http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1011-10.htm

Published on Saturday, October 11, 2003 by The Timberjay (Ely, Minnesota)
(http://timberjay.com/)

Win or Not, It’s Time to Fight the Right Fight
by Steve Foss

There is a clock ticking.

Anyone attentive to the environment knows this. But no one knows how
fast the clock is ticking, how much time we have before our greed pushes
us past the point of no return. It could be a 1,000 years. Or 100.
Or less. And that uncertainty, which leads our species to mill about
and argue, could be our undoing.

Writers more eloquent than I have marshaled the facts of industrial
civilization and its damage to the world that supports us all.
There is no room left for argument, so I won’t reheat a dish already
oft served and bland with age.

Fact is, we are using up limited resources faster than we replace them.
There are two reasons for this. There are too many of us, and we want
too many of the wrong things.

There are also two key questions. Will a critical mass realize that
we’re far down a path to destruction that must be altered?
And will we realize it in time to reverse it?

Throughout human history, we’ve shown an ability to coordinate and
succeed at phenomenal tasks. That ability makes humans unique among
animal species. But that same history shows we are malcontents prone
to digression into parochial bickering. It takes some common
understanding and overriding urgency to transform ourselves from
dilettantes to heroes.

Will the the environmental crises be our next such awakening?

I have been a soldier in that movement, and I will be again.

All who come to that battle have had their epiphanies.

Mine came at 10,000 feet in the Colorado Rockies, while I was bouncing
in a wild ride down a mountain on gold mine property in the back of
a company pickup, cradling my golden retriever/Malamute cross named
Jake. Hoping to make it to the mine building in time to reverse the
effects of cyanide poisoning and save his life.

Jake was the best dog I ever had.

I went to work for the mine, the only one left operating near Cripple
Creek, in the late 1980s. It used a solution of water, potassium cyanide
and lime to pull gold into solution out of low-grade ore crushed into
finger-sized pieces and stacked on giant flattened "pads" of hundreds
of thousands of tons.

Atop each pad was a system of hoses and fittings that spread the
solution in a cloud of droplets over the ore, like watering acres
of lawn. Beneath each pad was a heavy black poly liner, and the
yellow gold-filled solution ran down these liners into giant
poly-lined ponds for later processing. Ponds, pads and metal
and PVC distribution lines crisscrossed the landscape.

And they leaked, occasionally spilling thousands of gallons of
solution onto the land. Deer and horses got past the fences and
died after drinking the solution. If there’s not enough lime
to keep the pH up, the cyanide can become gas, and I’ve seen
birds fly over the systems and fall dead because of that, once
just before I was to be walking onto those pads to service the
sprinklers.

And then there was Jake, who fell into a pond half a mile from
our house and couldn’t climb up the slippery poly slope and out
of the pond to safety.

Cyanide, aside from killing things that breathe and ingest it,
is absorbed through human skin and can kill you that way. Dogs,
luckily, don’t take it in well through their skin but through
their foot and nose pads. Those small absorptive surfaces are
the only reason Jake was still paddling weakly around when
we got the word and blazed up to the pond.

I lassoed him out of there and we hauled him to the headquarters
building. No one we’d heard of had tried administering the oxygen
and amyl nitrate antidote to a dog before. Jake was breathing
about three times a minute when we got him in.

He responded to the amyl nitrate and made a full recovery,
as living things do from cyanide poisoning if it doesn’t kill
them.

But there in that dingy, dusty mill, surrounded by half a dozen
good working and beer-drinking companions in waterproof gear,
steel-toed boots and hardhats, who were happy for me and my dog,
I made a silent commitment to work to reverse this polluting and
dangerous way of life we’ve come to condone. I told no one of that
vow, not even my wife.

Industry provides a seductive deal with the devil. It allows us
to make enough of a living to dwell in splendid places, and the
Cripple Creek Mining District was one of those places, as is the
landscape of northeastern Minnesota. But industry also dominates
any rural economy, and in our hope to melt into the physical and
spiritual beauty of the landscape we are pinned to that industry
with the iron spike of our own desire. We come to believe it’s
the only way to live where we are. But it’s not true.

Six months after the poisoning near Cripple Creek, I was working
as a canvasser and teacher of canvassers for Clean Water Action
in Minneapolis, Fargo and Duluth, going into neighborhoods each
weeknight, showing individual people in their own homes how
contributions to the movement and letters to legislators make
a big difference in the political process. Calls to action from
individual citizens grew into thousands of communications to the
Capitol and had enough weight for environmental victory after
victory. And we helped elect Paul Wellstone, one of the
environment’s greatest champions in Washington, D.C.

Sometimes, you could see the light of success actually switch
on in a citizen’s eye, the glimmer of understanding how simple
and formidable it can be to empower a population, the firming
of a mouth with a new and profound purpose.

A beginning, certainly, but we are good at beginnings. More
demanding is the perseverance required to give beginnings meaning.

What must happen is a fundamental shift in priorities among people.
Too many of us care too much about the wrong things. I see this in
myself. Bigger boats and motors to speed myself faster from fishing
spot to fishing spot, when this contemplative pastime actually
becomes richer with each decreased mph. More money to buy these
toys, these ATVs and snowmobiles and faster computers and plasma
televisions, and to blazes with the natural resources it consumes
and the world it pollutes to manufacture and use and throw away.

No, millions of people in this country have come to the realization
that more is not better.

To simplify, to slow down, to ponder the nature of things and reach
humility through a more basic lifestyle - these are things we both
can and should do.

Will this happen in time? Will it happen to enough people?

I look through the glass that is my 41 years of life, a glass slightly
warped as are all such by each individual’s unique experiences. I’ve
spent the 12 years since my work with Clean Water Action on the
environmental sidelines, gaining insight through 10 years of newspaper
work into the best and worst of human character. Mulling, digesting,
evaluating.

In my heart of hearts, I have more doubt than hope. I don’t believe
we have the essential ability to cast off our way of life and embrace
such radical change.

However, I’ve spent too much time on the sidelines.

I could fight for women’s rights, take up the battle on behalf
of the poor or of victims of discrimination. These are all worthy
efforts.

But without an environment to support us, those causes would fall
by the way as immaterial. Survival first.

It’s time to get back in the fight that matters most, to demonstrate
the perseverance to turn what was a beginning 12 years ago into the
remainder of a life’s work.

I don’t think we will win the war, but I’ve been wrong before.

And there is honor in the fight, if it is the right fight.

Steve Foss is Ely-Babbitt editor of the Timberjay. Contact him at
(218) 365-3114 or stfcatfish@yahoo.com

Copyright 2003 The Timberjay

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