What’s at Stake?
Fossil fuels have been the cornerstone of modern civilization’s agriculture, textiles, transportation, communication, air conditioning, materials, and medicine. Remove them from history and you would look back on a medieval past extending to the present. Remove them from the future, and you will stunt civilization’s potential to feed and house people at its current levels. But today, after the Obama-Biden “war on coal” and the followup Biden-Harris “war on fossil fuels,” the future looks more “medieval” than “modern,” mostly because population growth supported by those fossil fuels from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries might not be sustainable under the promised, but only partially materialized, green tech energy development. There is, for example, no guarantee that green energy will be sufficient to transport all the commerce people now enjoy. And there is no guarantee that by eliminating that which made the modern world modern, we can “recreate” an idyllic Garden of Eden of calm air and shopping-mall temperatures. Futile efforts by nineteenth-century Romanticists to “return to Nature” reveal that humans are quite comfortable with artificiality. Endeavors to develop civilization are more powerful than drives to return humanity to more primitive times. Those who choose to go off-grid are few in number and still largely dependent upon the societies they leave (often temporarily) behind.
Questions for Urban Dwelling Greenies
Off to the woods to live? Where you gonna poop? Use leaves for TP? Not in a zone of deciduous trees that lose their leaves in fall. Natural clothing? What? From a bear you skinned after wrestling it to death with your bare hands? Food? Water? Air conditioning?
Would the urban greenie like to live in the Meadowcroft Rock Shelter where neolithic people lived 16,000 years ago just after the Last Glacial Maximum during end of the Last Glacial Period? Would a greenie prefer frozen tundra conditions in western Pennsylvania that prevailed just south of the large glacial ice sheets?
Growing Up with Coal, Oil, and Gas
I live in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, a land of some 18 million acres of forests that has been home to fossil fuel exploitation for more than 260 years. In Pittsburgh, coal mining began in the 1760s on Coal Hill (now the city’s famous overlook known as Mount Washington). In Titusville and Oil City, upstream from Pittsburgh on the Allegheny River, “Col.” Drake discovered oil in 1859, and 19 years later the Haymaker brothers Matthew and Obe drilled the first gas well in Murrysville, 18 miles from Pittsburgh. To say Pennsylvania has been an historical energy behemoth is no exaggeration, especially when one adds its eastern anthracite fields to its western bituminous coal, oil, and gas fields.
From those early colonial times through the twentieth century, western Pennsylvania’s Pittsburgh Plateau Province was a center for both bituminous coal extraction and subsequently the steel production that was dependent on it. Coal turned into coke (by baking) plus limestone made Pittsburgh the “steel city.” Until the development of gas home furnaces, most—if not all—western Pennsylvanian homes were heated by coal. And, yes, before you ask, my small hometown (pop. 16,000), which was more bedroom community than industrial center, was sooty. As a child, I thought all tree bark, save for the sycamores which shed older bark to reveal a lighter color “skin,” was black. (Think of the famous account of England’s peppered moths whose wings were selectively dark during the coal-burning years, enabling them to hide against such bark, and the subsequent selection for lighter coloring when the soot ceased to fall) It still surprises me all these decades later that having breathed sooty air as a kid, I did not develop “black lung”)
Before you ask: No, I’m not advocating for a return to home coal furnaces. Been there; done that. Natural gas does not produce sooty air, and gas furnaces do not have to be stoked on a cold winter morning.
Of course, as a child I had no say in my place of residence or the manner in which our home was heated. It was “my” hometown, where I played with cousins and friends. We lived in the city where my father worked as linotypist and foreman of a printing company. The choice of residence was dictated by work and relative poverty. I assume that had he worked elsewhere, we would have lived near that work. It was a time before long daily commuter rides, such as those in the more densely populated northeast megalopolis corridor in which people from Hartford took trains to and from work in NYC, as they still do. My father walked to work. I walked to school. My friends walked everywhere. The streets were uncluttered with fewer cars on them than during today’s traffic mayhem. In Pittsburgh, a city at that time with 600,000, 50,000 steel workers lived mostly in walking distance of the mills in towns like Hazelwood, Homewood, McKeesport, and Clairton.
I remember passing through Hazelwood, Clairton, and Duquesne on occasional urban forays and smelling the “rotten eggs” air near the coke plants and steel mills. Even then I recognized that the locals had to breathe that air daily. But it was that foul-smelling hydrogen-sulfide air that indicated a vital economy. If people wanted to make steel for a living, they had to live with the consequences of steel-making in an age before scrubbers on smoke stacks. Their countryside was dotted with lines of coke ovens and gob piles in western Pennsylvania and culm banks in eastern Pennsylvania.
The Rise of the Principle of Stewardship: Pretending the Big Wide World Is a Little Village
There lies in Pennsylvania’s industrial and mining past a resignation to the by-product pollution of both mining and steel-making. Whereas I took as a child the soot and rotten-egg smell as components of life in many mill towns, some Pennsylvanians began asking why things had to be as they were.
In the middle of the last century, people began to notice detrimental effects to their regional landscapes caused by the extraction of fossil fuels and the accompanying pollutants. Not that such effects hadn’t been evident early in the development of mines and wells. Among the first such effects were denuded forests whose soils quickly became black with petroleum covering many square miles of the Oil City-toTitusville-to Wildcat Hollow region, especially during the oil boom that followed Drake’s discovery. Suffice it to say there were for a time in that oil-boom region more derricks than trees. And then, after years of underground mining elsewhere on the plateau, residents began to experience subsidence of the surface as old mine ceilings collapsed. Impossible to ignore were the many piles of mining waste I mentioned above. Piled into the large gob piles of the bituminous landscapes in western Pennsylvania and similar waste heaps in anthracite coal areas near Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, the waste sometimes burned, as included coal fragments caught fire, smoldered, and produced a further waste product called red dog.
Not so recognizable was the danger from the pollution of groundwater and acidic effluents entering streams in some mining areas. Incidents of cancer were eventually associated with “yellow boy” (mine water) and heavy metals mixing with well water supplies in rural areas. Some streams ran orange with mine effluents. Slowly, the ill health caused by pollutants worked its way into the public mind until the 1970s, when environmental awareness became a cause célèbre.
The growing awareness of environmental hazards and the will to mitigate them developed exponentially after the famous Donora smog event in 1948 and an ensuing more deadly smog event in London. People began to take notice of environmental hazards, and politicians noticed the people noticing. So began a period of societal development that brought the downsides of fossil fuel extraction and industrial activity to the forebrain. “Sustainability” and “environmental health” became part of the common lexicon pushed by academia, sensing a new avenue for research grants funded by the government. In colleges environmental studies programs and courses like environmental ethics became commonplace. What happened in higher education then filtered to become concerns of those who reaped the benefits of cheap energy without being involved in its production. And then the Press, ever eager for a new line of reporting and editorializing, jumped on the environmental train. What had come to the attention of the forebrain then moved inexorably inward and entwined itself in the inner brain. Negative thoughts about fossil fuels and their effects became emotional social issues spreading like smog.
Today, protecting the environment has become a moral issue. A recent headline in the LA Times reads: “Earth Is in Peril. Will We Sacrifice Enough Today to Ensure Future Generations Will Survive?” * Poor kids. Their future is in our hands. Greta Thunberg, climate activist turned Hamas-supporter and Israel-hater, cried that we robbed her of her childhood, not to mention that we also seem to have robbed her of her ability to think rationally, argue reasonably, cite earth history, breathe air devoid of carbon, and solve complex problems. Such is the extent of fossil fuel hatred, supposedly motivated by a desire to “sustain” the planet in some arbitrarily chosen state of natural perfection. But give her credit; as a kid she inspired people like those at the LA Times to flail about in the despair that civilization had prospered on fossil fuels to the detriment of the environment and Greta’s childhood. (I wonder how those reporters get to work in LA. Do they commute?)
A Very Pretty Village: We Can’t All Live in Some Rural Shire Peopled by Hobbits
The air does what unconfined gases do: move rather chaotically and unpredictably, responding to pressure and density differences, the cause of wind. Such differences are beyond human controI, thus the wind blows as it blows. I thought nothing of it as a child. If a neighboring house’s sooty air cascaded into our yard, didn’t our sooty air cascade into other yards? Weren’t we mutually to blame for the pollution trespassing yards?
But elsewhere in the Commonwealth, Joseph Waschak sought to place blame. In 1954 Waschak lived in a house in Lackawanna Country that he painted with a lead-based white paint. In the borough of Taylor, the site of the house, neighboring coal-breaker and culm banks (gob piles) emitted hydrogen sulfide, a gas that reacted with the lead paint, discoloring it. He sued the company for “nontrespassory invasion.” Although Waschak won a judgment in the lower courts, the Supreme Court overturned that judgment. And here was the Court’s reasoning; read it through because it has some relevance to today’s green movement:
The Court reasoned that the gob, waste, or culm banks had long been part of the district’s landscape and that the Waschak family was aware of the proximity and nature of those piles before they bought the house. (Thus, my childhood home with its coal-burning furnace was next to another house with a coal-burning furnace)
Writing for the Court, Justice Stearne recounted the legal history. Three rules of law apply where an invasion of land occurs: 1) An English ruling by Lord Cranworth states that a person is liable for anything that escapes from his land to damage a neighbor’s property. This English law, common to both countries, declares that the responsibility is absolute regardless of the precautions a landowner might have taken to prevent the escape of the damaging entity; 2) the Absolute Nuisance Doctrine which says that a nuisance is an infringement on the rights of another, which is wrongful in itself, but only in the consequences which might flow from it; this nuisance rule is unlike the English rule because it does not distinguish between intentional and unintentional damage. Justice Stearne further writes that a person who builds a factory might risk emitting fumes that could damage nearby property, but “under varying conditions, the harm caused by the emission of offensive odors, noises, fumes, violations, etc., must be weighed against the utility of the operation.” 3) The Rule of Restatement that the Court followed in reaching its decision: Essentially, the “invasion” has to be intentional or otherwise unreasonable. In a case similar to the Waschak case, Chief Justice Frazer quoted from Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Sanderson to indicate that “plaintiffs knew, when they purchased their property, that they were in a mining region. They were in a district born of mining operations, a district that had become rich and populous because of that mining.
Pittsburgh, the Very Pretty Village
Here’s how Justice Musmanno worded the problem: “The plaintiffs are subject to an annoyance. This we accept. But it is an annoyance they have freely assumed because they desired and needed a residence in proximity to their places of employment. After all, one’s bread is more important than landscape or clear skies. Without smoke, Pittsburgh would have remained a very pretty village.”
Before You Object
Musmanno wrote that before scrubbers on smokestacks became part of clean air regulations and before communities sought to turn their brownfields (rusting old steel mills) into greenfields (often tech-related new buildings and condos). He wrote that before advancements in coal-burning technology changed the efficiency of coal-fired power plants. And he wrote that before we got so huffy and political about the environment based on our longing for an Idyllic Village of Pittsburgh, where during Colonial Times the only smoke came from campfires and canon as British and French fought over Fort Duquesne/Fort Pitt.
The Shire
At this current stage of civilization, few people could live as Hobbits in The Shire. Could you? As the world’s population becomes more urbanized, more people become accustomed to civilization’s comforts and conveniences. (Wait! You’re not a farmer, are you?)
Anyway, we do have processes for making coal and oil burn more cleanly with less damage to the environment. Even today’s coal mines—deep long wall and surface in western Pennsylvania—are less polluting than they once were, though escaping methane is unavoidable. But to echo Musmanno’s statement, I’ll ask if you realize your choice of lifestyle produces pollutants. What tradeoff are you willing to make? When night falls, do you turn on lights? When temperatures rise, do you turn on the air conditioning? Do you refuse to drive on asphalt roads or use any product made with plastic?
Groundwater
From landscape changes to air and water quality, we’ve become obsessed with environmental purity, a reality that never truly existed. Near the towns of California and Uniontown, Pennsylvania there are springs where for years people collected water in milk jugs to take to their homes in the belief that because it is spring water, it is somehow purer than city water. In fact, both springs contain bacteria and metals dissolved from the rocks through which the water runs. Natural Earth isn’t the Garden of Eden environmentalists believe it to be. It can be radioactive, toxic, and unproductive.
Romanticism and the Birth of Environmentalism
As the Age of Enlightenment drew to a close, nineteenth-century artists began to paint natural scenes as Gardens of Eden. Their Edens also housed “the Noble Savage,” a type of Tarzan who was “naturally moral,” a person living in harmony with Earth.
As portrayed in paintings by Norwich School artists and imitators, specifically by Turner in England and by Thomas Cole in the United States Nature was idyllic. Today, just about every hotel room has some Cole or Turner knockoff landscape painting on a wall, each portraying an idealized nature scene, that is, a scene without human artificiality, Nature without natural predation, death, and decay—pretty nature, the nature envisioned by Greta Thunberg and city-dwelling environmentalists who worry about climate change as they swelter in urban heat islands in July and August.
If those artists started an environmental movement with paintings exhibited to a relatively small population, would not the overwhelming media coverage of environmental issues hav an even greater effect on the population’s psyche?
I want clean air, water, and land. Don’t you? Who prefers the opposite? Even the exploiters prefer environmental safety over environmental danger, but they are caught in the vice of economics: Produce and thrive or fail to produce and go broke, poor, and hungry. Those who choose to exploit also provide livelihoods for those employees who support families and local economies.
Pretty villages are the stuff of fairy tales and hotel paintings. **
*https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-09-09/our-climate-change-challenge-youth-future
**Found this after I finished the blog: "Ana de Armas loves living ‘off the grid’ in rural $7M Vermont home ‘away from the craziness’" Online at NY Post. Nicki Cox, 9/11/24
Fossil fuels have been the cornerstone of modern civilization’s agriculture, textiles, transportation, communication, air conditioning, materials, and medicine. Remove them from history and you would look back on a medieval past extending to the present. Remove them from the future, and you will stunt civilization’s potential to feed and house people at its current levels. But today, after the Obama-Biden “war on coal” and the followup Biden-Harris “war on fossil fuels,” the future looks more “medieval” than “modern,” mostly because population growth supported by those fossil fuels from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries might not be sustainable under the promised, but only partially materialized, green tech energy development. There is, for example, no guarantee that green energy will be sufficient to transport all the commerce people now enjoy. And there is no guarantee that by eliminating that which made the modern world modern, we can “recreate” an idyllic Garden of Eden of calm air and shopping-mall temperatures. Futile efforts by nineteenth-century Romanticists to “return to Nature” reveal that humans are quite comfortable with artificiality. Endeavors to develop civilization are more powerful than drives to return humanity to more primitive times. Those who choose to go off-grid are few in number and still largely dependent upon the societies they leave (often temporarily) behind.
Questions for Urban Dwelling Greenies
Off to the woods to live? Where you gonna poop? Use leaves for TP? Not in a zone of deciduous trees that lose their leaves in fall. Natural clothing? What? From a bear you skinned after wrestling it to death with your bare hands? Food? Water? Air conditioning?
Would the urban greenie like to live in the Meadowcroft Rock Shelter where neolithic people lived 16,000 years ago just after the Last Glacial Maximum during end of the Last Glacial Period? Would a greenie prefer frozen tundra conditions in western Pennsylvania that prevailed just south of the large glacial ice sheets?
Growing Up with Coal, Oil, and Gas
I live in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, a land of some 18 million acres of forests that has been home to fossil fuel exploitation for more than 260 years. In Pittsburgh, coal mining began in the 1760s on Coal Hill (now the city’s famous overlook known as Mount Washington). In Titusville and Oil City, upstream from Pittsburgh on the Allegheny River, “Col.” Drake discovered oil in 1859, and 19 years later the Haymaker brothers Matthew and Obe drilled the first gas well in Murrysville, 18 miles from Pittsburgh. To say Pennsylvania has been an historical energy behemoth is no exaggeration, especially when one adds its eastern anthracite fields to its western bituminous coal, oil, and gas fields.
From those early colonial times through the twentieth century, western Pennsylvania’s Pittsburgh Plateau Province was a center for both bituminous coal extraction and subsequently the steel production that was dependent on it. Coal turned into coke (by baking) plus limestone made Pittsburgh the “steel city.” Until the development of gas home furnaces, most—if not all—western Pennsylvanian homes were heated by coal. And, yes, before you ask, my small hometown (pop. 16,000), which was more bedroom community than industrial center, was sooty. As a child, I thought all tree bark, save for the sycamores which shed older bark to reveal a lighter color “skin,” was black. (Think of the famous account of England’s peppered moths whose wings were selectively dark during the coal-burning years, enabling them to hide against such bark, and the subsequent selection for lighter coloring when the soot ceased to fall) It still surprises me all these decades later that having breathed sooty air as a kid, I did not develop “black lung”)
Before you ask: No, I’m not advocating for a return to home coal furnaces. Been there; done that. Natural gas does not produce sooty air, and gas furnaces do not have to be stoked on a cold winter morning.
Of course, as a child I had no say in my place of residence or the manner in which our home was heated. It was “my” hometown, where I played with cousins and friends. We lived in the city where my father worked as linotypist and foreman of a printing company. The choice of residence was dictated by work and relative poverty. I assume that had he worked elsewhere, we would have lived near that work. It was a time before long daily commuter rides, such as those in the more densely populated northeast megalopolis corridor in which people from Hartford took trains to and from work in NYC, as they still do. My father walked to work. I walked to school. My friends walked everywhere. The streets were uncluttered with fewer cars on them than during today’s traffic mayhem. In Pittsburgh, a city at that time with 600,000, 50,000 steel workers lived mostly in walking distance of the mills in towns like Hazelwood, Homewood, McKeesport, and Clairton.
I remember passing through Hazelwood, Clairton, and Duquesne on occasional urban forays and smelling the “rotten eggs” air near the coke plants and steel mills. Even then I recognized that the locals had to breathe that air daily. But it was that foul-smelling hydrogen-sulfide air that indicated a vital economy. If people wanted to make steel for a living, they had to live with the consequences of steel-making in an age before scrubbers on smoke stacks. Their countryside was dotted with lines of coke ovens and gob piles in western Pennsylvania and culm banks in eastern Pennsylvania.
The Rise of the Principle of Stewardship: Pretending the Big Wide World Is a Little Village
There lies in Pennsylvania’s industrial and mining past a resignation to the by-product pollution of both mining and steel-making. Whereas I took as a child the soot and rotten-egg smell as components of life in many mill towns, some Pennsylvanians began asking why things had to be as they were.
In the middle of the last century, people began to notice detrimental effects to their regional landscapes caused by the extraction of fossil fuels and the accompanying pollutants. Not that such effects hadn’t been evident early in the development of mines and wells. Among the first such effects were denuded forests whose soils quickly became black with petroleum covering many square miles of the Oil City-toTitusville-to Wildcat Hollow region, especially during the oil boom that followed Drake’s discovery. Suffice it to say there were for a time in that oil-boom region more derricks than trees. And then, after years of underground mining elsewhere on the plateau, residents began to experience subsidence of the surface as old mine ceilings collapsed. Impossible to ignore were the many piles of mining waste I mentioned above. Piled into the large gob piles of the bituminous landscapes in western Pennsylvania and similar waste heaps in anthracite coal areas near Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, the waste sometimes burned, as included coal fragments caught fire, smoldered, and produced a further waste product called red dog.
Not so recognizable was the danger from the pollution of groundwater and acidic effluents entering streams in some mining areas. Incidents of cancer were eventually associated with “yellow boy” (mine water) and heavy metals mixing with well water supplies in rural areas. Some streams ran orange with mine effluents. Slowly, the ill health caused by pollutants worked its way into the public mind until the 1970s, when environmental awareness became a cause célèbre.
The growing awareness of environmental hazards and the will to mitigate them developed exponentially after the famous Donora smog event in 1948 and an ensuing more deadly smog event in London. People began to take notice of environmental hazards, and politicians noticed the people noticing. So began a period of societal development that brought the downsides of fossil fuel extraction and industrial activity to the forebrain. “Sustainability” and “environmental health” became part of the common lexicon pushed by academia, sensing a new avenue for research grants funded by the government. In colleges environmental studies programs and courses like environmental ethics became commonplace. What happened in higher education then filtered to become concerns of those who reaped the benefits of cheap energy without being involved in its production. And then the Press, ever eager for a new line of reporting and editorializing, jumped on the environmental train. What had come to the attention of the forebrain then moved inexorably inward and entwined itself in the inner brain. Negative thoughts about fossil fuels and their effects became emotional social issues spreading like smog.
Today, protecting the environment has become a moral issue. A recent headline in the LA Times reads: “Earth Is in Peril. Will We Sacrifice Enough Today to Ensure Future Generations Will Survive?” * Poor kids. Their future is in our hands. Greta Thunberg, climate activist turned Hamas-supporter and Israel-hater, cried that we robbed her of her childhood, not to mention that we also seem to have robbed her of her ability to think rationally, argue reasonably, cite earth history, breathe air devoid of carbon, and solve complex problems. Such is the extent of fossil fuel hatred, supposedly motivated by a desire to “sustain” the planet in some arbitrarily chosen state of natural perfection. But give her credit; as a kid she inspired people like those at the LA Times to flail about in the despair that civilization had prospered on fossil fuels to the detriment of the environment and Greta’s childhood. (I wonder how those reporters get to work in LA. Do they commute?)
A Very Pretty Village: We Can’t All Live in Some Rural Shire Peopled by Hobbits
The air does what unconfined gases do: move rather chaotically and unpredictably, responding to pressure and density differences, the cause of wind. Such differences are beyond human controI, thus the wind blows as it blows. I thought nothing of it as a child. If a neighboring house’s sooty air cascaded into our yard, didn’t our sooty air cascade into other yards? Weren’t we mutually to blame for the pollution trespassing yards?
But elsewhere in the Commonwealth, Joseph Waschak sought to place blame. In 1954 Waschak lived in a house in Lackawanna Country that he painted with a lead-based white paint. In the borough of Taylor, the site of the house, neighboring coal-breaker and culm banks (gob piles) emitted hydrogen sulfide, a gas that reacted with the lead paint, discoloring it. He sued the company for “nontrespassory invasion.” Although Waschak won a judgment in the lower courts, the Supreme Court overturned that judgment. And here was the Court’s reasoning; read it through because it has some relevance to today’s green movement:
The Court reasoned that the gob, waste, or culm banks had long been part of the district’s landscape and that the Waschak family was aware of the proximity and nature of those piles before they bought the house. (Thus, my childhood home with its coal-burning furnace was next to another house with a coal-burning furnace)
Writing for the Court, Justice Stearne recounted the legal history. Three rules of law apply where an invasion of land occurs: 1) An English ruling by Lord Cranworth states that a person is liable for anything that escapes from his land to damage a neighbor’s property. This English law, common to both countries, declares that the responsibility is absolute regardless of the precautions a landowner might have taken to prevent the escape of the damaging entity; 2) the Absolute Nuisance Doctrine which says that a nuisance is an infringement on the rights of another, which is wrongful in itself, but only in the consequences which might flow from it; this nuisance rule is unlike the English rule because it does not distinguish between intentional and unintentional damage. Justice Stearne further writes that a person who builds a factory might risk emitting fumes that could damage nearby property, but “under varying conditions, the harm caused by the emission of offensive odors, noises, fumes, violations, etc., must be weighed against the utility of the operation.” 3) The Rule of Restatement that the Court followed in reaching its decision: Essentially, the “invasion” has to be intentional or otherwise unreasonable. In a case similar to the Waschak case, Chief Justice Frazer quoted from Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Sanderson to indicate that “plaintiffs knew, when they purchased their property, that they were in a mining region. They were in a district born of mining operations, a district that had become rich and populous because of that mining.
Pittsburgh, the Very Pretty Village
Here’s how Justice Musmanno worded the problem: “The plaintiffs are subject to an annoyance. This we accept. But it is an annoyance they have freely assumed because they desired and needed a residence in proximity to their places of employment. After all, one’s bread is more important than landscape or clear skies. Without smoke, Pittsburgh would have remained a very pretty village.”
Before You Object
Musmanno wrote that before scrubbers on smokestacks became part of clean air regulations and before communities sought to turn their brownfields (rusting old steel mills) into greenfields (often tech-related new buildings and condos). He wrote that before advancements in coal-burning technology changed the efficiency of coal-fired power plants. And he wrote that before we got so huffy and political about the environment based on our longing for an Idyllic Village of Pittsburgh, where during Colonial Times the only smoke came from campfires and canon as British and French fought over Fort Duquesne/Fort Pitt.
The Shire
At this current stage of civilization, few people could live as Hobbits in The Shire. Could you? As the world’s population becomes more urbanized, more people become accustomed to civilization’s comforts and conveniences. (Wait! You’re not a farmer, are you?)
Anyway, we do have processes for making coal and oil burn more cleanly with less damage to the environment. Even today’s coal mines—deep long wall and surface in western Pennsylvania—are less polluting than they once were, though escaping methane is unavoidable. But to echo Musmanno’s statement, I’ll ask if you realize your choice of lifestyle produces pollutants. What tradeoff are you willing to make? When night falls, do you turn on lights? When temperatures rise, do you turn on the air conditioning? Do you refuse to drive on asphalt roads or use any product made with plastic?
Groundwater
From landscape changes to air and water quality, we’ve become obsessed with environmental purity, a reality that never truly existed. Near the towns of California and Uniontown, Pennsylvania there are springs where for years people collected water in milk jugs to take to their homes in the belief that because it is spring water, it is somehow purer than city water. In fact, both springs contain bacteria and metals dissolved from the rocks through which the water runs. Natural Earth isn’t the Garden of Eden environmentalists believe it to be. It can be radioactive, toxic, and unproductive.
Romanticism and the Birth of Environmentalism
As the Age of Enlightenment drew to a close, nineteenth-century artists began to paint natural scenes as Gardens of Eden. Their Edens also housed “the Noble Savage,” a type of Tarzan who was “naturally moral,” a person living in harmony with Earth.
As portrayed in paintings by Norwich School artists and imitators, specifically by Turner in England and by Thomas Cole in the United States Nature was idyllic. Today, just about every hotel room has some Cole or Turner knockoff landscape painting on a wall, each portraying an idealized nature scene, that is, a scene without human artificiality, Nature without natural predation, death, and decay—pretty nature, the nature envisioned by Greta Thunberg and city-dwelling environmentalists who worry about climate change as they swelter in urban heat islands in July and August.
If those artists started an environmental movement with paintings exhibited to a relatively small population, would not the overwhelming media coverage of environmental issues hav an even greater effect on the population’s psyche?
I want clean air, water, and land. Don’t you? Who prefers the opposite? Even the exploiters prefer environmental safety over environmental danger, but they are caught in the vice of economics: Produce and thrive or fail to produce and go broke, poor, and hungry. Those who choose to exploit also provide livelihoods for those employees who support families and local economies.
Pretty villages are the stuff of fairy tales and hotel paintings. **
*https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-09-09/our-climate-change-challenge-youth-future
**Found this after I finished the blog: "Ana de Armas loves living ‘off the grid’ in rural $7M Vermont home ‘away from the craziness’" Online at NY Post. Nicki Cox, 9/11/24
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