A Few Individuals Can Make a Huge Difference in Environmental Justice
Each day we watch the slow grind of the forces that shape our world in terms of environmental justice. We ask ourselves questions that have no answers currently: How much of the Amazon rain forest will we be able to preserve? Will the migration away from fossil fuels occur in time to save the Greenland Ice Sheet? Will Chevron eventually be forced to pay for the devastation it caused in Ecuador? Phenomena like these, unfolding as they are–not across months or years–but over a period of decades, are why the destruction of our natural environment is often referred to as a “train-wreck in slow motion.”
Given all this, it’s easy to forget that each one of us plays an important role in the outcome, and that a few key individuals have single-handedly brought about huge redirections in the course of humankind—even previously unknown and indistinguished people like the Chinese man who defied the armored tanks in Tienanmen Square in 1989, or the young fellow who lighted himself on fire, bringing on the Arab Spring in 2010.
Speaking of individuals who changed our civilization, let’s consider Voltaire (pictured above with one of his more famous quotes, which translates as “reading enlarges the soul”), a man who was anything but indistinguished. According to the Writer’s Almanac, last Tuesday marked the anniversary of the
“….day in 1778 that Voltaire returned to Paris after living in exile for 28 years in protest against France’s religious fanaticism. He was a crusader for human rights and one of the most respected people in Europe. When he was allowed to return home, more than 300 people came to visit him his first day in the city. One of those visitors was Benjamin Franklin, fresh from helping to lead the revolution in the United States of America. Franklin had brought his grandson with him and asked Voltaire to bless the little boy.”
When you look at the horrors that Muslim extremists are wreaking around the world, and on their own people (especially women), remind yourself of one of the fundamental reasons for all this mayhem: that this part of the world never received the fruits of what Voltaire and just a few others brought us: the Age of Reason/the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the U.S. Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and so forth. Keep in mind how radical these ideas were in their time, and how limited our human rights would be without them.
Then consider what we all can do to bring about a new Enlightenment — one that respects the basic rights of all seven billion of us, as well as the health and sustainability of the natural environment.
Some of these societal transformations come quickly but many are slow and painful none the less. It seems like only a generation ago that industries and municipal governments were dumping waste material into rivers and the air. Dump sites were the banks of rivers.
Today we continue to pollute our environment but the quantities and their effects are muted compared to the past ignorant dumping.
Still it does not take a large amount of mutagenic material to cause birth defects. A few alien carp or Zebra Mussels in our Great Lakes can ruin a great fishery.
Sometimes we get it right and sometimes we have to suffer the consequences of our shortsightedness.
Fortunately we continue to have creative people who come up with some great ideas that bail us out of our self made boxes. Education can maximize our chance of survival.
Once again Craig, you move us to think beyond ourselves and the moment. We simply need more folks like you Craig. And of course, Amen. All the best to you, Mark
I deeply appreciate the kind words, Mark.
When considering whether to be hopeful, or to despair of changes for the better in our societies, it is indeed wise to consider how far we’ve come – even in that last fifty years or one hundred years. Look upon the advances in civil rights won by the women’s movements and against racism, and the steps toward economic justice won by the labor movement. We live in a much better world today, and have hope of further advances, because of the sacrifices of those individuals in the name of justice. We began this nation in the blood of the indigenous peoples and built it on the backs of slaves, but we have recognized the error of those ways and have more than begun to move beyond them. We have far to go, and there is hope.
On energy constraints? There are fist hand and very relevant facts as to mans associations with and to all his commercial grade reasons. Every ten years what was good is now bad, what was dab was good. New words, IE: terms] suffice to say, are merely government tactics for which the entities of justifiable [for the symbolic consecrated agreement processing] we call: reason; that comes from and forms the mighty head of the systemic and very neurotic belief cycles. In that our intentions matter personally, they are made terminally extinct by law. It’s a matter of A.I. head symbols games beyond our widest imagination. what’s our mind made of? symbols, labeling, icon, masks, and tagging schemes? No one wants to hear this, do they?
The one way street we can all feel as some kind of emotional helplessness to the biological fact….we do sense a knowing grater than ourselves that can be shared, but is not. legally, our hands are tied by knots of reprisal fear. when that changes our little man voice will reappear…like old BEN and his and if we legalize every move man makes he is somehow going to obey the rules of the game. No quits.
Man has devised, and cunningly agreed to do things for control over the masses, their aimless beliefs and their all mighty mailable fears. Until we wake up to the fact man suffers form symbols fatigue, not physical weakness, not lack of will. His major head problem is arrogant masks off icon affiliation [ agreed masking], the judgement of the symbols that are placed on people; of them the processing of humanity itself.
How do we correct the parody of the icon converts who actually believe there is meaning when a long time ago it was made up to fit terminal end legalism. Do we get? The little man syndrome, the scared believes, the meaning of terminal gaming we call our word/aphasic knowing. We are trapped in a binary all or nothing [terminal legalism] knowing that should not be, but is….Albert Einstein, early 1950’s. James of Green Marine Energy, Vortex SeaDrive Systems Corp.