"The nation that destroys its soils destroys itself." – F.D. Roosevelt, 1937.
Mr. Herbert, New York Times editorialist, points out today [june 5, 2010], in Disaster in the Amazon , the heinous acts of a parasitic entity without a soul, the laissez faire corporate model, which is currently sucking the soul out of America.
Agreed, wetlands destruction anywhere is nothing less than a national disaster but it is only the tip of the iceberg.
FDR, over 70 years ago, was clueless of practices yet to be born.
A few examples of impending disasters:
1. Under the best of circumstances fossil fuels will fail in time, threatening our national defense, not to mention poisoning our potable water with mercury and fouling our wetlands.
Answer: Support renewable energy at least to the degree we support fossil fuels, allowing more jobs while avoiding leaving our children brain damaged from mercury and threatening national security. Even now many beautiful trout streams have toxic levels of mercury risking fetal brain development if eaten by expectant mothers.
2. We have rendered the entire nation vulnerable to resistant infections as a direct result of the unrestrained use of our life saving human antibiotics added to animal feed by corporate farm and ranch operations, predictably leading to super bugs. These bugs then infect humans and we no longer have effective antibiotics to save ourselves.
Answer: limiting use of certain critical antibiotics to only humans and even then human use must be restrained to appropriate cases by prescribing doctors which is not the case today.
3. Agricultural use of insecticides and herbicides, when we know these agents are of only temporary benefit, again due to the predictable development of resistance. This leads to the use of ever more toxic yet ultimately ineffective agents that pervade our environment with unknown toxic hazard and renders humans vulnerable to fatal insect carrying diseases, with the insects resistant to our pesticides because of unrestrained use.
Answer: limit use of pesticides to those carrying human disease and accept some level of crop loss or perhaps selective use if critical need arises.
4. Wholesale use of agricultural fertilizer leading to overpopulation and expanding dead zones from the runoff into streams.
Answer: sustainable farming using crop rotation
5. Corporate industrial fishing leading to the destruction of habitat off the US East coast and the crash of our Atlantic Cod, which was thought to be an unlimited natural resource. Not to mention salmon, tuna and whales, to name a few.
Answer: none known for the cod other than maybe a thousand years for the ocean bottom to heal itself
Pogo said, “Yep, son, we have met the enemy and he is us.”
This is so true because our myopic thinking leads us down the primrose path thinking that technology will bail us out before we destroy ourselves and because the of the Siren Call of life on the cheap.
In the short term all the above measures would cost more money but in the long term we would not end up on the ash heap of failed nations moldering on top of the rotten carcasses of Rome, Easter Island, the USSR et al.
But the rub is that every nation is in the soup together.
how to solve these problems on a planatery level is the subject of another post.
uncle steve
