I Put My Laundry On Line

I grab four or five clothespins in my left hand as I bend down to pick a shirt out of the laundry bucket. After a few months, I’ve gotten used to this routine. Holding a few extra pins keeps me from having to reach into the clothespin bag every time I hang a shirt or pair of pants, speeding the process along. This is part of my routine two or three times a week now, hanging our laundry out to dry on a clothesline.

Growing concerned about global warming and my contribution with my car, refrigerator, computer, and any other modern device that plugs in, moves, or shakes, I put up a clothesline a couple years ago outside the house that my wife and I live in. There are 80 million clothes dryers in the United States, and it’s estimated that each one throws from 1500 to 2000 pounds of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere every year. Of course that estimate is just that, an estimate. A dryer owned and used by a single person, particularly a frugal one, will not produce the CO2 that is produced by a dryer used by a family of four, but the overall numbers can give an idea of how much we’re warming the planet due to our reliance on dryers.

At the most, we are throwing 80 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere with the clothes dryers. It’s a fraction of the 314 million tons of CO2 that our cars and trucks produce in the same year and another fraction of the CO2 produced from industrial production. It is nonetheless a lot of carbon thrown in the air that would not be there otherwise. Also, those statistics are just the United States. There are plenty of clothes dryers in Argentina, Ukraine, and anywhere else that you have people, a power source, and laundry.

When I first started hanging our clothes out, I thought that this would be a sacrifice, that I would dislike the extra labor involved or the change of routine. I was wrong. It’s a chore that forces you to take your time, like almost all the chores that sustained our ancestors for millennia – milking goats or cows, planting crops – the chores that became part of our DNA as human beings, the work that brings quietude and a feeling of well-being.

Some of my earliest and most pleasant memories are of being in the backyard with my mother as she hung laundry out to dry. I remember when she washed our bed sheets and put them on the line. I would run between the brilliant white billowing walls. It seemed magical to me how, in summer, the air seemed so cool as I raced the length between the clothesline poles.

            I hang up a pair of my pants. I’ve learned that it’s best to hang pants legs down. They dry quicker this way. I haven’t read up on this, but I suppose it has something to do with the way water flows from around the waist and pockets and the way water flows through the clothing as it dries. If I hang pants ankles up, it can take a real long time for the waist and pockets to dry. Long sleeved shirts dry best upside down, with the sleeves dangling.

The wind picks up a little from the east. This is good. Easterly winds come in from the desert. The humidity will be low, and these shirts and pants will dry quickly. I’ve always been as aware of the weather as the next person, bundling up when it’s cold and carrying an umbrella for rainy days. But since I’ve started hanging our clothes out, I’m a bit more aware of what is going on in my environment. Is it humid today? Windy? The weather can make all the difference between getting one or two loads done in a day.

            Dry lined clothes enforce a routine on doing laundry. Before I put up the clothesline, I’d throw laundry in the washer any time of day, morning, afternoon, evening. Now, on a laundry day, I know exactly what I’m going to do after breakfast. The clothes go in the washer, and within the hour I have the line and clothespins all set to go. I get the laundry up by a little after nine or ten.

            There are some disadvantages, chief among them the added ironing that I wind up doing from time to time. I have dress shirts that are “iron free.” When they get tossed in the dryer, they come out looking crisp and rarely need a touch up with an iron. It’s a different story when they’re put on a line. They can wind up as wrinkled as a prune.

            On the other hand, I save some money. I’m not spending a dime on electricity or gas to power my dryer. I don’t have any direct proof of this, but my clothes are supposed to last longer when they’re dried outside. It makes sense. Every time they’re dried on a line they are not being par boiled while they tumble against each other. Best of all our clothes smell fresh and clean now. The freshness stays with the shirts, sock, and bed sheets, so that our closets smell fresher.

            I’ve remarked that I’ve installed a wind powered clothes dryer at my house, and it’s interesting to note that older folks, the ones like me who remember their mothers and grandmothers in the backyard with their laundry baskets, are the ones to get the joke. Some of the younger folks get a vague look in their eyes when they hear me say “wind powered clothes dryer.” Perhaps they imagine that I went online and bought a contraption with a windmill and a generator that I hammered to the roof of my house and connected all of its wires to a sleek looking machine in my laundry room.

            There probably is a company that makes such a dingus. And it is probably marketed as a green product. I would guess that such a device would be a good move, and it would lead to less CO2 in the air. There is nonetheless the question of all the metals used in making the generator and motor, not to mention all the wires needed to move all the electricity around.

            Winston Churchill once said “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” Along with buildings, Churchill could well have included ballpoint pens, space shuttles, clothes dryers, and everything else that we manufacture. Not only our buildings, but all the things that we shape and form into being also shape and form us as well. In a hunter-gatherer society everyone thinks like a hunter-gatherer. In an industrial society we all think industrially. And so for us, if there is a problem, there has to be something that engineers can figure out an answer to, a new dingus or product that does things better, faster, and more efficiently, that will be the answer. Global warming? Introducing the new wind powered Dryomatic, with computer controlled thingamabobs!

            We environmentalists see ourselves in opposition to industrialists and developers. They would pave over the wetlands we see as essential and wreck even more havoc on the mountaintops of West Virginia. We need to recognize, however, that on a very fundamental level we think as they do. We can’t help it. It’s in our DNA. Inside every tree hugging environmental activist beats the heart of a techno-frenzied consumerist eager for the next eco friendly device. Look at any environmental magazine. There will be ads and product reviews for dozens of newfangled compost enhancers, hybrid cars, solar panels, and anything else that gives us a warm, environmental fuzzy.

            Please don’t get me wrong. Our lights should be a low-watt and our cars should not be gas-guzzlers. But we should realize that we are still part of the social machinery of our industrial society, and we are still nonetheless switching on lights and driving cars. Driving a hybrid is greener than driving any SUV, yet you’re still driving something—using resources and putting CO2 in the air—when you zip down the interstate in your Prius. “Green technology” may not be a full bore oxymoron, but it does have a twinge of doublethink to it.

            We need technological advances to better our situation. But there are other solutions as well—when the lights, though they are low watt, are not turned on, when the car, despite its being a hybrid, is not driven, when the high efficiency clothes dryer is not turned on and the clothes go up on the line instead—that require us to consider things differently, nontechnically, nonindustrially. What I’m suggesting is we need to think outside the Prius.

            My clothesline, I’ve reduced my carbon footprint by putting it up and using it. It has also opened up a new area of life for me. Besides the benefits of saving money and fresher smelling clothes, it has given me an unhurried quiet time of day when I am more attuned to my surroundings, a nontechnical and nonindustrial experience that would be unavailable to me had I put up an all new, green, wind powered Dryomatic clothes dryer. 

Those Dangerous Environmentalists!

I think of myself as an old fashioned blogger, someone who puts up a few thoughts from time to time without a whole bunch of bells and whistles. But I’ve been intrigued by this video clip for the last few weeks, so I stuck it in this blog. You may have seen it. It was apparently broadcast on the TV news and later made something of a splash on the Internet. It shows President Obama in one of his town hall meetings–an event expected to be attended by supporters–when this couple, identified as members of the T Party, confront him over statements that Vice President Biden was accused of saying. Biden was accused of comparing the T Party to terrorists.

            There is no record of Biden making such a statement, and he has denied comparing members of the T Party to terrorists.[i] The gist of the video is hence a moot point. I want to talk about something else in the video. It concerns what the young lady said about 40 seconds into the video clip. Continuing the confrontation with the president, she says, “You do realize that 90 percent of the domestic terrorist attacks are done by left-wing environmental radicals and not people like me.”

            Well, OK. I have to agree that she doesn’t seem to have the disposition of being a terrorist of any sort. But 90 percent of domestic terrorist attacks performed by left-wing environmental radicals? Where does that come from?

This young lady, since identified by the press as Stacey Rogers, is confused, but it’s not all her fault. There are many things that make the whole subject of terrorism confusing. Often it is the result of sloppy thinking, at other times, as I’ve pointed out in this blog before, there are people who are trying to obfuscate the issue for political ends.

Before we get to the subject of terrorism, we should clear up one thing: why would she call terrorism identified as environmental as left wing? I’ve written about this in other blogs, Environmental concerns and regulation have traditionally come from conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats. Painting environmentalists into a political corner is a recent phenomenon.[ii] Right-wing folks have been pushing this idea, this misunderstanding, for decades. Rogers seems young. So on the one hand, I want to give her the benefit of the doubt on this; on the other hand, when you’re talking to the President of the United States and leader of the free world, you should at least have some idea of what you’re saying.

            OK, on to terrorism. The reason this young lady is confused is because terrorism has different definitions. Not only do different people and organizations define it differently, terrorism will have different definitions from the same organization. The FBI says of international terrorism:

 International terrorism involves violent acts or acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or any state, or that would be a criminal violation if committed within the jurisdiction of the United States or any state (italics mine).[iii]

While the for domestic terrorism:

Domestic terrorism is the unlawful use, or threatened use, of force or violence by a group or individual based and operating entirely within the United States or Puerto Rico without foreign direction committed against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof in furtherance of political or social objectives.[iv]

Note that the phrase “dangerous to human life” does not appear in the definition of domestic terrorism. What we think of as terrorism–car bombs, suicide bombers blowing up cafés and busses–is not needed for an act to be considered terrorist by the FBI if that act is committed within the borders of the United States. So the FBI considers two incidents, men with bombs killing 35 people in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and members of the Earth Liberation Front pouring sugar in the gas tanks of construction vehicles, to be defined and reported as acts of terror.[v]

            Now let’s think a moment, no one in his right mind could equate, on any level, a deadly bombing and vandalism of a car. That is, nonetheless, what is happening here. There is something wrong at the FBI that they would do such a thing leading to such confusion. This needs to be corrected. In the meantime people like Rogers get confused.

Furthering the confusion is that the government counts the perpetration of acts it describes as terrorism, and each act is counted equally. Protesters trampled a crop of genetically engineered corn in July of 2000 = one act of terrorism. Mohamed Atta and his cohort fly airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September of the next year = one act of terrorism.

OK, let’s see further how we muddle the pot when we think about terrorism. Arson committed by ELF is defined as terrorism.[vi] Yet other acts of arson, ones with a clear political message or the intent to cause fear or intimidation are not described as terrorism. In August a federal grand jury indicted Cody Crawford with a hate crime and arson for firebombing a mosque. Nowhere in the FBI’s description of this incident do they call it an act of terrorism.[vii] Last year a father and his son, Dwight Lincoln Hammond, Jr. and Steven Dwight Hammond, both ranchers, were charged with arson and assault for setting fire to BLM land, but their crime was not counted as a terrorist act.[viii]

Please don’t think that I’m condoning vandalism or other property crimes. But to effectively deal with crime or terrorism the severity of the act and intent need to be part of our judgment. That is part of the bedrock of our criminal justice system. Murderers and rapists get longer sentences than petty criminals; repeat offenders get more jail time, too. And if we are truly to make ourselves safer against terrorism, we need to properly understand it. Thinking of vandalism, the destruction of genetically engineered crops or spray painting construction equipment, as the equivalence of pipe bombings and mass killings increases fear and clouds our judgment. It seems obvious that there are politics and involved in how these definitions of terrorism are applied and misapplied. No wonder people like Rogers get confused.

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[i] Obama’s denial that Biden called tea party activists ‘terrorists’ Glenn Kessler Washington Post 8/17/2011  http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/obamas-denial-that-biden-called-tea-party-activists-terrorists/2011/08/16/gIQAr1g3JJ_blog.html

[ii] http://environmentcontext.blogspot.com/2011/07/can-bird-fly-with-only-left-wing.html

[iii] FBI website: Terrorism 2002-2005 http://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/terrorism-2002-2005

[iv] ibid

[v] ibid

[vi] ibid

[vii] Oregon Man Charged with Hate Crime for Arson at Mosque. FBI press release. http://www.fbi.gov/portland/press-releases/2011/oregon-man-charged-with-hate-crime-for-arson-at-mosque

[viii] Ranchers Commit Arson, But Not Terrorism. Doris Lin. About.com June 25, 2010 http://animalrights.about.com/b/2010/06/25/ranchers-commit-arson-but-not-terrorism.htm

Hire Me. I Promise I Won't Do a Good Job!

I interviewed recently for a job at one of San Diego’s largest employers. A company that produces products with electronic components, they had a position open that would make their products less harmful to the environment.

            Anymore, just about every electronic device that is slightly more sophisticated than a two-slice toaster has complicated electronic components with integrated circuit boards. These boards work with ever so tiny chips, processors, and resistors. Some of the soldering holding these components onto the boards can contain lead. And part of what allows these items to be ever so tiny is their use of metals like cadmium and mercury. These metals are toxic. Lead is well known to cause nerve and kidney damage. Cadmium and mercury can damage the kidneys and other organs. Sometimes exposure leads to death.

            For these reasons there has been a push to restrict the use of these metals in electronic components. Europe, Korea, China, and California all have RoHS standards (pronounced row hoss), which stands for Restriction of Hazardous Substances. By the RoHS laws of these governing bodies electronic devices are to have reductions or eliminations of these harmful metals.

I had a phone interview with this manufacturer for a position that would help them achieve RoHS compliance. While I was on the line with my potential new boss, I emphasized the knowledge I had of these metals, how they can enter the water supply and make people sick, how they can persist in soils. I also emphasized that through my own initiative I had started the RoHS program at my previous employer and how I believed that the RoHS program will lead to better health and safety. I thought that I had made the case that I had the knowledge and experience for this job. I thought that I had shown that I had the enthusiasm to do the work that would make me practically a shoo-in for this company that touts its green credentials.

            Then there was a silence on the end of the line. I knew that I had said something wrong. Did I say something that did not quite agree with what was on my resume? Did I get some of the facts wrong about the RoHS program?

“We’re only doing this because we have to,” my interviewer said. My enthusiasm was unwanted.

So I didn’t have the job. I kept the gal on the line a little while longer. She admitted that she didn’t like her job and that the company overworked its employees. I thanked her for her time and said goodbye.

It is not painting with too broad a brush to assume that the attitude of my interviewer – that mitigating our assault on the environment is not a worthwhile endeavor and only to be undertaken under the duress of legislation – is the dominant attitude of the corporate world. I had thought that, like any other job, they would be hiring somebody who had some enthusiasm for his work, who wanted to do his job well. I was wrong. As I said before, this company touts its green credentials, but the person who heads up this company’s environmental program has no training or background in environmentalism. I imagine that they consider their environmental program to be part of their PR campaign, making them look good to the folks who buy their products.

I should be unsurprised. From the time that I started a paper recycling program when I worked for a bank to the RoHS program at the last manufacturer I worked for, management and upper management were unhelpful and sometimes outright hostile to the efforts I made.

What does this mean? Companies will continue to pollute and ravage the environment. The only thing restricting them from causing more harm are good environmental laws and the enforcement of those laws. They will not comply otherwise. It also means that folks like me, people who have a great concern and are willing to work for the environment, are persona non grata to large employers. There will be no change from within in the corporate world. Environmentalists do not have a place at their table. And we should be justifiably wary any time a company burnishes its green credentials.

Highway Fatalities As Seen From 30,000 Feet

I flew from Pittsburgh to San Diego on September 10^th. Expecting tightened security and a few extra hassles, I made it to the airport a little early. Getting my ticket and taking off my shoes for the TSA, however, took no longer than normal, so I had some time to kill before the boarding for my plane in Pittsburgh. I also had a layover of several hours in Philadelphia.

            While I grabbed a sandwich or tried to read the paperback that I brought along for the trip, the large flat screen TVs in the waiting areas and restaurants displayed broadcasts of the 9-11 tributes and memorials. There were solemn processions, and in speeches we were told that we were “forever changed” by the events of that day ten years ago. Great slabs of granite now stand in New York City and a field in Pennsylvania inscribed with the names of people who died in the terrorist attacks that day.

Now, keeping in mind that the last thing a person getting on a plane wants to be reminded of are large jets being flown into large buildings, all the 9-11 events got me wondering as to how we think about this tragedy in relation to what I consider a greater tragedy. Each year more than 30,000 Americans die in traffic accidents.[i] That number of deaths is roughly equivalent to a 9-11 happening every month. Like 9-11, these deaths are unpredictable and violent, and they cut across all demographics, killing old and young, rich and poor.

            Watching the tributes of 9-11, it is not a big stretch of logic to assume that, if we value life as we say we do, each month we would gather our president, vice president, and former presidents to make speeches honoring those killed in car crashes, that each month granite slabs with the names of the dead would be dedicated along our roads and highways, that each month there would be wall to wall television coverage of memorial events commemorating those who lost their lives on this country’s roads.

            OK, I recognize the difference. 9-11 was a murderous terrorist attack, and the other deaths are summation of hundreds of accidents that happen every day. There is no sinister intent to the traffic deaths. People simply die when cars and trucks crash. But how is it that we are so blithely blasé about so many people dying? The same number of people succumbing from a communicable disease would be considered a frightening epidemic. Terrorists killing the same number of people would generate comparisons with the Holocaust. The fear generated by terrorism on this scale or an epidemic of this size would paralyze our society.

            But we still get in our cars and drive to work and take the kids to school. Sometimes we’re stuck in traffic on the freeway, and as we inch up past the flashing lights, police cars, and tow trucks, we always glance over to see the smashed headlights and wonder if there was anyone killed.

Our reaction to these deaths does not make sense.

The formula for the airport TSA is pretty simple: keep bombs, weapons, sharp objects, and crazy fanatics off airplanes. Road safety is more complicated. There are millions of drivers who are running late for work, distracted by cell phones, or simply aren’t fully paying attention to moving a vehicle down the road. Add to this the testosterone of teenagers, alcohol and other drugs, heavy rain, fog, ice, and snow and you can see that it is not an easy task to keep us safe on our highways.

But we have more than 50,000 TSA agents at our nation’s airports.[ii] And we spend about $75 billion annually on what is termed “homeland security.”[iii] What if we were to dedicate the same amount of resources and spend the same amount of money to make sure that cars don’t run into each other or run into pedestrians and cyclists? What if we were to have the same sort of vigilance for drivers as we do for airplane passengers? Taking off our shoes and belts and submitting to the intense scrutiny of the TSA, would we be willing to submit to similar routines to drive our children safely to school? By the arithmetic of 9-11, if a similar investment and scrutiny were to reduce highway fatalities by a quarter – saving 7,500 lives, more than twice the number killed on 9-11 – it would be worth every penny.

But perhaps there is nothing we can do to end this carnage. Perhaps these deaths, killing the equivalent of the population of Juneau, Alaska every year, are the price we pay for the ability to travel conveniently, quickly, and autonomously. But after I spent a day in which my safe travel across the country was ensured by an army TSA agents and the investment of billions, only to be left amid cell phoning, tailgating, make up applying drivers as I motored from the airport back to my home, it’s at least a good question to ask.

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[i] Department of Transportation website: http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx

[ii] TSA website: http://www.tsa.gov/who_we_are/workforce/index.shtm

[iii] LA Times Has Homeland Security spending paid off since Sept. 11? http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-911-homeland-money-20110828,0,3913741,full.story

Why Does an Environmentalist Write a Book About Religion?

I just published a book, As We Believe: Conversations of Religion and Faith, a collection of interviews in which people explain their religious beliefs. The obvious question is: Why would an environmentalist write a book about religion?

At this stage of my life, my primary concern is the natural world and the preservation of the environment, but religion has been a longstanding interest for me, going all the way back to when I was a preschooler. I remember being fascinated by the televangelists Oral Roberts and Katherine Kuhlman on the Sunday morning broadcasts. The way they talked – I particularly remember the way Kuhlman said “I believe-ah in miracles!” at the beginning of her TV show – seemed stranger, and a little scarier, than anything else I experienced on TV or the rest of my life. Watching these programs gave me the same feeling that I got from suspense or horror movies, and I liked it.

            All twelve years, from first grade through high school graduation, I went to Christian, most specifically Catholic, schools. I started first grade before Vatican II, and all the nuns wore the black habits and wimples. That they dressed so oddly and seemed to live so differently was something that puzzled me. The nuns didn’t live in a far away land, like natives in a National Geographic television show. They lived in a two-story house next to our church, but they lived as though they were from another place or time. In school I watched my teachers as carefully as I could, observing how they walked down the hall or cut a piece of paper with scissors, trying to see how different or how similar they were to my family and neighbors.

In high school part of our religious education during my junior year was the study of New Testament and early Church history. Our religious instruction had bored me until then, with nothing to tweak my curiosity or challenge much thought. It surprised me and amazed me that the bible could be studied and analyzed, just as though it were an ancient artifact. You could look at it like any other book, not just as a source of inspiration or the font of Christian principles. That year our class learned of when and why Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote their Gospels and that there were other gospels, such as the gospel of Thomas, which had been dug up a matter of decades beforehand. My teenage curiosity was primed.

My senior year part of our religious studies included learning of other religions, Buddhism, Judaism, etc. and I remember diving into my religious schoolwork that year. My interest in religion continued into college, and I fulfilled a great deal of my humanities requirements with religious studies courses. So you see, I’ve been interested in religion, academically and as it is lived and practiced, my whole life.

Of course there are qualities that religion and the natural world share. They both offer beauty and a sense of order. And as I have stated with this blog, I am fascinated with the way people think and why things make sense to them. The emphasis with this blog is on the environment and how people think about the natural world. But I am also interested in how people think in general. Interviewing individuals about their religions allowed me to sit down with dozens of people and hear their story of how they came to believe as they do. In discussing their religious beliefs these men and women share with me what they considered to be important. They told me how they made sense of their lives and made sense of their beliefs. It showed me how they think and what they value.

One of the books that I consulted as I was writing As We Believe was the Joy of Sects, by Peter Ochiogrosso, who has written several books on religion. Ochiogrosso started his writing career as a music writer and coauthored Frank Zappa’s autobiography. Maybe Ochiogrosso found similarities between music and religion, things that tied together the pope and punk and similarities between the Dalai Lama and Rama Lama Ding Dong. What I like to believe is that, like me, he has more than one interest that he has wanted to write about.

Like Ochiogrosso, I started my writing career writing about music, and I still write frequently about music and musicians. I don’t have any plans to write another book, but if I do, it will probably be about the environment, the subject that interests me the most now. Till then, if you have any interest in what people might say about their religious beliefs, you can check out As We Believe on lulu.com.

Pay No Attention to That Radical Ideologue Behind the Curtain

For months the big headlines were about the impasse in Congress created by the Tea Party over raising the debt ceiling for this country. While not thoroughly routine, raising the debt ceiling has been performed dozens of times by Congress with little fanfare. Congress raised the debt ceiling, the story was placed in papers below the fold, and not much was made of the event.

            The Tea Party radically changed this. They turned the event into a crisis. And they did so purposely. By holding the government hostage, this band of right wing ideologues succeeded in the ultimate political blackmail. No compromises were made with Democrats, who favored closing tax loopholes and raising some taxes. In the “deal,” cuts were made to government spending, with no increase to revenue.

            The term brinksmanship was used on occasion to describe the wrangling in Washington, but brinksmanship describes a situation in which all sides have a great deal to lose in pushing a very hard bargain. That is not the case here. As a default may have brought about a financial crisis—forcing ever-greater cuts to government spending, including the programs of Social Security, Medicare, and environmental protections, which is the primary goal of the Tea Party—many of the Tea Party wanted to see a government default.

By being the hostage takers, the Tea Party were able to control the agenda and achieve a great deal of what they wanted, but they may not have been fully successful in controlling the larger debate on debt, taxes and spending. A majority of Americans believe that raising taxes on the rich is necessary to close the gap on the deficit, and most Americans continue to support SSI, Medicare, and governmental environmental programs.

But the Tea Party was quite successful in perhaps another way. It is a common dictum that in any debate, those who are allowed to define the terms of the debate win the debate. What needs to be added to this truism is that by creating a debate, by forcing your opponent to debate you on a subject of your choosing, other matters are left by the mental wayside.

We commonly accept distractions in our entertainments. Magicians know that their craft of illusion is about hiding cards up sleeves and unseen wires pulling at trap doors. But their craft of the sleight of hand is also about distraction. The flourishing hand, the pretty assistant in an outfit that reveals a lot of skin, draw our eyes away from the magician’s manipulation of reality, giving us a surprise when we see the rabbit pop out of a hat or a bouquet of flowers appearing out of thin air.

As a fabricated crisis, the debt ceiling issue served as a similar distraction. While the Tea Party ensured that our attention was grabbed by headlines of John Boehner walking out of a meeting with the President and news anchors counting down the days till our impending default, other issues, important issues that should be at the fore of our public discussions, were pushed from news sites and left out of the public consciousness.

Many thousands of us remain unemployed, yet during the debt ceiling crisis news of the unemployed amounted to no more than the evening news giving us latest percentages of those out of work or the number of new unemployment claims. Unlike the debt ceiling, global warming presents a real and pending crisis, requiring that we act now to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gasses. This issue was drowned out like so many polar bears amid the din of the debt crisis. The debt crisis was a weapon of mass distraction, with the Tea Party’s desired collateral damage to our public discourse. Expect more of these thrill-a-minute sideshows from the far right of the GOP and expect some version of “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” whenever the public tries to steer our discourse back to important matters.

Laying the Rhetorical Groundwork

As I alluded to in my last post, the effort to push environmentalism into a political corner starts in 1980, with the presidential campaign of Ronald Reagan. In 1970 he had signed into law the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), an outstanding environmental achievement. Reagan’s appointments to environmental positions as governor, however, were disappointing.[1] Reagan’s environmental record as governor of California was hence something of a mixed bag and, on the face of it, would not have pegged him as an anti-environmentalist.

            Things had changed quite a bit by the time he was running for president in 1980, with the differences between him and Carter, as far as the environment was concerned, being quite stark. Carter wanted increased environmental safeguards, such as protecting barrier islands from development, and spoke of  “a strong defense of environmental protection legislation in the face of growing pressure to dismantle a decade of environmental progress.”[2] On the other hand, Reagan’s aides told him that American factories had been shut down due to environmental laws.[3] This became a theme of his campaign.[4] In a fox guarding the henhouse scenario, Reagan called for the coal and steel industries to help rewrite the Clean Air Act and promised to appoint to the EPA people “who understand the problems of the coal industry.”[5]

To bolster his argument, Reagan cast environmental regulators as being out of the mainstream. He said of the EPA, “I want clean air and water. But I think we’re in the hands of what I call some environmental extremists.” He used this term again when defending his choice of James Watt to be Interior Secretary. At the time, Watt was a lawyer working to open up more federal wilderness land to mining and oil drilling. He said, "I think he's an environmentalist himself, as I think I am. He is fighting environmental extremists."[6]

Describing someone who worked to allow for the industrial exploitation of federally protected wilderness as an environmentalist is a head spinning “ignorance is strength” Orwellianism, but in his political calculation, with the hostages in Iran and other issues grabbing the big headlines, Reagan knew that this mental sleight of hand would not receive much scrutiny. The same holds true for his description of EPA regulators as extremists. He nonetheless added this rhetoric to the discourse and began the process of politically isolating and weakening the movement to better our air, water, and land.

The rhetor who helped get us in this fix

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[1] Kamieniecki, Sheldon, Robert O’Brien, Michael Clarke. Controversies in Environmental Policy. New York: State University of New York Press. 1986. Print p 284

[2] Crutsinger, Martin. “Carter, Reagan Differ Widely on Environmental Policies.” Freelance Star 25 Oct. 1980

[3] Kamieniecki et al

[4] Crutsinger

[5] ibid

[6] Warner, Edwin, Douglas Brew, Don Sider. “Reagan Sticks With Haig.” Time 29 Dec. 1980.