I recently watched an episode of "The American Experience" entitled "Surviving The Dust Bowl". ( yeh Netflix!)
In the early 1930s, the southern Midwest suffered a severe drought that lasted more then half a decade. The soil in the Texas Panhandle, Oklahoma and Colorado, as well as other places, simply turned to dust and blew away. Great black billowing clouds of this windblown dust covered entire communities choking the life out of the land. Death from respiratory ailments was widespread and virtually all the crops were destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of people watched their livelihoods simply blow away.
The narrator of the program quoted a passage from the bible that was on the lips of many of the dust bowls victims.:
"For rain, the Lord will give your land powdery dust, which will come until you are destroyed". Deuteronomy 28:24
If I were a God fearing farmer in the Texas Panhandle at that time, I would probably freak out too if I thought about that one for a while, but the fact of the matter is that the Dust Bowl disaster was not the act of a wrathful God for sins committed by farmers. It was a purely man made catastrophe.
At the beginning of the Twentieth Century, the Southern Plains were a huge undeveloped open space, unmolested by the plow but the country was growing and with it the demand for agricultural products. The Southern plains were surveyed with greedy eyes and soon, the developers stepped in. Land was sold and farms. established. Business men from urban areas. often referred to as "suitcase farmers", pumped millions into the region speculating on the harvests. A lot of money was made by all concerned and soon almost the entire area had been cultivated. World War One accelerated the demand and nobody ever believed that the bounty would end. Then nature took a hand.
The Southern Plains are a semi-arid region whose weather goes in cycles. This gold rush of development occurred in a wet cycle, a time of plentiful rain. Unfortunately, that was to end. In 1930, the rain stopped, and would not start again for six years, longer in some places. The crops withered and died and there was nothing left to anchor the soil. The naturally occurring high winds of the area picked up the fine powdery dust and launched it into the atmosphere. Repeated dust storms occurred including one that darkened much of the eastern half of the country to include Chicago and even Washington D.C.
By the time the rains fell again, the destruction was total. Approximately a quarter of the effected area's population packed up and moved west. Many found themselves in squalid labor camps in California's Great Central Valley, harvesting crops for absentee owners under serf-like conditions. Those that remained in the Dust Bowl set out on a long and exhausting journey of recovery that lasted decades.
The Bible reference got me to thinking about the concept of "Free Will". The creator, for better or worse, put human destiny into the hands of human kind. As a species we are free to choose our own path. With freedom comes responsibility. Responsibility by definition is understanding and accepting the consequences of our actions.
Deuteronomy lays out punishments for they that do not "heed the word of the Lord". As a Christian, I do not believe that the Lord is still in the "Smiting" business. I don't think that he sits up in heaven and launches thunder bolts or other nastiness's at those who anger him. That was the reason for Christs death on the cross. His death absolved all of us, but I do believe we are capable of punishing ourselves for our own sins, particularly the sin of greed. To rape creation in the interest of profits, beyond what is needed for survival, is a sin against creation, it follows that a sin against creation is a sin against the creator. The Creator, in his benevolence, has left it entirely in our hands. We commit the sin, and we create the punishment: over use (the sin of greed)=environmental collapse (punishment)
In non christian terms, it should be clear that the environment is a giant house of cards. Every species, every ecosystem, each aspect of the Earth represents a card. Each card draws support from the cards around it and in turns returns that support. It is possible to remove a card and maintain the integrity of the structure. You can remove a second and a third and the house will probably remain standing but in so doing, each card shoulders more and more of the burden. Sooner or later, with enough cards removed, the structure will collapse. The same occurs if you radically change or shake up a given ecosystem. If you continually overwork the land, trying to squeezed every last dollar out of it, at some point the consequences of greed will manifest themselves in the shape of environmental calamity, like the Dust Bowl. The land is our friend as long as we use it wisely. When we misuse it, it becomes our enemy. Action and reaction.
The Dust Bowl has many lessons for us today. We need to seriously examine the consequences of our lifestyles and our actions in maintaining that lifestyle. We should be aware of the long term effects of the increasingly radical steps being taken to keep pace with our energy consumption, for instance. Things like tar sands petroleum extraction in Central Canada where huge tracks of land are literally boiled in order to get oil out of rock, poisoning ground water and destroying pristine forests in the process.
We should be aware of Mountain Top Removal mining for coal in Appalachia where entire mountain peaks are literally bulldozed into the valleys below destroying vegetation, fish, habitats and everything else in the path of the cascading rubble from up the hill. Whole streams with there surrounding ecosystems are buried alive. These ecosystems have been the center of the spiritual and economic life of the region for centuries. On top of that, all this displaced soil remains unstable for some time. When the rains come, there is a very real danger of mudslides. In South America, we have already seen thousands killed by mountains made bare by overuse, answering the call of gravity during the rainy season, moving onto and burying whole villages. The freshly bulldozed soil and rock from mountain top removal presents the same sort of danger.
Of course the legislators from these areas are all for this type of development. This is entirely understandable. If you look at it from the dark side, the extractors are the ones with the money. A lot of campaign dollars flow in through them. If you look at it from the side of the angles, it means jobs and prosperity for these areas, but at what cost?
I think it is possible to generate jobs and prosperity and not kill the planet at the same time. There are green alternatives to excessive extraction as a source of wealth and energy. Unfortunately a lot of very rich people have vested interests in this extraction and it is in there best interests to see it proceed.
Overuse through greed exacts a heavy toll. Instead of dust clouds over Oklahoma, we may be seeing mudslides in Kentucky. Instead of respiratory problems in the Texas Panhandle, we may be seeing illness from poisoned streams and wells in West Virginia. Different times and different locations but the same dynamics of greed to disaster are in play. In all of these instances, the wages of sin is indeed death.
Friday, March 5, 2010
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)