Environmentalism

Where There Is Life by Paul B. Sears (1952), an introduction to ecology, was prominent on the reading list for a freshman interdisciplinary course at Ohio Wesleyan in 1965 called “Conflict and the Human Condition: Man in Nature.” I don’t have my original marked-up copy of the book so will have to rely on memory to recover something of its personal impact at the time.

I was familiar with the pollution Sears described. I grew up in a small industrial town in the 50’s and 60’s where most wage earners worked either at the Ferro-alloy or power plants. Both places paid good wages, and both provided a healthy tax base, which made our tax-financed public school system one of the best in the county. No one in the area seemed to bother about the pollution: the plumes of chemical-filled air that blew through the town as the wind changed directions; the hot, dirty water dumped back again into the river that ran past the town so that no one could swim there or even eat fish that was caught. So accustomed was I to the pollution that I didn’t give much thought to the black soot that settled on laundry hung outside, eating holes in the bed sheets.  Nor did anyone seem to connect the pollution with health problems, like my mother’s life-long struggle with lung disease. As for the land itself, we were near enough to Appalachia to suffer the scourge of strip-mining.

 I don’t remember much public discussion about these degradations, let alone anything that resembled an environmental movement. Our town had no newspaper. (Well, many people subscribed to one that never got printed because the scam-artist “editor” left town with the paid-up-front subscription money.) The local minister who devoted a Sunday sermon to Silent Spring was forced to find another church. The small professional class included teachers, a doctor, a nurse, a couple of lawyers, and a handful of plant managers. Since the town was incorporated, there was a mayor and a town council, but if any of them felt concern, they did not voice it publically. And who am I to judge them? They thought they were civic-minded public servants. After all, the plants provided good-paying jobs, and because our schools benefitted from the strong tax base, we had good teachers and champion sports teams, always good for public morale. The reigning philosophy seemed to be, as my mother would put it, “you’ve got to go along to get along.” 

So the Sears book must have been a real eye-opener, and I do remember some heated arguments during school breaks with my parents and others about what industry had done to our once-attractive little town, with its rolling hillside and river views. However, I could never get past the “it could be worse; at least there are jobs” counter-argument. Indeed, I was later to see what joblessness would do when both plants shut down, and our town, like much of the industrial mid-West, was absorbed into the “rust belt,” a desolation from which it has yet to recover. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring may have spearheaded an environmental movement, but our town was not part of it, nor was I. As one privileged to get a good education, including the science of ecology, I should have worked harder at “consciousness raising.”  Instead, I did everything I could to escape and get on with my own life in some more desirable location, and I regret that.

Spiritual Exercise

     I've been thinking about the process of  dialoguing with a younger self as a spiritual exercise. A friend who is a psychiatrist talks about opening up various files in the brain. My paper file from the 60's is starting to deteriorate; the aging process is probably doing the same thing with my brain file. Before time's passing takes its toll, I want to study nature/nurture with myself  as chief specimen. I also want to look back at my spiritual path to understand where God might be leading me.

     I don't think I kept any diaries in the 60's, at least I haven't found any among the papers and books that surfaced as we sorted things after my mother's death. But these classnotes do start to create a kind of simulacrum. So far, there are few signs of activities, ideas, or even the craziness associated with the 60's to be found, even in margin jottings or doodling. Instead, what emerges is a serious, very hard-working young woman on a scholarship, trying to absorb as much as possible from all the new ideas and life styles she is experiencing and feeling like a poor relation invited to a major dinner party. My first college room-mate had shoes to match every outfit. My suite-mates went skiing on breaks. They gave me a pair of winter gloves (which I still have) as a Christmas present. What is so touching as I think back on this is their effort to show charity without making the recipient feel poor.


    But I'm getting off the subject now --  the 18-year-old I'm trying to channel. There is an undercurrent of sadness, even hopelessness, running through my notes. Were the professors signalling these emotions? The readings? Perhaps it was the zeitgeist. We were in a period marked by war, assassinations, and the threat of annihilation -- if not by nuclear exchange with the USSR, then by over-population. Women's liberation made some of us feel uncertain about self-images and personal values we had once held. The death of God had been proclaimed. 

    I did not know any hippies my freshman year. OWU students seemed more interested in sorority-fraternity life, dressing well, even steak night in dorm cafeterias. But surely ideas were starting to take root from the excellent education we were getting. I met my first hippie in 1967 when she came through the dorm asking for donations to buy a bus ticket for Washington D.C. where an anti-war demonstration was scheduled. Her appearance certainly made an impression. I was sympathetic, but my background made it hard to support her position on the war. I had  high-school classmates who were serving in Viet Nam, and I felt, however faulty the reasoning, that protesting the war in such a public way would hurt their morale. And as for the way the young woman was dressed -- well, I was still hoping for a time when I could buy decent clothes and not feel so out-of-place.

Corrections to Last Post

In my last post I said I had not been able to find a copy of  Where There Is Life. Well, I have done so, and it's in the mail. (The wonders of online old book dealers.) I also said that Sears et.al. were among the first ecologists. That, too, was incorrect. It seems ecology has been around for a while, picking up steam in the 19th century with the work of Darwin. The authors we read first in the OWU course "Conflict and the Human Condition" were helping to increase public awareness of the degradation of the planet by over-population and other processes. Environmentalism, if not ecology, was a household word in the 60's, at the heart of which was the best-seller Silent Spring by Rachel Carson.