A Secular Pilgrimage - "Do we really hate the world? Are we really contemptuous of it? Have we really ignored its nature and its needs and the problems of its health? The evidence against us is everywhere."
This relates directly to the way that I felt about some of the readings in Berry's The Unsettling of America. It would seem that out of all the countries in the world, we have the most wreckless abandonment when it comes to the treatment of the world. A good part of the population will fail to recycle that bottle of beer they were drinking, or newspaper they were reading. An even bigger part of the population will flick their cigarette butt out the window - landing anywhere from the side of the road to a drainage ditch that leads into the bay. These are lighter examples of gross pollution level that is allowed to go unchecked. Even walking around in the woods out by my Mom's house you can find ancient beer cans almost rusted all the way through, or plastic beef jerkey wrappers - evidence of the hunters travelling through the area. Even more surprising is in the case of coal plants and water treatment plants where the technology is available to upgrade so that they will produce significantly less gases that contribute to the "enhanced greenhouse effect". As a collective, 5% of the population representing almost 25% of the greenhouse gases does not seem like a balanced ratio. Instead of spending government money on out of proportion defense budgets, among other things, this money could be better spent bettering our own situation. It makes me slightly worried that it has taken this long for us to realize what kind of irreversible damage we have been causing to the only planet that we know of able to sustain life as we know it. Unfortunately it is hard to honor profit above anything besides victory in this country.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment