Anger and Accommodation
Frederick H. Swanson
Frederick H. Swanson
The first home I ever owned lay at the outskirts of Helena, Montana, a pleasant little city located under the shadow of the Continental Divide. With the help of loan from my parents, I and my then-wife, Charlotte, took possession of a one bedroom, one bath bungalow in a working-class neighborhood. The mortgage came to half of my income, but this represented no real hardship. In the waning years of the 1970s, forty thousand dollars could get you into a decent, if small, home in a place like Helena. We felt fortunate to have a place to call our own.
During those early years in Helena, Charlotte and I pursued frugality to an extent that would mystify most homeowners today. We generally walked or biked to our jobs, which for her was a school some seven miles away. We planted a small garden and shared potluck dinners with friends, sitting on old rugs in our tiny living room. The two of us looked forward to a future together, although that was not to be.
Most of our friends were pursuing similar ways of living, making do and getting by on small incomes. Although we had come of age after the hippie era, we felt some kinship with those older back-to-the-land folks. A few of our friends were making homesteads in rural parts of the state, and I harbored a hope of one day moving out to the country. I bought a few tools and started making some modest improvements to our house, trying to remember the carpentry skills my father had showed me when I was much younger.
There was a fellow in the neighborhood who was undertaking a building project of his own, on land that was not his. High up on a hillside behind our house was an old prospector’s adit, a shallow tunnel dug long ago during Helena’s mining heyday. A young man had staked an unofficial claim to the site and was building a crude shelter out of weathered boards left by the former owner. He spent many of his days there, hammering away at his little project, although he didn’t appear to sleep there. Something was clearly the matter with him, as he would sometimes let loose a stream of loud curses which we could hear from our place. These rages grew worse after kids from the neighborhood came along and tore down his little shack. He set about rebuilding it over the next few days, only to find it torn down again. My recollection is that he continued with his doomed project for some weeks, all the while giving voice to his anger in words we could scarcely understand.
I got to thinking about this unfortunate fellow the other day in the context of my own discontents, which in a typical week cycle through a series of depressed or angry moods, depending on which news articles I’m reading. Their subject, broadly speaking, is the state of our living planet. My reactions to reports of the latest insult to Earth’s integrity range from anger, bitterness, and despair to resigned acceptance--or less often, grudging hope. There are days when I want to mount some hilltop above the city where I now live and yell out: Do you realize what you’re doing to your home? Do you care? Are you going to do anything about it?
Despite all the scientists’ warnings over the past fifty or sixty years, we continue to pursue lifestyles that practically guarantee the loss of much of the Earth’s natural beauty and biotic diversity. On top of this we are ushering in a frightening new era of vicious climatic conditions. Over the course of my life I’ve seen too many beautiful places bulldozed for homes and roads, drilled for hydrocarbon fuels, invaded by noxious weeds, or overrun by humans in waves of motorized recreational vehicles. There seems to be no limit to our headlong rush to colonize every inch of the Earth’s surface and commit to its atmosphere every last megajoule of its fossil energy.
I’ve always felt I ought to minimize my consumption of Earth’s resources, knowing that mineral and energy extraction comes at a cost to the natural world. Americans have no special right to use up land and minerals at rates far exceeding those of our ancestors, or of people elsewhere on the planet. Yet conservation today appears wholly out of fashion; all the talk is of finding new sources of energy, not using less.
Our retreat from the values of the 1970s is mirrored in my own life. I’ve grown used to increasingly comfortable ways of living, to the point that the home my wife and I now occupy could be considered luxurious. We built much of it ourselves, and packed it with every green feature we could, from thick walls insulated with recycled newsprint to a passive cooling system that uses no electricity. Ten years ago we added grid-tied solar panels which produce enough power over the course of a year to equal what we use. We recycle as much as we can, compost food scraps, and drive a hybrid car which gets more than forty miles a gallon. My old truck, a concession to utility, mostly sits in the garage. We rarely fly anywhere.
Yet I’m fully aware that the way we live is far more consumptive of land and resources than the Earth could withstand if it were replicated by eight billion of us. For us to reduce our ecological footprint to such a level would mean moving into a downtown apartment, selling our vehicles, and never getting in an airplane again. Not even driving a fully electric car would be sufficient; the materials needed to supply every household on the planet with such a vehicle would be enormous.
My wife and I, in fact, recently upped our consumption level by purchasing a small cabin in an area of high desert two hundred miles from where we now live. We hope to eventually move there, plant a big garden, and travel less. This is our attempt to reconcile our desire for a comfortable, quiet life with the need to not overly burden the planet. In the meantime, though, our second-home purchase has nearly doubled our net energy use.
Knowing all this, I turn my frustration inward. I’ve failed my own ideals in at least this respect, and that is hard to bear. Unlike our disturbed neighbor from a half century ago, I don’t vocalize my frustration—at least not loudly. We’ve willingly chosen to live this way. No one forced us to buy this package—we acquired it gradually, so that it now seems perfectly normal to live this way. Our story, moreover, is replicated all across America, even among the environmentally aware.
There is an effort by some environmental activists to pin the blame for our ecological crises on corporations, or even on the whole system of industrial capitalism. These activists take issue with the idea of an “ecological footprint,” which is a calculable sum of our individual impact on the planet, from the materials we use to the carbon we let loose in the atmosphere. They maintain that the footprint metric was conceived of and promoted by industry in order to pass off culpability to individual consumers. I’m no fan of polluting industries or their servants in government and the advertising world, but it is not entirely accurate to lay the blame solely on capitalism. Individual choices still play a role in creating the dilemma we’re in.
There is no doubt that the American way of life in all its various forms is a disaster for the planet. The home my wife and I currently live in lies at the outskirts of a sprawling, noisy, and terribly polluted megalopolis, where the air often can be seen, which is not how air should be. The growth ethic reigns in this state and new housing developments, freeways, and commercial centers are always under construction. People drive everywhere, so much that walking and biking can be hazardous. Buildings that could be repurposed are torn down to make way for apartments to house the ever-growing population.
When I moved to this city nearly forty years ago, one could still see remnants of its rural, agricultural beginnings in the previous century. What had been small towns and villages scattered through a broad intermountain valley were beginning to coalesce under the advance of urban sprawl. That process is now nearly complete, with new centers of growth emerging beyond the mountain fringe. Huge gravel pits eat away at mountainsides in order to supply the endless demand for road base and concrete. Highways and feeder routes that carried one or two lanes of traffic when I moved here now are four, five, or even six lanes wide. Noise has increased substantially, and the night sky displays only the brightest stars. I have grown to hate this place for what it has become.
Yet this megapolity arose not from any plan or decree, but from the collective results of millions of smaller decisions, made by individual consumers and ratified by their elected representatives, most of whom were only too glad to grease the skids of growth. Commerce and industry grew along with this demand, and their captains certainly promoted the endless expansion, but I don’t think it is fair to say that they made it happen. Rather it came about because all of us--from the powerful to the ordinary--sought a more comfortable, convenient life, replete with the possessions and symbols of our chosen lifestyles.
An aversion to the typical American lifestyle has been a feature of the environmental movement since its earliest beginnings. We can see its origins in the critiques of consumerist culture in the 1950s and even earlier, although it was not until the first Earth Day in 1970 that this became closely tied to environmental issues. In the intervening half-century, our culture’s impact on land, water, and air has only grown worse. From the parade of giant pickups and mountain-size recreational vehicles on the highways, the growing use of the backcountry for motorized racetracks and challenge courses, the outlandish size of our homes and the insistence on stocking them with a panoply of high-tech electronic and consumer gear, the sheer volume of waste that is evident in everyone’s trash cans, to the steadily worsening air, our imprint has become truly monstrous.
Hovering over all of these visible burdens on the ecosphere is one that is harder to discern but perhaps even more disastrous: the growing dominance of a virtual world, created within our computer networks, which consumes astonishing amounts of electric energy as well as cobalt, lithium, and other minerals. Here again is a crushing ecological burden which arose out of the handshake between entrepreneurial capitalism and its willing, even eager, consumers. Again, no one is forcing us to buy cell phones, tablets, bitcoins or virtual reality headsets, although the tech industry’s marketing arm is very clever at stoking interest and demand in all of these. Artificial intelligence promises to tap even more resources in this seemingly limitless spiral.
I challenge anyone to assert that we as a country, let alone as an earth civilization, are moving quickly enough to establish a truly sustainable society. Whether the result will be a collapse of civilization as we know it, or simply the continued degradation of Earth’s ecosystems, is not clear. My own feeling is that the human species, being tremendously adaptable, will find a way to go on living, even if we strip off much of Earth’s biotic diversity and a great deal of its inborn beauty. Humans will adjust to the new climatic reality of flood and fire, hurricane and heat. That is what we have done for a million years—using our capacious brains to overcome every bottleneck nature has put in our way.
Even the most obvious broader-scale actions we could be taking, such as instituting a carbon tax, raising automotive mileage standards, organizing our cities around mass transit, and requiring manufacturers to build life-cycle reuse into their products, are proving elusive. If we could institute these policies, I’m not sure they would suffice. To truly divorce ourselves from our consumerist excess would involve radical lifestyle changes that few Americans, let alone our political leaders, would countenance. It’s easier to stick with what we know. No imaginable changes in policy or governance are going to pull us out of these habits in toto—we are too wedded to a system that depends utterly on consumer demand.
Yet this megapolity arose not from any plan or decree, but from the collective results of millions of smaller decisions, made by individual consumers and ratified by their elected representatives, most of whom were only too glad to grease the skids of growth. Commerce and industry grew along with this demand, and their captains certainly promoted the endless expansion, but I don’t think it is fair to say that they made it happen. Rather it came about because all of us--from the powerful to the ordinary--sought a more comfortable, convenient life, replete with the possessions and symbols of our chosen lifestyles.
An aversion to the typical American lifestyle has been a feature of the environmental movement since its earliest beginnings. We can see its origins in the critiques of consumerist culture in the 1950s and even earlier, although it was not until the first Earth Day in 1970 that this became closely tied to environmental issues. In the intervening half-century, our culture’s impact on land, water, and air has only grown worse. From the parade of giant pickups and mountain-size recreational vehicles on the highways, the growing use of the backcountry for motorized racetracks and challenge courses, the outlandish size of our homes and the insistence on stocking them with a panoply of high-tech electronic and consumer gear, the sheer volume of waste that is evident in everyone’s trash cans, to the steadily worsening air, our imprint has become truly monstrous.
Hovering over all of these visible burdens on the ecosphere is one that is harder to discern but perhaps even more disastrous: the growing dominance of a virtual world, created within our computer networks, which consumes astonishing amounts of electric energy as well as cobalt, lithium, and other minerals. Here again is a crushing ecological burden which arose out of the handshake between entrepreneurial capitalism and its willing, even eager, consumers. Again, no one is forcing us to buy cell phones, tablets, bitcoins or virtual reality headsets, although the tech industry’s marketing arm is very clever at stoking interest and demand in all of these. Artificial intelligence promises to tap even more resources in this seemingly limitless spiral.
I challenge anyone to assert that we as a country, let alone as an earth civilization, are moving quickly enough to establish a truly sustainable society. Whether the result will be a collapse of civilization as we know it, or simply the continued degradation of Earth’s ecosystems, is not clear. My own feeling is that the human species, being tremendously adaptable, will find a way to go on living, even if we strip off much of Earth’s biotic diversity and a great deal of its inborn beauty. Humans will adjust to the new climatic reality of flood and fire, hurricane and heat. That is what we have done for a million years—using our capacious brains to overcome every bottleneck nature has put in our way.
Even the most obvious broader-scale actions we could be taking, such as instituting a carbon tax, raising automotive mileage standards, organizing our cities around mass transit, and requiring manufacturers to build life-cycle reuse into their products, are proving elusive. If we could institute these policies, I’m not sure they would suffice. To truly divorce ourselves from our consumerist excess would involve radical lifestyle changes that few Americans, let alone our political leaders, would countenance. It’s easier to stick with what we know. No imaginable changes in policy or governance are going to pull us out of these habits in toto—we are too wedded to a system that depends utterly on consumer demand.
Which brings me back to that lone figure standing on the hill many years ago. I have a feeling that he was more honest that I am. With his mind subject to unknown torments, he chose to give vent to his fears and anger in a place and in a manner that forced others to hear him. He did not suffer in silence. What relief he may have gained from crying out, I do not know. He probably had little capability for self-reflection, so I cannot fault his outbursts. The question is, can I accept my silence?
Over the course of my career I’ve had the opportunity to speak before many public audiences about environmental issues. These have ranged from friendly gatherings of like-minded conservationists to skeptical members of Congress. Not once did I ever raise my voice or express the deep-down anger I feel at the destruction of Earth’s natural places and habitats. I’m not sure if this is a fault of mine or just my natural personality, but thinking of that poor fellow above our home in Helena gets me to wondering about my reticence.
Anger, if expressed in the right place and in the right manner, can sometimes change the course of history. But it can also get you shot, jailed, or simply ignored, as I tried to ignore that tormented young man long ago. Should I have fought harder for my ideals? Of course. But like all of my peers, I craved a pleasant and peaceable home life, with time spent outdoors and with loved ones. I chose not to bring up what was bothering me deep down, especially if it appeared I would be disparaging my friends or coworkers. To be seen as a killjoy is a recipe for loneliness.
Still, there are many who are protesting, loudly and forcefully, what is happening to our mother Earth. They take part in demonstrations, rallies, sit-ins, traffic blockades, or other, more violent and destructive actions. Maybe one day, as the forces of repression and exploitation extend their reach into all our lives, there will be many more who resist in this manner. But I will not be among them. Instead I will be trying to fashion some small shelter for my family out at the edge of things, where a measure of beauty still persists. I’ll go on writing my letters and emails and giving talks when called upon. My anger will remain repressed. If that is a fault, I will have to live with it. If, however, I am able to reconcile what I have done with all I have failed to do, I may find a measure of peace.
That is all I can hope for.
Over the course of my career I’ve had the opportunity to speak before many public audiences about environmental issues. These have ranged from friendly gatherings of like-minded conservationists to skeptical members of Congress. Not once did I ever raise my voice or express the deep-down anger I feel at the destruction of Earth’s natural places and habitats. I’m not sure if this is a fault of mine or just my natural personality, but thinking of that poor fellow above our home in Helena gets me to wondering about my reticence.
Anger, if expressed in the right place and in the right manner, can sometimes change the course of history. But it can also get you shot, jailed, or simply ignored, as I tried to ignore that tormented young man long ago. Should I have fought harder for my ideals? Of course. But like all of my peers, I craved a pleasant and peaceable home life, with time spent outdoors and with loved ones. I chose not to bring up what was bothering me deep down, especially if it appeared I would be disparaging my friends or coworkers. To be seen as a killjoy is a recipe for loneliness.
Still, there are many who are protesting, loudly and forcefully, what is happening to our mother Earth. They take part in demonstrations, rallies, sit-ins, traffic blockades, or other, more violent and destructive actions. Maybe one day, as the forces of repression and exploitation extend their reach into all our lives, there will be many more who resist in this manner. But I will not be among them. Instead I will be trying to fashion some small shelter for my family out at the edge of things, where a measure of beauty still persists. I’ll go on writing my letters and emails and giving talks when called upon. My anger will remain repressed. If that is a fault, I will have to live with it. If, however, I am able to reconcile what I have done with all I have failed to do, I may find a measure of peace.
That is all I can hope for.
* * *