Environmental Issues

The Basic Issue

I have a very distinct memory of watching a log cabin burn to the ground up north. It took ten minutes. The heat was ferocious. Fortunately, nobody was hurt. It was about thirty below and night was falling which made for a great photo-op.

The most amazing thing about the incident was that he family was absorbed into the community within minutes. A tragedy always brings the best out in people. It struck me how close those people in that remote settlement were to the threshold of survival. They had no illusions about how harsh and unforgiving the natural world can be.

Several years later when we moved to a new suburban housing district, we bought one of the first houses to be built. As we watched the community develop around us, I noticed that we were living on a bed of clay and our unstuccoed houses were really tarpaper shacks with chicken wire around them. In the spring, it was a sea of mud. It reminded me of the reserve. Then came the summer, with its truckloads of sod, transplanted trees, and pails of stucco. Suddenly we were "civilized". New home buyers had no idea that they were really living in glorified tarpaper shacks on a clay field. To their thinking, they were insulated by many layers from nature and its rawness. They could afford to live insulated urban lives safe from the ravages of nature and the intrusions of other people.

Over he next few years, when the blizzards blew, the Red River flooded and the power went off intermittently, we re-discovered each other in a flurry of community mutual aid, but then thing returned to "normal". Once more we could pretend that community and nature were separate entities and that there were no vital linkages.

I wonder what it is going to take to bring us to our senses as we deal irresponsibly with even the minimal steps of the Kyoto agreement. Our human community and our natural world are intricately linked, and one goes where the other does.

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