I Was Wrong

It was probably Jean Freemen’s comment on my last blog,”Pete Seeger’s 90th,” that got me rethinking what I had said, “The left had given up the class struggle in favor of environmental issues.” Jean suggested that the two are so intertwined as to make them difficult to separate. The poor are and will suffer more from the the environmental catastrophes than the rest of us. That got me thinking it over again, as I have done so many times before. Now I believe I was wrong.

A little background. It is generally agreed amongst historians that the Industrial Revolution started about 200 years ago. That’s when the life of strictly living off the land began to change. It started in England with the invention of the steam engine used to pump water out of the coal mines. The railroad embodies the idea that we can use things found in nature to make our lives easier and richer. The railroads demand on nature included iron, copper, coal and wood. But look what it did in moving stuff and us from one place to another. Then came the cotton gin and most important of all the Internal Combustion Engine essential for all transportation. It required oil for lubrication and gasoline refined from oil to make it run. It created a revolution in farming through the tractor and the transportation of food and the airplane. It gave us very cheap source of power. This was the revolution that changed the lives of millions of people from feudal peasants to skilled industrial artisans. My life was the epitome of that largess. At age 16 I had my first car. I was the, “king of the hill” in my old neighborhood.

Those same very cheap sources of power have kept the lights on and air conditioners running through the use of coal. Now here comes the rub. These resources are finite and we are now at the point of beginning to run out of oil. The effect of our burning fossil fuel is destroying the very air that we breath. So here’s the quid pro quo. Nature gives us all these wonderful things that makes our lives a great historical party. But we foul up the atmosphere with carbon emission, water rises forcing millions to leave their homes, and new deserts are formed.

Yes Jean, I think you are right and I wish to retract what I said about the Sloop Clearwater. If we continue to destroy the planet at the rate we are presently going, there won’t be much of a class struggle to fight over. And yes, the poor are already paying as climate change is mostly effecting the people of Africa and Asia who can least afford it. People living on low lying islands in the Pacific are being moved as the oceans rise from the melting of the glaciers, the Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets. The endangered Polar Bears are acting as our Canaries in the coal mines.

Why aren’t people more alarmed by this environmental crisis? My years of experience in the Labor Movement taught me that the average person, overwhelmed with their own day to day issues, feels that there is no way they can go out and do something about the destruction of the very environment that we are dependent on for our continued existence. That’s the present dilemma that we find ourselves in. Thanks Jean for your challenge.

Thanks Kate N.H.W.Y.