Just the Fracks? Environmentalism is Patriotic, Not Political

     The question whether or not to use 'fracking' to tap underground natural gas resources in Central New York is easily one of the prime dramas playing out in our historical frame.  It's like so many other things that manifest as politics but really are just questions, aims to find out the truth, or the best way to do something.  The term 'politically correct' is overused, often when people really mean 'socially correct', or simply 'disingenuous' or 'un-genuine'.  It really means 'You may say that, but aren't your real thoughts a bit more cynical or ruthless?'.  Use of this phrase seemed to gain prominence also in our lifetimes, and seemed to really take off when open discussion of who's soft and who's tough became the defining political argument. 

     Attempts to make everything political, and the tendency for people to see more and more things as falling along political party lines, can be construed as the honest evolution of party lines in a country, America, that is still nascent and still sorting itself out.  We're still less than 250 years old as an organized sovereign entity.  But is political party line truly the keenest way to divvy ourselves up?  Especially when we really only have 2 major camps?  You want Coke or Pepsi?  Maybe we're headed for a refining of thoughts within broader parties, the early rumblings of an evolutionary set of sub-menus within the two-party model.   But the politicization of everything can also be seen as a chronic afflication, and can't be the goal of a two-party system, unless the next goal of that system is constant bickering that leads to grudges, feuds, and fighting about money, taxes, resources, power and status within the system...isn't that what the young America was trying to reject in the first place?  Can Environmentalism ever hope to exist above Politics?

     Attaching the the weight or standard of a political party to every decision is not only a grave hinderance of free thought--shouldn't we be able to hold opposing ideas in our hearts simultaneously?  Isn't that a natural condition of humanity?  Isn't that part of what makes us human?  Didn't Einstein say that?  Maybe he was wrong.  But making every dispute political also diminishes the ideas and questions at hand to a sort of sport.  Yankees or Mets?  Jets or Giants?  Flyers or Bruins?  Red or Blue?   Would it were that simple.  Yes, many decisions can be cast as political--affairs of the state, or the public, the commons, whatever you want to call it.  But too often the party itself becomes the badge that stands for a long grocery list of packaged ideas.  Instead of thinking about the ideas, we just use the brand name as a placeholder for the ideas, until we're talking in code instead of thinking.  Someone wears certain clothing, they're with this party; someone has a certain job, or drives a certain car brand, they're with that party.  Environment?  Liberals want to take food out of my kids' mouths.  Can we come back from that idea, that wanting to protect the environment means not that we love our country but that from some ivory tower we want to govern the salt of the earth?  These caricatures are taking the place of reality.

     I  have no problem saying I don't want hydrofracking to be here.  I don't.  The idea that our state DEC--Department of Environmental Conservation--seems to be functioning more as a Department of Economic Consideration is of grave concern but no surprise.  Have you ever once heard of a wetland being protected at the expense of development in our region?  To be fair, I assume that has happened--but I've never seen or heard of it happening.  There are complicated issues of public vs. private land, but if on one hand you argue that owners of private property should be able to do what they want with their land, how can you also have compulsory intergration, which says the exact opposite--that a drilling company can take things from my land even if I don't want them to?

   I also have no problem saying I think increased flooding in recent years, locally and all over, is directly related to the loss of wetlands to development.  You just can't continue to develop in wetlands, then try to acheive the same hydrologic function with man-made detention and retention ponds and culverts, and expect nature not to react.  Nature isn't reacting with a vengeance, I don't think...it's just an unfathomably complex system that has taken millions of years to reach equilibrium in so many ways, in millions of places.  If we undo that, and then try to 'fix' it again, there is no way we should expect to succeed, or at least not quickly.  You don't have to be a wetland scientist to start wondering what the effect might be of losing much of our wetlands in America.  But again, it's been made into a political issue, bundling ideas along party lines: anti-development, pro-wetland?  We know all about you, Mister.  It's my land, I can do what I want with it.  Keep government out of my life.  Except when I want it there...But what happens when each of those seemingly individual decisions starts to have collective consequences?  When individual 1/2 acre decisions are multiplied by a huge number of replicates?  It adds up.

     According to the Center for Earth and Environmental Science at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis, the US as a whole has lost over half its wetland acreage, and continues to lose more than 100,000 acres of wetlands a year.  The lower midwest (and California) has lost over 80% of its wetland acreage; only 3 states have lost 20% or fewer of their wetland acreage--Alaska, Maine and New Hampshire.  The stats are alarming but breaking them down further just numbs our sense of meaning.  Check countless other sources for similar data if you are a skeptic.  You can't continue to lose wetlands and hope to keep the functions wetlands perform.  The main ones?  Absorbing water, or slowing its flow and thereby allowing the loads of sediment, nutrients and other pollutants to settle out into the vegetation and the mud.  This is nature's erosion control--the wetland, and vegetation in general.  Wetlands are sponges.  Wring them out or throw them out, and you don't have as many sponges at work.  It's that simple.  Faster-moving water does more damage in the form of erosion, and it can't be absorbed into faux, man-made 'wetlands' or scraped-out straight-line roadside ditches when it's moving fast.  Note how, in nature, water settles out and slows down in large, generous allotments of space (again, the wetlands) that for the most part we don't create.  Our roles with wetlands are generally to learn to appreciate and love them--leaving them intact or protecting them--or to destroy them and suffer the consequences.  So flooding--is this political?  Wetlands--are they political?  Is it political to learn and understand how wetlands work, what they do?   Does it make you a weenie within your 'party' to say 'Hey, that kind of makes sense, could it be true?'...does it make you a traitor within your party to suggest that development in one place might be ok, better than development in another place (again, wetland...)?

   Loving wetlands is patriotic--they are our natural heritage, our tableau.  Those idyllic nature scenes we think of as heartland--geese and ducks landing or resting in a farm pond with vast vistas of hedgerows sharing space with fields, sunset in peach and lavender and gray--this is what we had.  Wanting to protect that has somehow become unpatriotic.  It's an aspersion to be pro-environment. 

   This is what we need to reclaim.  We need to remember to be proud of environmentalism because its core effort is to protect America from careless waste and thoughtless squandering.  For years, going back to grade school, we've been taught that nations and cultures are defined by their resources.  Does it make sense to risk one to extract another?  How about risking a few to extract one?  If we squander our fresh water, but money can be made in the act, does that make squandering better?