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The current Harper's
Magazine (June, 2007) has two articles in it about the
environment, but really about much more. The first of these in its
pages, Garret Keizer's "Climate, Class, and Claptrap," focuses on
the first of the three words in his title, and then erupts in
piquant rage regarding the second two words. As he riles in vitriol
at a certain class of people – "that all-too-familiar universe [of]
the affluent, the educated, the suburban, and the wired" – his
stings at them prick mercilessly at the blindness that keeps so many
of the privileged so insulated from the damages they do to others.
Or should I say "we," as in
the damages we and our privileges do to others? I might
admit myself to this class incurring Keizer's scorn. I'm sort-of
affluent. I'm educated. I'm wired – Essaying Differences
exists on the Web. It's only the suburban part of Keizer's tags
that I don't quite fit, living as I do in one of the motley, old, "painted-lady" hilly neighborhoods of San Francisco. I have,
otherwise, nearly the same splenetic reaction as Keizer to my
fellows who live with their SUVs, big box mall stores, McMansions,
and cul-de-sac subdivisions out beyond the perimeter of
interstate ramps, bridges, and freeways. They're not really,
however, "beyond," driving into old San Francisco by the tens of
thousands as many do every weekday. Too many of these do so as
emotionally animated as is Keizer, but in another way – arriving too
often in their single-occupancy-vehicles with the road rage stress
from their hour-long and more commutes in congestion with each
other. Then they take it out on us, on us pedestrians and
takers-of-public transit as the beetle-browed, bug-eyed, and
white-knuckled inflict on us their waves of speeding and red-light
running.
Keizer's article runs with
the same fever pitch as our sprawl-mad fellow Americans, writing
against them in defense of the environment that gets ever-more
polluted, paved-over, and destroyed. His real animus is blindness –
against all of us who may be cushioned in our privileges and cannot
see how we are, yet, "members of a single species . . . family
in every sense of the word." In the same proportion that too many
of us cannot see the damages we are doing, he says we cannot make
crucially due changes "without staggering sacrifices" – and that no
one will begin this "unless the burden is shared with something like
parity."
The same June issue of
Harper's Magazine carries another, longer piece on the
environment, by Ted Hoagland: "Endgame: Meditations on a
diminishing world." As his title implies, too, Hoagland's contents
deliver, with more ruminative range. He writes it from a home he's
had for over thirty years in the far, rural north of Vermont, near
the Canadian border. As in the long career he's already had writing
essays of erudition, precision, and lyricism on landscapes, Hoagland
sees, as does Keizer, the many details in nature that we are
losing. As Keizer does, too, Hoagland sees "the pace and enormity
of destruction" as "paralyzing, as is our general indifference." He
sees those from sprawlville buying their SUVs and off-road vehicles
and taking them up to his remote, rural area, where they then impose
their entitlement conceits and recklessness on old New England
culture, where, now "people tend to carom from Boise to Bangor."
It's insane, he rues: "There seems to be no baseline, as if we're
in free fall." As we may be "kneecapping ourselves," he asks of
this suburban sprawl mentality that has so many so confined to it, "Would Wordsworth, Frost, Turgenev, feel not just glassed-in and
deracinated but amputated?" He sees the destruction not just around
him, but the same system – ours – doing it to all the world. The
problem compounds, worldwide, for "more flabbergasting alterations
[that] are in store – the mowing of parts of Amazonia to grow
ethanol; the melting of the poles; the desertification of more of
Africa (and if you've already seen famine there, as I have, the idea
of growing corn in Iowa to drive cars is obscene)." Some things may
help put some checks on this, as "Hurricane-insurance premiums do
register a bit more on us than our actual demolition of habitat, but
our world religions don't help, even if, to be fair to them, no
religious persons ever saw it coming – and "no organized religion
has ever countenanced such wholesale obliteration of nature."
Hoagland is aware of the environmental movement
across the U.S., and around the world, but sees it dwarfed by the
larger culture of consumerism and entitlement, so "Today's mantras
are crabbed, apprehensive, self-involved, as we shop around for tidy
climates in gated selfishness." We're not slowing down but,
"Blindly accelerating, we burn through entire galaxies of other
life, unimaginably interlinked and unmapped – amputating ourselves
from the rest of Creation." The costs keep coming: "New Orleans
was too low, the World Trade Center was too high, and our democracy
has gone spavined." And so Hoagland, like Keizer, sees the ultimate
costs of blindness: "if we are stripping, dicing, and deforming the
landscapes, souring the oceans, and sooting the skies, we are not
just wiping out cheetahs and codfish, blue whales and sandalwood
trees, but undermining our very lives and our afterlives."
Others have had similar comments this recent
month. Louis Menand, in May 21's The New Yorker, sees the
flatulence of too much of our good-minded rhetoric. His
"Talk of the Town" piece, "The Graduates," notes that "In
commencement speeches and the like, people say that education is all
about opportunity and expanding your horizons. But some part of it
is about shrinking people, about teaching them that they are not the
measure of everything." Menand, like Keizer and Hoagland, is,
sadly, also writing as all-too-aware, as many of us are, of our own
dear America's currently colossal ignominy and incompetence in
Iraq. How is it, he seems to be asking, that our tens of millions
voted to reelect the very same national team that had already shown
its supreme ignorance and arrogance in foreign affairs, its blithe
disregard for others? As if to answer this, he looks out at another
season of corporate academe ritually congratulating itself on
another crop of its graduates, and notes one most-telling statistic
of our current U.S.A.: "There are more bachelor's degrees
awarded every year in Parks, Recreation, Leisure, and Fitness
Studies than in all foreign languages and literatures combined."
In this same month, others have carried on
examining this same theme of our incredible blindness and
limitations. Rebecca Solnit is another. A young woman who lives in
the same San Francisco neighborhood as I – I've seen her on
occasions, though we've never met – has a new book out, the
University of California Press, across the Bay in Berkeley, just
having published a collection of her essays, Storming the Gates
of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics.
Solnit is good. Like Keizer, Hoagland, and
Menand, she worries not just about our environmental degradation,
but also our culture which so hugely elevates our conceits so that,
more, not less blind, we all the more indulge our ruinous
consumerism. The current debate on American immigration policy is
an example. Speaking in past tense of one recent immigrant-hating
piece of legislation, she says:
It implied that immigrants were to blame
for the deterioration of the environment, as though those
huddled masses were rushing out to buy jet skis and ten-acre
Colorado ranchettes, as though sheer numbers alone, rather
than habits of consumption and corporate practices, were
responsible for the degradation of the U.S. environment. It
reeked of American isolationism – the idea that our garden
could be preserved no matter what went on outside its walls,
though many ecological issues are transnational: migratory
birds, drifting pollutants, changing weather – and it
implied that we live in a garden and they do not.
Solnit stresses her ire at the
recklessness built into our corporate culture, not for the
rhetorical joy in ire as Keizer shows, nor the bucolic alternatives
that Hoagland's sentences frame, but for the exquisite linkages she
lifts as a standard in her own prose. This serves her larger,
pervading theme, that we see the great interdependence of all
things.
Once we count on the good in seeing
the possibilities within larger-connected complexity – the ethics
and literacy of interdependence – we can measure differently and do
different. Take, for instance, she says, our much-vaunted computer
technology..
In a 1995 essay on Silicon Valley, "The Garden of
Merging Paths," she writes "The world of information and
communication online, much hailed as a technological advance, is
also a social retreat accompanying a loss of the public and social
space of the cities." People may not be connecting more and more,
as we're told, but withdrawing:
This vision of disembodied
anchorites connected to the world only by information and entertainment, mediated by the entities that
control the flow, seems more nightmarish than idyllic. Postulated as a
solution to gridlock, crime on the streets, the chronic sense of time's scarcity, it seems
instead a means to avoid addressing such problems, a form of acquiescence.
Solnit argues for a recovery of the
incalculable – a wider skein of reference to include the sensual and
sensuous, the odd and idiosyncratic. She argues against everything
our corporate marketing and advertising thrive on, exploiting as
they do all the entitlement expectations by which we divide into our
mutually-isolated demographics. She argues against everything our
corporate academe similarly exploits – confining as it does, too,
all imaginations into the mutual-isolation systems all defer to as
departmental specializations.
Amidst all the rue of the recent
month, however, in The Nation
issue of June 4 Eric Alterman had a column referring to
a new program, one in fact in the Mideast: a project which "aims to
develop parallel histories of the Israelis and Palestinians,
translate them into Hebrew and Arabic and train teams of teachers
and historians to teach in the classroom." Called "Learning Each
Other's Historical Narratives," it's still in the planning stages,
online at
www.vispo.com/PRIME/leohn.htm – so something good, something
practical, something hopeful is happening.
But then we come back to America.
On the penultimate day of the recent month – May 30 – National
Public Radio broadcast a piece, humorously put, but sadly true, on
how American businesses are now having to hire consultants to teach
their middle-aged managers how to flatter their new employees aged
twenty-something. It seems that the new generation is in a constant
state of low morale unless they get frequently rewarded, adulated,
praised, and celebrated – for nothing more than doing normal work.
Our schools have done this to them, schools that for many recent
years have gone out of their ways to insist that all kids are
"special" – see my earlier Proprietor's Column, "The Waters Of
Kalamazoo County," where I first learned of these pedagogical
conceits nearly ten years ago.
God Bless America: bloated, fat,
rich, blind, arrogant, and "special"! |
