pRESERVING

Some years ago I was interviewed by a television reporter before a speech I was giving in the southwestern part of the U.S. They set up the interview at the edge of the desert outside my motel, and the first question the reporter asked was, "Professor Van Matre, how can the people here prepare to live the life they've become accustomed to in the future?"

I laughed and said, "They can't. Look around, you live in a desert. There's no way they can live like this in the future." I went on to explain that their city existed as a sort of energy fungus feeding off the fossil fuel and fossil water that people had pumped out into the desert.

You see, the water they were using was being sucked up out of ancient underground aquifers, deposited there over thousands of years, and their consumption now lowered the level of that source at the rate of several feet each year. In addition, much of the energy they were using was fossil sunlight that was captured millions of years ago by plants that had subsequently been molded underground by time and pressure into gas and coal and oil. So it was this combination of "old" sunlight and "old" water that actually supported them.

Anyway, the television reporter seemed rather startled by my comments, and said a bit defensively, "Well, we're concerned about environmental problems, professor. Our station has been running a 'Beat the Peak' campaign."

When I asked what in the world that was, she explained that they had been urging people to spread their water use out over the day instead of following the traditional pattern, thus "beating the peak" times of demand. I am afraid I chuckled openly at her example. She just did not seem to grasp that beating the peak had nothing to do with what I was saying. How can people be so completely uninformed, even misled about what supports their lives? How can anyone possibly believe that "Beating the Peak" offers and answer for our environmental crisis? (By the way, the camera supposedly malfunctioned during the interview and my comments didn't make the evening news. Surprised?)

The point of the story is that so few people really understand how life functions here that it is almost impossible to carry on a conversation with them about many of these issues. They just don't have the vaguest idea of what you are talking about. Consequently, they ricochet off of your remarks into completely extraneous areas, and the conversation becomes very difficult, almost painful to pursue. I remember one man telling me, after listening to the fossil energy and fossil water story, that what he was worried about were all those empty holes we were creating underground. He thought the whole surface of the continent might just collapse.

"When you look out the other way toward the stars you realize it's an awful long way to the next watering hole." -- Loren Acton The Home Planet

Earth education exists to preserve the extraordinary richness and biotic health of the third planet from the sun, by changing the perspective and habits of its most dangerous passengers. Unfortunately, many of the human residents of the planet seem unaware of how lucky there are to live on board such a wondrous vessel of life circling a nondescript little star in the corner of an immense spiral galaxy. Powered by the energy of the sun and awash with the liquid of life, their vessel glimmers like a lost oasis in the voids of space. Millions of other forms of life share the oasis with them -- from jelly fish and giraffes to kangaroos and gnus; from microscopic creatures in the soils and seas, to towering plants and leviathan animals; from beetles without number to species without names.

Tragically, the health of this marvelous oasis in the universe is now in great danger. The hunman species of life has become so pervasive and grown so powerful and arrogant that it presently threatens much of the other life with which it shares its garden-like vessel. Estimates vary, but many environmental scientists believe that the human passengers on board are destroying the other kinds of life on the vessel at the rate of at least one species each day.

In the process, the burgeoning numbers of humans have outstripped their own food supply in many areas as well, and over twenty million of them die each year of starvation and nutrition-related disease.

Environmentally induced stress and sickness has also reached plague-like proportions. (In the United States alone almost a thousand people a day die of cancer, and there are now more mental health workers than policemen.) And more and more of the planet's energy supplies and building materials are controlled by fewer and fewer of its inhabitants. (The U.S. Chamber of Commerce estimates that by the turn of the century, a majority of the earth's resources will be controlled by 200 mega-corporations.) Meanwhile, many of those in the northern and western sectors of the planet are caught up in an economic system based upon the idea of unlimited growth even though they live in a limited world. (Unlimited growth elsewhere in life is called a cancer, in America, it's called opportunity.)

"The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between the way nature works and the way man thinks." -- Gregory Bateson

At the same time, the systems of life that developed on board the vessel over millions of years without human interference are more and more infected with insidious, man-made poisons with far-reaching environmental consequences, and the highly consumptive lifestyles of a small percentage of the current inhabitants has led to increasing disorder and decay at every turn.

I suspect I don't need to belabor this point any further. You probably feel you are already too familiar with the predictions. In many eyes, soil depletion, biological contamination, habitat destruction, and atmospheric pollution have become the four horsemen of our coming apocalypse, and looming over all, the very real possibility of accidental nuclear annihilation haunts our dreams. As Pogo expressed it in a cartoon in the seventies, "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

Continue... The WHYS: Nurturing

Earth Education... A New Beginning Copyright © 1990 The Institute for Earth Education. All Rights Reserved.