Socrates:
But tell us further, Meletus, before Zeus, whether it is better to dwell among upright citizens or villainous ones?
Sir, answer. For surely I am asking nothing hard. Do not the villainous do something bad to whoever are nearest to them, while the good do something good?Plato, The Apology
***
A
few years ago a local supermarket chain explained the reason for its
support of community services:
“After all, we live here too” (or words to that effect).
Those
words (or their equivalent) surged to the forefront of my mind as I
gagged at the devastation to the environment that will shortly be
effected by the willful actions of Trump and his fellow destroyers of
the planet Earth. As Elizabeth Kolbert wrote on
the New Yorker website:
A White House characterized by flaming incompetence has nevertheless managed to do one thing effectively: it has trashed years’ worth of work to protect the planet. As David Horsey, put it recently, in the Los Angeles Times, “Donald Trump’s foreign policy and legislative agenda may be a confused mess,” but “his administration’s attack on the environment is operating with the focus and zeal of the Spanish Inquisition.”(1)
And,
of course, it isn't just the Executive branch that is all-out for
more pollution and contamination of the air and water. There are
congressmen like Matt Gaetz (Republican) of Florida, who wants to
abolish the EPA altogether, allegedly to “better protect the
environment.”(2) We should, he claims, “downstream resources to
states for more effective & efficient protection.”
Let's look at that word “downstream,” used here by Gaetz as a
verb, and its opposite “upstream” in their more usual roles as
adverbs. Waste, contaminants, and pollution flow downstream. If a
state upstream is less zealous in its policing of its waters, then
the downstream states are also the victims of the former's abuse of
the environment. (And if you're Florida, you're way
downstream.)
Or, consider this air pollution stream:
Much of Hong Kong’s pollution . . . wafts across the border from China. About 60-70% of particulate matter comes from the mainland, according to a study commissioned by the city’s Environmental Protection Department. In winter, when the wind direction tends to blow more pollutants towards Hong Kong, as much as 77% of dust in the air comes from China.Hong Kong has signed a series of agreements with Guangdong province directly to the north – but they are unenforceable, stymying efforts by the local government and activists to have a meaningful impact. In the meantime, the health impact on Hong Kong’s population is severe.(3)
Yes,
Hong Kong creates a great deal of its own air pollution,
and needs
to attack it at the source, just as local and state action
in the US is needed to tackle localized pollution. But only
action by larger political entities, national and
international, can significantly help to reduce overall
pollution.
*
If
the desire to kill people is a prerequisite for the job of Attorney
General of Arkansas(4), the prerequisite for the Attorney General
post in either North Carolina or Oklahoma is selling-out to fossil
fuel companies.
To
understand that devolving complete environmental control to the
states is meshugah, take a look at North Carolina.
“It’s like our state is deaf, and the only voice they can hear is Duke Energy,” claims Amy Brown, who lives with her husband and two sons in a small single-story home in Belmont, not far from Charlotte. (5)
Because
of contamination from Duke Energy's power plants, the Brown family
has been forced to live on bottled water, and they never take baths,
only rushed showers; the in-ground pool, "which has
elevated levels of arsenic, among other chemicals, is strictly
off-limits.”
In
Oklahoma, the state's Attorney General, Scott Pruitt, seemed to spend
his whole tenure fighting to dissolve the Environmental Protection
Agency—plagiarizing texts from petroleum industry flacks in doing so.
He was, of course, named Trump's head of the EPA. “It’s the worst
thing in the history of our environment!” exclaimed Garvin
Isaacs, the president of the Oklahoma Bar Association.
“We are in danger. The whole country is in danger. Our kids are in danger.” . . .He claims the fossil-fuel industry “owns the whole darn state.” But his worries at the state level are now national. By choosing Pruitt, Isaacs said, Trump has outsourced his environmental policy to the Republican Party’s most powerful private donors—the oil-and-gas magnates who have funded Pruitt’s campaigns in Oklahoma.(5)
*
All
of which leads me back to the beginning of this post: “After all,
we live here too.”
As
Socrates stated, it is better to live among good people than bad
people—and I think that we can all agree that polluters and their
enablers are bad people. Don't the Trumps, the Pruitts, the Gaetzes
“live here too”? Don't they share the same air as everyone else?
Are they oblivious to the damage they are doing not only to us but
their own families?
For
a long time I tried to wrap my head around this seeming absurdity—of
people actually promoting harm to themselves and their families. But
I have finally found the answer:
Aliens exist and they live in our midst disguised as humans - at least, that's what 20 percent of people polled in a global survey believe.(6)
I
am converted! That is the answer. The polluters and their enablers
don't “live here too.” They are aliens amongst us, who are only
temporarily on Earth in order to destroy it, before retreating to
their true home in some nasty far-off corner of the universe.
***
(4)
Arkansas is determined to run convicted prisoners to their death on
an assembly- line basis.
