“Fouling one’s nest” is an old metaphor, originally in reference to birds that excreted in their nests, and applied by extension to humans who failed to keep their environments tidy. The thought that led me here was about helium balloons used to help promote events such as weddings and open houses, cut loose after the event to come down wherever. And they will come down, and, when they come down, they cause problems for birds and other wildlife. People think about the immediate benefit of using the balloons to highlight an event without considering the after-event consequences of disposing of them.
But the balloons are just one example of the human inability to think in terms of long-term. Immediate needs and desires are first in line. The English Novelist, Charles Dickens, addressed some of the problems caused by the coal industry in the novel, Hard Times. Anyone who has been in “coal country,” knows what coal does not only to the landscape, but also to those who work in the mines, for whom black-lung disease is a common problem. In the early days of coal mining, the coal dust got everywhere. The same is true for oil, and an oil field is not a pretty place. Although the physical damage is not as obvious for agricultural pollution, which includes fertilizer and insecticide “contamination” of surrounding areas, it is definitely there.
The truth is that everything that lives “pollutes.” Human pollution, however, is the one that’s out of control. Left to its own devices, the rest of nature remains in good balance. Lions don’t kill a few extra giraffes so that they can mount heads on walls. Seagulls don’t kill a few extra fish so that they can have some mounted. Our ancient ancestors were generally more frugal than modern humans, but for them, it was often a case of “feast or famine.” When a herd of buffalo came through an area, Native Americans would kill as many as they could in any way they could (including driving them over cliffs), and then they would feast. When the buffalo went elsewhere, they often didn’t have enough to eat, so they were glad to feast when it was possible. For most of human history, food was difficult to to come by, and there was no good way to store what wasn’t consumed on the spot. That’s especially true of meat, of course. Humans have been storing grain a very long time, and for a long time, meat (from both fish and cattle) was a luxury because it tended to spoil.
At this point in human history, we need to get serious about conservation. Planet earth is a big place, but it isn’t infinite. Competition for resources has been the primary cause of wars, including those fought seemingly for religious differences. In previous times, humans could move when they had exhausted the resources in a particular area. The sequence was explore, settle, exploit, repeat. We have pretty much done that to the fullest extent possible on planet Earth, and we have begun following that sequence in space. We can now put “stuff” on the moon and Mars and have been considering colonization. We have been prepared psychologically for space travel by “science fiction” stories for generations at this point.
Jules Verne was one of the first to popularize science fiction, which really “came of age” in the 1950s. Star Trek started as a TV show and migrated to the “big screen.” Star Wars started as a major motion picture. The relationship between garbage and planetary destruction isn’t a major theme in any of the films I have seen in either series, and I have seen most of them. Fiction, regardless of medium, only rarely has pollution as a major theme. We (humans) do everything we can to avoid thinking about the damage being caused by the way we foul our own nest. In recent years, Al Gore and others have been doing what they could to draw attention to the problems humans are causing by “fouling our own nest.” The current head of the EPA has evidently deiced that the minimal rules and regulations we currently have in place need to be rolled back to a previous century. Surely ahead of his time, back in 1965 satirist Tom Lehrer expressed concerns about pollution:
At about that time, I was living in Santa Monica, California, and driving into downtown Los Angeles for work. I would drive a clean car into LA, park it, and walk another couple of blocks to my work location, and then walk back to the car for the drive home. During the day a thick layer of grit would have accumulated on the car. Since then, Southern California in general and Los Angeles in particular have done a lot to clean up their air and water, but the problem of pollution really isn’t “local”&151;it’s global. Plastic is pretty much everywhere in the ocean. And we (humans) are putting more in more rapidly than we are removing what’s there. We speak badly of birds and other animals that “foul their nests,” but when it comes to that, humans are the champions, and it doesn’t look as though that’s going to change until/unless more of us suffer the consequences than benefit from the profits.
When you have a chance, vote for those who will work to solve the problem and to repair the damage that has already been done. If you think it is too late to do anything, I can sympathize with that, But I’m not willing to “go down” without a fight. But until those of us who think the planet is worth saving out number those who want to profit from its destruction, “they” will win.
