0801blog

Don’t Look Now, But…

Oh, bring back the good old days, when the number one concern was whether ShopRite would ban plastic bags.

Now, it’s whether a pandemic virus will ban the world and whether we will suddenly be transformed into a fascist state. The issue of plastic bags seems rather,relatively unimportant.

So now, while quarantined, I sit by the above ground pool in the back yard and watch the algae grow like weeds, stimulated by record high temperatures likely spurred by climate change, in the shade of the new palm tree that just sprouted a month ago, while inside the air conditioners run full-time to keep the house inhabitable for more than just cave crickets while the electric bills keep going up, up, up as my revenues go down, down, down.

I’m kidding about the palm tree but not the rest of the stuff.

It seems like a century ago when the anti-environmentalist in chief cancelled the U.S. membership in the Paris Climate Agreement. Remember all the talk about the climate change hoax and that biggest farce of all, greenhouse gases, and how all those pesky laws to protect the air, land and water need to go away so that the fossil fuel industry and other businesses can make more money and the benefits will trickle down to the common man, or rather up to the uncommon corporate billionaires.

Since the nightmare of Trump began, all kinds of laws have ended that were designed over many years to protect the air, water and land. If we’re not careful, there will be pipelines where there was tundra and oil drilling within view of the beaches.

The Environmental Protection Agency, an oxymoron if I ever heard one, repealed and replaced emissions rules for power plants and vehicles; weakened protections for more than half the nation’s wetlands; and withdrew the legal justification for restricting mercury emissions from power plants.

The Interior Department, which is now designed to destroy the interior, has opened up more land for oil and gas leasing by cutting back protected areas and limiting wildlife protections.

It’s like the pickpocket at New Year’s Eve on Times Square. Keep everybody’s eyes on the ball dropping while you steal their wallets. In this case the wallets include so many overturned laws that it makes your head spin.

Did you know that Trump reversed a rule that stopped hunters from using bait like grease-soaked doughnuts, to lure and kill grizzly bears?

Or that a plan is in progress to open nine million acres of Western land to oil and gas drilling by weakening habitat protections for the sage grouse, an imperiled bird?

Or that our anti-nature officials have rejected a proposed ban on chlorpyrifos, a pesticide linked to developmental disabilities in children; and ended an Occupational Safety and Health Administration program to reduce risks of workers developing the lung disease silicosis?

And that is just a short list of the havoc that has been wreaked on a system that was designed to keep our children and the rest of us safe from environmental dangers.

Make America great again. I remember back in the day when you could empty your ash tray by the side of the road and nobody seemed to care, in fact, it was the acceptable way to empty an ash tray. You could even toss a candy wrapper or empty cigarette box out and nobody would bat an eyelash.

There weren’t a lot of plastic bottles strewn about because there wasn’t a lot of plastic, but rather soda and beer came in glass bottles. Of course, you could find shards of glass along the shoulder if you looked.

Recycling hadn’t even entered the lexicon. You just threw the garbage in the garbage can and put it out for the garbage man to pick up and nobody really cared what it contained, whether it was paper, plastic or nuclear waste.

The first environmentalist I knew about was not Rachel Carson, it was Mac, my neighbor 60 years ago, who taught me that when I was done with a non-filter cigarette to open up the butt, let the remaining tobacco float away and then ball up the paper so small that nobody would notice it. He also beat his wife but you take the good with the bad.

And on my stroll through the meadows today, I was reminded of that prescient comment made to a naieve Benjamin in “The Graduate”, about “plastics is the future.” Mostly toward the entrance to the meadow that winds along the Musconetcong River, I saw all forms of discarded plastic cups and lids, pieces of plastic from unidentifiable sources, blue plastic bags, clear plastic bags and an occasional shoe.

Fortunately, as I made my way further down the path away from the highway, there was fewer garbage, most likely because the litterers are too lazy to talk long walks and would rather just heave their trash out the window of their passing car.

Poor Greta Thunberg. Just when the young Swedish environmental activist was gaining international recognition, Trump and the COVID 19 pandemic arrived and swept the teenager and her noble cause off the front pages and off the front burner in the effort to save the planet from itself.