Originally published in The SandPaper, June 9, 2010

Gulf Disaster a Painful Reminder Of Real Threat to Quality of Life

By BILL BONVIE

In the last few weeks it has becomes ever more evident that along with the ecology and economy of a large sector of the U.S. Gulf Coast, an entire way of life has been effectively destroyed by corporate corner-cutting, haste and irresponsibility, enabled by a slipshod, uncoordinated and allegedly compromised regulatory system. As a result, the lives as well as the livelihoods of many thousands of the region’s inhabitants may well have been ruined for the foreseeable future.

What makes all this seem just a bit ironic is that for years, we have been beset by warnings that our lives were indeed on the verge of being literally ruined -- not by the likes of profit-driven behemoths behaving in a manner that put our living conditions and the very viability of our surroundings at risk, but rather by… environmentalists.

A case in point is a book that came out a little more than a year ago, titled Green Hell, by Steven Milloy, and subtitled: "How Environmentalists Plan to Ruin Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them." According to Milloy, the Green Movement, which includes President Obama, is one huge conspiracy bent on depriving us of our creature comforts by compelling or coercing everyone "to live on a smaller, more inconvenient, more uncomfortable, more expensive, less enjoyable, and less hopeful scale." Green living, the author claims, is really about things like "downsizing your dreams" and "having the boundaries of your life drawn by others."

In his introduction to the book, Milloy also notes that readers might be tempted to dismiss such allegations as "gross exaggerations." But in actuality, they’re not at all – they’re merely misdirected. As things turned out, it isn’t meddlesome agents of environmentalism who have succeeded in making life a lot less convenient, comfortable, enjoyable and hopeful for a good many Americans, or in significantly downsizing their dreams, but those of unconstrained enterprise, of the very sort who come across as such heroic figures to the laissez-faire crowd.

Much of the rhetoric of such believers in the Evil Environmental Empire is, of course, directed at Al Gore and others who have warned of the dangers of industry-induced global warming. A particularly strident spokesman for this group is George Reisman, a Pepperdine University Professor Emeritus of Economics, who in a 2007 essay titled "Global Warming is Not a Threat, But the Environmental Response to It Is," contended that climate change should simply be accepted as a "byproduct of economic progress" and that nothing should be done to stop it "that destroys or undermines industrial civilization."

The environmental movement, Reisman charges, "contents itself with offering to the public what is virtually merely the hope and prayer of the timely discovery of radically new alternative technologies to replace the ones it seeks to destroy. Such pie in the sky is a nothing but a lie, intended to prevent people from recognizing the plunge in their standard of living that will result if the environmentalists’ program is enacted." (Interestingly enough, Reisman also believes that were global warming to really get out of hand, technological solutions would ultimately be found to cool things down.)

What’s more, according to Reisman, "the loss of industrial civilization is of no great consequence (to environmentalists) …But to everyone else, it would be an immeasurable catastrophe: the end of further economic progress and the onset of economic retrogression, with no necessary stopping point."

Here, again, is the sort of language -- "immeasurable catastrophe" and "the onset of economic retrogression with no necessary stopping point." -- that seems ready made for a semantic reapplication to the events of the past month and a half. For even if the hole in the bottom of the sea should be successfully plugged, who can say with any authority at what point the resulting damage to the ecosystem will necessarily end?

Then there’s this rather fanciful parting shot the good professor takes at environmentalists (and "the rest of the left"), declaring that "they hate the American way of life because of its comfort and luxury. And to frighten people into abandoning it, they are threatening them with a global-warming version of hellfire and brimstone."

Actually, hellfire and brimstone might be as apt a description as any of what we’ve seen emanating from that mile-deep hole, beginning with the inferno from below that claimed the lives of 11 of the rig’s crewmen. If anything, the far more imminent threat of such hellish emissions being unleashed by drilling at so unmanageable a depth should in retrospect have had the movement raising hell, as well as objecting far more vociferously to Obama’s approval of offshore drilling in specific areas at the end of March (with which the Sierra Club, according to its executive director, Michael Brune, was merely "very disappointed").

But then the disaster itself was really all the fault of "extreme environmentalists," in the view of Alaska governor-turned–media star Sarah Palin, who explained on Facebook that they had brought it about through "protests and lawsuits and lies about onshore and shallow water drilling," like that proposed for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, that have "locked up safer areas." (Apparently, the mantra "drill, baby, drill," was not actually meant to encourage companies like BP to venture so precariously out over their heads in pursuit of petroleum.)

While there may be no proverbial silver lining to be found in a disaster as devastating as this, there are important lessons the American people can draw from it. One is the realization that benign alternative technologies for fueling our civilization, far from being "pie in the sky," already exist and need to be put on a fast track to becoming our dominant energy sources. That this can be successfully done has already been demonstrated by the 4,000 or so residents of the island of Samso in Denmark, who have made themselves completely self-sufficient by relying solely on such renewable, carbon-neutral sources as solar and wind power, and burning straw from their fields for heat. If they can do it ----especially in so cold and harsh a climate – so can the rest of us, if only we devote our collective efforts and will to the task.

To do so, however, will require a new sense of appreciation of just how essential our environment is to our daily and long-term survival, as well as of its fragility.. That’s something that, hopefully, the tragedy – and travesty -- in the Gulf will help to engender, along with dispelling the propaganda disseminated by shills for corporate interests that environmentalists are really nothing more than America-haters bent on making our lives uncomfortable and lowering our living standards.

In fact, I think it could be said that nothing demonstrates a more genuine love of country than a commitment to preserving its God-given livability and protecting it from all those who would pollute, plunder and poison it, whether in the name of profits or progress.

After all, when we talk about the environment, what we are really referring to is our habitat – the one we share with pelicans, turtles, dolphins and a host of other creatures., and to which the quality of our lives is intrinsically linked.

And once we’ve allowed that habitat to be laid waste, as has been so pointedly demonstrated to us by recent events, there’s no amount of manmade comfort or convenience, nor enough money in the world, that can compensate us for so profound a loss.