The year 2015 is disappearing down the black hole of amnesia and business as usual.
Aside from ceaseless war in the Middle East and countless refugees engulfing the Greek islands in the Aegean, nothing of any significance happened in 2015 to make the future any less dreadful than the present.
The international gathering in Paris about climate change in early December was conventional petroleum politics at its worst. World leaders celebrated a toothless wish list that left petroleum, coal and natural gas under the burning flames of their corporate and state owners.
This shameless game did not surprise me much. I have been observing the steady decline of environmentalism and civilization for more than fifty years. Wars and pollution keep raising the harm to human and environmental health.
When I arrived in the US in 1961, Rachel Carson was alive. Her 1962 book, "Silent Spring," warned Americans they had to rethink their addiction to dangerous pesticides their farmers sprayed so recklessly over huge territories all over the country.
Millions of Americans bought her book but, strangely, nearly nothing improved. The farmers, like medieval feudal landlords, have been poisoning the land like there's no tomorrow. And the scientific community (colleges and universities) and the government (the US Department of Agriculture and the US Environmental Protection Agency) legitimize the dangerous practices of the farmers.
I found this policy so obscene that, in 2014, I wrote my own book, "Poison Spring." I learned working for the EPA that science and regulation, which the EPA is using to approve old and new farm toxins, are corrupt and untrustworthy. My EPA colleagues gave me the data for this conclusion.
I documented in my book that pesticides are byproducts of petroleum and WWII. I argued the chemical industry has been doing to farmers what the cigarette companies did to cigarette smokers. They sponsor their addiction to deleterious substances under the guise of "weed killers" and "pest control." Add to this a sophisticated advertisement campaign by the chemical companies and the teachings by our land grant (agricultural) universities alleging alternatives to petrochemical farming are equivalent to hunger, and the chemical industry has been reaping billions per year.
I also document in my book that, for several decades in the twentieth century, laboratories funded by pesticide companies used fraud in the testing of pesticides. USDA then approved those sprays. EPA also caught several pesticide labs making "safety" data out of thin air.
Despite this legacy of criminal science in support of pesticides, the chemical industry has been purchasing influence at Congress and the White House to capture government regulatory agencies.
What about Americans who describe themselves as environmentalists? Some of them are probably still reading "Silent Spring." They also work or support hundreds of environmental organizations fighting for a tremendous variety of good causes: water restoration to cleaning or abetting river pollution to shutting down the fracking of their land for natural gas and petroleum to even bring some order in the pesticide jungle.
American environmentalists are probably the best of Americans. They have the scientific knowledge and interest to keep ecosystems functioning for the services they provide: clean water, clean air, and good and healthy food.
Yet, America's state of the environment has been deteriorating steadily. My example of agricultural chemicals can be duplicated by the condition of water, air, food, wastes, forests, public lands etc. Global warming is also in the same hazardous category.
Are environmentalists asleep at the wheel? Or there's another explanation for America's abuse of the natural world?
First of all, environmentalism is not religion, though contemplation and study of nature leads often to metaphysics. However, environmentalism is not unconnected to how people live, make a living and see themselves as political animals. Respecting and loving the natural world is very much part of how we grow up, how we educate ourselves, and how we govern ourselves.
Our environmental tragedy is a political tragedy of allowing immense inequalities among the citizens of the country. Medieval income inequalities, for example, simply mirror the dramatic decline in democracy and, therefore, dramatic abuses of both people and the natural world.
Billionaires are controlling the real political power in America. Environmental organizations, no less than agricultural universities and regulatory agencies, have sought to accommodate their programs to minimum friction with the powers that be.
The institutionalization of one's love for the natural world soon extinguishes that love for coexistence with unpleasant realities. You know neurotoxins are bad for life, including your life and that of your children. But the temporal need to earn a living, or because of deception, laziness and ignorance, tempts you to give credence to government and industry saying science assures us the pesticide used properly causes no harm.
Given our predicament, both in appalling economic inequalities and in steady hazardous environmental decline, individuals and organizations dedicated to environmental protection must rethink their goals. If those goals are for a livable and better environmental and public health, time has come to act.
United environmentalists have tremendous power. Lobbying polluters and politicians have plainly failed because the polluters own most of the politicians. So a new strategy demands going to the grassroots: lobby citizens to elect honest persons to state and federal offices. Join other citizen movements like the organic farmers. Buy their food not merely because it's free of toxins but because organic farming is friendly to the natural world. Spread what the environmentalists know about the natural world to all Americans.
America cannot afford the shameful fact Republican politicians consider climate change a hoax and Democratic politicians barely talk about it.
A healthy dosage of democracy could heal the political brain of America. It might also heal our environmental organizations, the natural world, and the country.