Diverse Observations, from History and the Current Moment
Thursday’s Earth Day: What are the Other 364?
WHEN PSYCHOLOGY SEES ECOLOGY AS JUST MYTHOLOGY, PREPARE THE EULOGY FOR HUMANKIND
The origins of the celebration of Earth Day are fantastic to remember---the culture and thought and ethos of oneness and abundance and impact, the idea that a single person might join with others to reform or otherwise improve the collective. The 1960’s were ending and the sobering and debilitating recognition of oil as a non-renewable resource had not yet begun to percolate into popular consciousness. The following site gives a little bit of this context for interested readers. The purpose of this post, however, is slightly different. http://www.nationalcenter.org/EarthDay98History.html
One idea on which I’d hope everyone would reflect is the simple question of “why is it Earth DAY??” Similar queries arise in regard to International Women’s Day, Black History Month, and like memorializing about facts and events that are easily identifiable as crucial day after day after day, as long as we manage to survive. Since the earth is important every day, and Black people are important historical actors every month, and so on, we should facilitate this ethos constantly, and not center our attention around one span of time.
To some extent, of course, to celebrate for a period of time is as old as humanity. Archeological evidence confirms cases of seasonal holidays at least as long ago as 25,000 years. All of our contemporary celebrations arise from a like source, the desire to mark important passages and recollection with a special span.
What accompanies this narrowing of focus, of course, are marketing opportunities that at the very least drive important sub-sectors of the economy, and in certain instances, especially Haloween and Christmas, come to predominate economically. Two key inquiries here, for folks who believe that democracy and other indicia of social progress actually are possible, are to ponder how we can EXTEND the concern far beyond a single period of time, and how we can put more grassroots thinking and experience into the messaging that happens in the marketplace that the memorials produce, instead of ending our concern as the sun sets and allowing mega-corporate control of the ideas that enter the stream of commerce. How we can answer these queries constructively is a matter on which we might entertain a lively discussion, but we can’t even contemplate the conversation until we ask the questions.
A second reason for this post is to look at choices that people no longer make for themselves. Whatever the inequalities of earlier periods in history, and they were many and frequently vicious, there are many identifiable instances from the 1400’s to the 1800’s when social situations happened that allowed many, if not most, social actors to make choices about the sources of energy they would use, the types of farming they would practice, the relations of production they would embrace. The idea of a mythic, halcyon past, in which all were equal, and equally happy, is obvious dung. But to ignore the instances of greater democracy in the past is equally wrongheaded.
What this means is open to individual interpretation, of course. What I want to communicate is twofold. First, there exist uncounted legions of folks---individuals, families, and even well-organized social action networks---who are taking responsibility about issues such as power-generation, ag-practice, and production generally. They rarely receive much attention, especially in the South, and one of the points of some of my posts will be the life and work of these pathfinding heroes, many of whom I have the privilege and honor of knowing and with whom I am lucky to be able to network.
One of these people is Mary Olsen, the Southeast Director of the Nuclear Information and Research Service. I will return in a later post, however, to the potentially revolutionary developments that she and her husband are exploring in low-flow hydroelectric generation technology that they have patented. That story is amazing, both for it’s hopeful implications for humanity, and for its condemnation of the narrow parochialism and corporate toadying of current environmental bureaucracies.
The second aspect of the celebration of Earth Day I’d like folks to consider is something of which Mary and other anti-nuclear colleagues have made me aware, however. The obverse of EPA disallowing field tests of new technologies, of corporate disinterest in promising new research, etc., is the slavish promulgation of capital intensive death-dealing monstrosities like nuclear power reactors. Quite likely, a long-term reliance on these approaches to boiling water will destroy most mammalian life and all human existence on the planet. While ongoing analysis of this part of life’s panoply will show up here from time to time, today I merely want to examine briefly one recent event that conclusively demonstrates a bit of the bankruptcy and murder and fraud which are at the heart of the nuclear industry.
Nuke-Critics have long pointed to the waste problem as, IN AND OF ITSELF, totally destructive of any hope for long-term social benefits from boiling water with fission. Just as the South is now the Nuclear Breadbasket---from reactors to H-bombs---for the world, it is fast becoming the deathly toxic dumping ground for whatever lethal excrescences the industry wants to wish didn’t exist, executives confidently presenting balance sheets for their businesses where billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies never show up.
Within the past few months---we believe, we don’t really know for certain, since IT’S SECRET! terrorists might hurt us if we knew about it, because then they’d find out; personally, the idea that something useful would have to be a SECRET from everyone except the people who ordered it to happen, who enrich themselves from the ordering process, and who maintain political power on the basis of the secrecy, is chilling and dangerous, albeit with an absurdly humorous twist: aliens would certainly find it funny---a large and lethally poisonous reactor vessel made an incredible journey from San Onofre in California to the Savannah River Site, 160 miles from where I sit.
The trek is worthy of documentary history, and it could act as a premise for half the world’s annual output of thrillers and psychological novels. The trip took the reactor, the size of a large three story building basically, onto an oceanic freighter, around the tip of South America, since the Panama Canal authorities would not allow it through, and then, either by boat or train, up the Savannah River from the port city South of me which is one of the most polluted and cancer-ridden places on the planet already.
JUST THINK!! Thirty seconds or so of exposure to this wreckage of a reactor---AND THERE WILL BE HUNDREDS MORE LIKE IT TO DEAL WITH IN THE NEXT TEN TO TWENTY YEARS---would induce an excruciating death for any animal that survived the initial encounter. Perforated skin, diarrhea and vomiting worse than that accompanying cholera, lungs that become like a wet sponge so that breathing and drowning become indistinguishable, and with luck, death in a week or so, is what fortune’s recipient of that radiation dosage has in store.
The stories that are possible in this case stagger the imagination. Do we hear them? Here on this BLOG we may glean a tiny reflection of the monumental movie, the magnificent novel, the harrowing documentary. But what we see and hear here is less than fractional. Why is this? Why do we permit this? When will people begin to take responsibility for empowering independent media work that is just as important to our survival as are independent technological and other economic ventures, just as crucial as developments that favor democratic politics?
The answers to these questions are not at all clear. I intend to remain optimistic, “to bet on life,” as I’ve said before. I will keep presenting bits and pieces, occasionally getting at the fuller story, serially coming to a broader understanding, and hoping to garner the support that allows for the true expansion of this kind of story-telling and reporting to reach the billions of people who are hungering for meaning instead of “reality television” vomitous, who know that things are all screwed up and just want some information to help them try a different track than the train wreck inevitably coming if we don’t change course.
As I remember Earth Day and pray to God to “show me how!” that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.