Spring Waning Seed Moon
Yesterday I cleared the corn stalks out of their old bed and loosened the soil where I will plant peas, good legumes that will replenish the nitrogen lost due to the corn. Oh, and we’ll get peas for the table in the bargain. I’ve always been impressed with legumes, a class of plants that gather nitrogen in little nodules on their roots. They used rhizobia, a symbiotic bacteria that pull the nitrogen into the root nodules where they live.
In a recent article, likely by a conservative commentator, I read a grumbling about how the United States bifurcates into those who believe nature is salivific and those who see civilization in a similar vein. Environmentalists and their (our) ilk clothe themselves in leafy greens when they attack the polluters: fossil fuel consumers, pcb producers, sulphur mining, chemical based industries and nuclear waste generating power plants.
What they forget is the wonder of electricity, plastics, rapid transit, the movement of goods and services that has created the richest economy in the world. Environmentalists also stand accused, in this perspective, of creating a false tension between bad humans and good nature. Humans have a right to live, too, just like the damned spotted owl and snail darter, right?
When looking at arguments with apparently polar positions, I find it useful to search the middle ground, see if there might not be a place either camp has missed. There is a large middle ground here. Humans, as animals, are part of the natural order, not apart from it, and as animals our home building and self-sustaining activities are as important to us as are those of any species. I love humanity, the civilizations we have created and want to see us healthy far into the future.
In this sense the dichotomy is false. This argument becomes problematic, however, when we examine certain aspects of our self-sustaining activities such as the burning of fossil fuels, the pollution of fresh water with sulfuric acid in hard rock mining and the devastation of eco-systems with pollutants like pcbs and ddt.
Now we loop back to the middle ground. We are part of, not apart from nature. When we harm whole eco-systems on the one hand or tamper with climatological mechanics on the other, we not only press the snail darter, the spotted owl and the Galapagos tortoise toward extinction, we press ourselves in that direction, too. If we create a natural order no longer friendly to human beings, our time on this blue marble will end. If, in other words, we make the planet too hot, the oceans too high, the fresh water and soils poison, we will no longer have a place to live, literally.
So, on the one hand, I embrace Mozart, Lao-Tze, Shiva, Isaac Newton and the techno-computer industial complex, while on the other hand I recognize my need for clean water, renewable energy and food grown in safe conditions. Humanity and nature are not either/or choices, but embedded and intimate partners, dependent upon each other for wise use of the resources we have.
