Yesterday, I discussed John Kerry's thesis that environmental politics is local in his book, "This Moment on Earth." Today, we are going follow along as Kerry develops his thesis by turning to the work of Rachael Carson, who was in many respects, one of the forerunners both of our blogging movement as well as the environmental movement.
What is relevant for one community might not be relevant for another community. Where I live, the relevant environmental issues are the dispute between the local mayor and other community leaders over whether there should be a mud run near the city well, water quality issues in general, the hog odor from CAFO's, and creating a favorable environment for people to hunt and fish in.
But on the other hand, for Washington, the issue might be Native Americans and how the Grand Coulee Dam might affect their ability to catch fish from the Columbia River. It would not do me any good to talk to local people about Save the Salmon here, just like it would not do any good for people in Washington to talk about CAFO issues there. People would not see that as relevant.
What is important is that we bring up issues that are relevant to the communities that we live in. For instance, Brian Schweitzer won in Montana because of his staunch advocacy for environmentalism. Not just the kind of environmentalism that you see from Greenpeace. But the kind of environmentalism that is relevant to the people you are asking to vote for you or your candidates.
Specifically, he won because he was not only able to define himself as an advocate of hunters and environmentalism, he was able to link the two together and create a winning message. The previous mindset of Democrats was that people like that were not natural allies. But the fact of the matter is that hunters have contributed billions of dollars to environmental issues for a simple reason -- as a group, most of them care about seeing the environment protected and preserved so that they can hunt every year and so that others can hunt as well. Just not to groups like Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth or Sierra. And not only that, local Conservation Departments provide tons of information to people about how to attract wildlife so that people can hunt responsibly.
As Kerry argues throughout his book, winning elections is not just about advocating the right policy positions on the environment, it is about understanding the local issues involved and getting them discussed.
There are two fundamental choices we can make when we look at the environment. As Kerry writes, despair is not an option. However, we are just as vulnerable to Republican propaganda as Republicans are. We simply react in different ways to elephant dung.
Republicans are not stupid enough to try to make us change our minds about issues. Instead, they try to get us to despair. They try to create the image of a machine that is so powerful that there is nothing that we can do to stop the machine so that we might as well shut ourselves off from the political process.
We see once-committed liberals and Democrats react the way the Republicans want us to all the time. We see people completely shut themselves out from the political process, focus on organic gardening, and await the inevitable apocalypse. We saw it during the last election when people were afraid that Diebold was going to hack all the voting machines and that we were going to be subject to another two years of one-party rule. We see people decide that Democrats and Republicans are all one and the same and go off and chase the elusive 1% of the Green vote somewhere. We see others dream of some anarchistic utopia sometime around 3000 AD.
All this is what Bush and Rove want us to do. They want us to throw up our hands and conclude that it would do us no more good to participate in the political process for whatever reason. They want us to act like Winston did in 1984 when he was being tortured by O'Brien. He finally decided that there was no use resisting the machine and that Big Brother was too powerful for him and that he was all alone in his thoughts and fears. He cast aside the woman that he loved and embraced Big Brother even as he was being led off to be shot in the end. In the same way, Bush and Rove want us to cast aside the political process because there is nothing more that we can do to stop them and that we are isolated and alone.
But the fact of the matter, as John Kerry points out, is that we do not know what is possible and what is not possible until we try. His thesis throughout the book is that politics is about the art of the possible. Now, that is a frequent excuse not to go far enough. That would have been a totally plausible excuse, for instance, not to vote for John Tester or James Webb during the last election in the primaries. But that would have completely missed the point that Kerry is making in his book -- we do not know what is possible unless we push the limits of the possible. For instance, if we had not pushed the limits of the possible, we would not have mobilized as quickly as we did during World War II and manufactured enough resources to defeat the Axis during World War II.
Rachael Carson not only became the person who banned DDT, she became a forerunner for our own blogging movement -- taking stories that were ignored by the SCLM and push them into the mainstream. And she did it thanks to a local issue throughout the 40's and 50's -- she observed numerous dead animals on her lawn through an aireal spray of DDT in her community. She did it through the application of sound science -- based on observation; she was just as much of a scientist as anyone with a degree at MIT.
Her first thought was to turn to Reader's Digest -- one of the most widely-read magazines of the day, and still is. But they turned her down twice when she submitted manuscripts for them. This seems like a strange choice today -- but there was no Internet or Daily Kos or anything of that nature.
Reader's Digest is a propaganda organ of the Republican Party; their audience is a Republican audience, judging by how they rank the candidates (all three of the main Republican candidates rank higher than all three of the main Democratic candidates.) Their terrorism section is a constant drumbeat of why we all should be scared and why (by implication) we should cling to George Bush as our savior from the terrorists. Every issue has rants about how the government has failed us at every level -- a typical propaganda device for the Republican Party. Yet, Carson had so few resources that this was where she turned to to publish her piece on how DDT was destroying our environment.
And it just goes to show how the Republican Party is the Party of No -- anytime people want an environment clean of CAFO odor or smells from the local waste dump, the Republican Party says no. Anytime people want affordable healthcare, the Republican Party says no. Anytime people want us to get out of Iraq and concentrate on the real terrorists in Bin Laden, the Republican Party says no. It is very appropriate that for the very first issue of the National Review, William Buckley talked about how they were going to stand tall like a statue against the rising tide of liberalism -- the Republicans have been saying "No!" ever since.
Back before Carson came along, DDT had been the insecticide of choice for this country. It was very effective in killing off pests. However, as Carson observed, it killed off non-pests as well. Her fears that DDT could be destructive to humanity were well-founded. She interviewed scientists and read studies out there that DDT could posion the whole food chain. It does not break down like most chemicals do. As a result, the higher up the food chain it goes, the more concentrated it becomes so that it could get to the point where it could be lethal to humans once it invades the digestive system and gets concentrated in sufficient doses.
She was well ahead of her time with her ability to take a story and force people to pay attention when the media was not reporting it. This is the sort of thing that bloggers do all the time -- stuff like Gonzales, Inconvenient Truth, Gannongate, fraud in Ohio, Abu Girhab and Guantanamo which is now common knowledge was not before bloggers and courageous journalists reported the truth.
And it is telling to see the difference between how the Democratic Kennedy administration reacted to the publication of her book, "Silent Spring," and how a Republican administration would have acted. Kennedy appointed a committee that recommeded that DDT be taken off the market and that the government conduct research into the potential health hazards of pesticides before they be allowed on the market. Eventually, it was outlawed in 1972.
If it had been the Bush administration or the Reagan administration, the difference between the two administrations' reactions would have been telling. A Republican administration would have decided that government was the problem and not the solution and would have done nothing about it. They would have decided that it was up to the markets and not the government to decide what was best for the people. They would have decided that Carson was simply an alarmist or a fearmonger, much like the right-wingers scream about how Al Gore is or how he is a millionaire hypocrite who does not live up to the standards that he asks of others. Our existance would have been threatened because of the ever-increasing concentration of DDT; thanks to the dumbing down of this country that the Republicans strive for, nobody would have come up with the bright idea of actually taking DDT off the market.
Now, imagine that Carson was a right-winger in a right-wing churchy neighborhood and believed that the woman should stay at home and let the man provide for her. Now, don't get me wrong -- there is nothing wrong with homemaking as such. But what is wrong is the ideology that women should stay in the home and let the man be the head of the household.
It is not difficult to see what would have happened if that had been the case. She would have said that, well, she was a woman and it was not her place to question what the powers that be were doing -- after all, they knew what they were doing. She just had to make do the best that she could. This sort of blind deference to authority is destructive because it prohibits the very kind of independent thinking that is necessary to detect and prevent what could have been a horrific national tragedy. And like Al Gore with "Inconvenient Truth," Carson foresaw what would happen if we did not act on unsafe pesticides -- life in this country as we know it would be destroyed.
Carson, as Kerry writes, never advocated that we ban all pesticides. Instead, she advocated that we make decisions about pesticides when we are in full possession of the facts. She understood that man had the power to destroy ourselves through environmental irresponsibility well before Al Gore came along with "Inconvenient Truth."
And the reaction of the Kennedy Administration versus how Bush or Reagan would have reacted shows by Democratic administrations are superior to Republican -- their ability to adapt and change to circumstances. The problem with modern Republicanism is that it is grounded on an ideology that is rigid -- the underlying premise being that they have all the answers; therefore, they don't need to adapt. Kennedy had the intellectual honesty to admit that he did not have all the answers.
So, when you hear Republicans complaining about "rules" and "regulations," this is the exact sort of thing that they are talking about. And ever since the early 1970's, when Carson's activism led to a political groundswell of activism that led to the passage of the Clean Air Act and the banning of DDT, they have engaged in a systematic campaign to gut the environmental laws that not only protect our health, but our existance as a human race as well.
Kerry points out that good intentions are not good enough. This especially applies to wingnuts in moderates' clothing. The problem is that Republicanism is obsessed with short-term profit at the expense of our long-term well-being as a human race. For many abusive corporations, the shareholder demands for more and more profits trump any commitment to environmental stewardship.
From the book, on page 7:
The planet is in crisis. In all industrialized nations, and particularly here in the US, evidence shows that we live in a world so infused with toxins that they have made their way into the soil, the air and water, and our bodies from conception to the end of life. This stark reality was bluntly confirmed in March 2005 with the release of the UN's Global Millennum Ecosystem Assessment, a 14-year study involving more than 1,350 scientists and other experts from 95 countries. It was the most comprehensive look at the health of the world's oceans, land, forests, species, and atmosphere to date, and its conclusion was bleak -- Many of the world's ecosystems are headed for collapse unless radical measures are implemented to revive them.
According to the report, over the past 50 years, human actions have depleted the Earth's natural resources on an unprecedented scale to satisfy growing demands for food, fresh water, timber, fiber, and fuel. The report's authors warned about the calamitous state of many of the world's fish stocks, the intense vulnerability of the 2 billion people living in dry regions to the loss of ecosystem services inclduing water supply, and the growing threat to ecosystems from climate change and nutrient pollution.
And there are many corporations who do not set out to be abusive to people or to the environment, but who wind up becoming that through their valuing of short-term profits over long-term thinking. On the other hand, there are many corporations and business people who want to be good stewards of the environment and who understand that sound environmental stewardship is both good for the bottom line and good for the environment. Tomorrow, we will write our comments as John Kerry looks at good intentions gone awry. He will name names and also talk about people who are working to change that kind of short-term thinking in the business community.
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