Save the planet

Was looking up information on energy policy and came across an op-ed article called "Destroying Both Jobs and Energy Security" at http://www.newt.org/, Newt Gingrich's website. Here's a quote:

President Obama just signed a controversial, pork-laden, trillion-dollar "stimulus" package. We'll spend another $350 billion this year on imported oil.

And with the stroke of a pen, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar canceled 77 Utah oil and gas leases that had gone through seven years of studies, negotiations and land-use planning. In an instant, he eliminated hundreds of jobs, terminated access to vital oil and gas deposits, and deprived taxpayers of millions in lease bonus, rent, royalty and tax revenues.

The canceled leases represent one-third of acreage estimated to
contain enough oil to fuel 3 million cars and enough natural gas to heat 14 million homes for 15 years. They were rejected because temporary drilling operations might be "visible" from several national parks more than a mile away.

Many moons ago I took a trip to Mount Rushmore for the simple reason that I hadn't ever been there before. I flew to Rapid City, South Dakota, and spent a week driving around.

You must understand, I'm a "flatlander." Spent an afternoon once driving through desolate canyons around Los Angeles along fire roads. We seemed to be surrounded by "mountains," really just pretty high hills, I guess, and almost desert-like. At any rate, driving through there was very claustrophobic for me. I'm used to the Big Sky of the Midwest. Surrounded by mountains, I feel crowded and, in a way, burdened by the landscape.

Anyway, in South Dakota, I drove from Rapid City to Deadwood, before Deadwood became a casino town. In this area, there are no real mountains. They do have the Black Hills (miles south of where I was), and if you go a little farther west, you begin to see the Rockies. But right between Rapid City and Deadwood there were mainly only the buttes. These are steep hills, windswept at the top, so they're shaped like mounds of ice cream or mashed potatoes with their peaks bent and tipped toward the east by the westerly winds constantly leaning against them.

So I'm halfway down one butte and could see across a very broad and shallow valley to the next rise. You can see the highway, I-90, wending along. And it looks really insignificant, like a pen-scratch on a pile of clay. Also in this valley, actually cradled up to the next butte, was something that looked like it might be a lumber yard or a quarry, a square of industrial activity hemmed on one side by a cluster of buildings. I could see big 18-wheel trucks moving around that place, like "Hot Wheels" models, the entire industrial site itself no more than a small scuff on the land.

What struck me was something like, "Jeez. If the human race disappeared tomorrow, we would have left hardly any tracks."

Another trip along I-80 was interesting, too. Again, I'm a flatlander and pretty much used to the height of the sky at whatever sea-level is in Illinois. As you drive along I-80 west across Iowa and more notably moving across Nebraska, you feel yourself getting closer to the sky although the land is relatively flat. It's bizarre. The clouds seem to be getting lower.

Then these strange long bursts of rock begin bolting up, ripping through the layer of soil. Like the bedrock suddenly decided to stand up and look around. This effect gets to be a kind of norm the farther west you go. But these things are enormous. Some, like around Chimney Rock, are ledges miles long. They look like cracks in the earth, almost, one side higher than the other, the underlayer of solid rock rising up.

There are a few other bizarre formations around Chimney Rock, too. I paid special attention to this because I was writing a book about the Oregon Trail, and Chimney Rock, Scott's Bluff, the Courthouse -- all rocky formations -- for the 1840 wagon trains these geological features served as "the elephant" in the phrase, "I've seen the elephant." All very strange and exotic, and most became landmarks for these travelers.

And then there are the Rocky Mountains. When I finally saw them from the ground (as opposed to flying over), I was less impressed by their beauty than I imagined I would be. After all, we've all seen so many Westerns and postcards and coffeetable books, etc etc. But the Rockies are huge and spread out enough so I didn't get quite the same sort of claustrophobia as in the hills around Los Angeles. The Rockies were more like.... Really Dangerous. Even though the land for hundreds of miles around them has been rising steadily and you're nowhere near sea-level anymore, you've already seen the smaller eruptions of rock pushing up, the Rockies are still, well, monumentally towering, bare, uninviting, scarred, insensate rock.

And I thought: What on earth happened here? Where's all the nice, soft, sweet-smelling grassy soil? The Rockies seem to belong to another planet.

And what did happen there? People used too much aerosol hairspray and deodorent?

Actually, apparently parts of the Midwest, especially around Rapid City, were once the bottom of an ocean. If you're familiar with the Plate Theory -- that the earth's crust consists of a number of plates that move around very slowly over the more liquid core of the earth -- then you understand that at some time the plates collided and the Rocky Mountains are the result. The mountains are actually the edge of one plate crushing through and riding up on another.

Only when you haven't grown up around this and see the mountains for the first time, you can't even imagine the force that could create these formations. It's like $3.6 TRILLION, it just goes beyond any capacity to comprehend.

That's when I lost any real interest in environmentalism, or rather, grew orders of magnitude more skeptical of the argument that claims human beings are destroying the earth. Sure, we can dump a lot of garbage into lakes and rivers, kill all the fish, and make the water non-potable for us and for everyone downstream. But I'm not convinced we're capable of doing significantly more damage. It seems incredibly arrogant to me to believe we could.

Went to Italy once and to Pompei. That town was a resort area for rich Romans and has always been "under the shadow" of Mt. Vesuvius. Actually, Vesuvius is a good 10 miles away or so. As you walk into the ruins of Pompei, there's a big glass window framing Mt. Vesuvius in the distance. And on the window, they've painted a line that shows how high Vesuvius used to be. It blew like Mt. St. Helens did -- the whole top exploded -- and projectile-vomited tons of ash and all kinds of earth junk, burying Pompei and the surrounding area. It's a great place to visit. If you ever get to Italy, go there, definitely.

At any rate, just to add to the pile of things to consider: Mt. St. Helens. Or the mountain in Southeast Asia somewhere that blew up about 1819 or so, and spewed so much ash and gas into the atmosphere that residents of North America eventually experienced the "Year with No Summer." It snowed in July here.

So, in the face of what the earth is capable of, the forces and energies it can whip up all by its non-intelligent and entirely material self, I don't see how human beings can seriously challenge it or win too many battles against it. We can grub around with our little tools and plant things. We can lay down long strips of asphalt to ease our passage across it. We can puncture it and bleed out little pools of oil. I suppose we might set off some chains of events that might not have a happy ending (for us) in our interaction with the planet.

But even if, in fact, something strange is happening to the ozone layer, or the polar ice caps are melting, I doubt that it's entirely the fault of our puny selves, and I also doubt there's much we can do about it. I'd look somewhere else for a more plausible explanation.

But it might be warmer and fuzzier to think it's all our fault. That would mean it's under our control.

Environmentalists say that mankind must learn how to live with the earth. Yeah, I think that's what we've been doing since we emerged as a distinct species. We have to know how to live with the earth, extract from it what we need, because our ability to manipulate the environment is really our only effective and successful method of survival. We have to operate more or less pro-actively with the earth, take the initiative, rather than just waiting for, say, a passive bovine or a bunch of asparagus to deliver itself to our doorsteps. Otherwise, we won't survive.

And given all this, I suppose it was inevitable that eventually human beings would turn on each other. Sometimes it's a lot easier to steal food and shelter from others than to get it for ourselves through our own efforts. Of course, that means turning the "others" out, watching them wander away and die of exposure and starvation.

Human beings can be soft-hearted. Usually we have to demonize our enemies before we destroy them in order to justify our own cruelty, label them "monsters", "ogres", "corporates CEOs", or "rich people." Then they're fair game. They aren't people like us anymore.

But ya know, it takes a lot of thought and energy to steal from someone else. You have to either hit them over the head with a hammer, shoot them, outlaw them, or devise convoluted and complicated government mechanisms, get the legislation through congress, set up bureaus and agencies... All that energy could be used to make something for youself by yourself. And unless you plan on building an atom bomb, don't worry too much about irretrievably screwing up the planet. That's not all that easy to do.