
So we expanded our rules and regulations, we amended the
Clean Air Act – several times. More
money in the forms of grants and loans was provided to communities to help them
build more treatment capacity and to use new technology. We came up with new and more complex
technologies to treat our wastes. We
wrote more complicated permits and we imposed higher fines against those who
dared to violate their permits – we used the stick. And we tried new control strategies to
encourage the generators of pollution to follow our lead by offering them the
stick turned over with a carrot attached.
These new concepts included the likes of pollution prevention or P2 as
it is often known. We tried to sell the
concept that by implementing pollution prevention practices we could avoid
controls and compliance, and save money too!
This genre of pollution control techniques encourages
pollution generators to use economic incentives to encourage the use of: increased
resource efficiencies, resource substitution, becoming lean, green chemistry,
renewable energy, and energy efficiency.
We encourage society to do their part by finding ways to recycle some of
our wastes, to use more energy efficient appliances themselves, and to always
dispose of wastes responsibly.
Corporations become socially responsible and design new logos to promote
their new found marketing strategy of being green, and governments and environmental organizations jump
on the band wagon by coming up with green star awards and certificates to
reward them with. Sustainability is the
latest buzz word we use to make us feel like we are back in control. And most of us have bought into these new
green marketing ploys.
But like their predecessors, these new generation of
pollution controls will not be able to keep up with the beast that is at the
heart our problems – our ever expanding economy that is based on a model that
separates what is important to us into the entities of economy first, people
second, and the infinite environment that is out there last. So as we ride into the second decade of the
New Millennium, many of the problems we faced in the past don’t seem so serious
anymore. It is not because we have
solved them, but more likely that we have become numb to the consequences. Our
pursuit of the fermenting “low hanging fruit” has kept us from seeing that
trees are dying. Bigger problems than we
ever imagined knock on our doors daily, but most of us stick our heads in the
sand, afraid to confront the monster that fuels them. So instead of rivers that burn and air that
sucks the life from our lungs, the innocuous carbon dioxide that we pour into
our atmosphere is causing record breaking temperatures to heat the planet and
change our climate. Droughts, wild
fires, and increasingly more intense storms become the new normal. We
read articles proclaiming that humans are currently causing the “sixth great
extinction” of species that the planet has faced. We see
large rafts of garbage filling our oceans, and turn our heads as we create ever
expanding landfills to try and contain the garbage that our ever expanding
economy produces. And we find dead zones in our oceans caused by
the runoff from our current industrial farming practices.
There is a saying that goes “hind sight is 20/20” meaning it
is easy to see clearly the mistakes of our past, but in our world today we
can’t see past the bottom of overflowing landfills, and the invisible smog from
ever increasing burning of fossil fuels blinds us from having the foresight to
change our course. So like the Titanic cruising
towards a collision with the iceberg, we ignore any warnings of what lies
ahead, and throttle full-speed ahead toward our pending doom, reassuring
ourselves of the progress we have made. Our only path out seems the foolish
hope that burning what is left of our limited fossil fuels will heat the planet
enough to melt the ice burg before we
strike it.
Our denial may help us to continue to play our role in
keeping our ever expanding monster of an economy in place, but it will not ease
our guilty conscious. And our excuses
that there are no other alternatives, or that we need to pursue the simple
things first, will not change the course we are on. Until we admit what our problem is and until
we begin to see our place on the planet we will continue to soil ourselves with
our wastes, and sit in the warm mess expecting the next technical care taker to
clean us up, or invent a better green colored diaper to capture our wastes,
before we collide.
The 12 Step Recovery program defines the insanity created by
addiction as doing the same thing over and over again, but hoping for a
different outcome. This definition fits
our own repeated patterns of dealing with our environmental problems the same
way over and over again and hoping for different results. Maybe we could take a lesson from the 12
Steppers and take the first step, and admit that our crazy view of separating
ourselves from the rest of the planet is making our lives unmanageable. By admitting our insanity, we might just
realize that our Divine calling is not to subdue and separate ourselves from
the rest of the world, but to realize that we are just plain co-inhabitants of
this finite planet – and that it is time to start living accordingly.
We need to come up with a real world model where we step
back and see that we live on a finite planet.
We need to acknowledge that the human beings that make up our societies
are simply one community of many life forms that share the planet. We need to understand that environment is not
something out there separated from us, but that we are part of the ecosystem
that does sustain us. What we do to the
ecosystem we do to us – what we put in the ecosystem we put in us. And we need to put our economy in its
rightful place – namely simply as one tool that we use to meet our needs. Until we stop our economy from controlling
us and defining our wants, any attempts we make at controlling pollution will
blow up in our faces the same way our previous attempts have.
