For those who do not recognize, the parenthetical statement accompanying the title of this post references a line in Roald Dahl’s short story, “Papa and Mama,” which appears in his book, Boy: Tales of Childhood.
Now to the crux of the post….
Take a course in good water and air; and in the eternal youth of Nature you may renew your own. Go quietly, alone; no harm will befall you.
—John Muir
Perhaps it is my sometimes-cynical outlook that goads a gloomy sense of humor, but when I saw this photo I thought two things: (1) these children are swimming in oil and (2) my gosh, how much of the Louisiana coastline has been affected by the leak from the sunken oil rig (a question that has been answer in appalling ways in the last week) and who did not inform these unwitting children that there had been a spill?
I was, of course, relieved to find that the children were not swimming in oil, but no less disconcerted to learn that they were bathing in toxic water—the one keeping his mouth tightly shut so as not to inhale it as it bubbles about him, the other looking on as the stifling sun shines upon his sullied body. For them, dirty water is normal, even mundane. For us, a polluted coast is as aberrant as it is blameworthy. Both, however, are justifiable in giving us reason to pause. The following two political cartoons give us a comic frame through which to do this.
Indeed, the sad truth is that polluted bodies of water are not altogether uncommon in many parts of the world, but particularly here in the Hindon River in Ghaziabad, India, which—as a report by the Janhit Foundation, entitled “Hindon River: Gasping for Breath,” shows—is as much a catchment for the Uttar Pradesh region’s water supply as it is a reservoir of toxins from the refuse of various mills and chemical industries (not to mention the runoff from agricultural pesticides). And the ironies of such a picture emerging on April 20 I am sure are not lost on many: two days before Earth Day, two days before the oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico sank (yes, on Earth Day) and which has now been leaking massive amounts of oil into the ocean for over a month, four days before Senator Lindsey Graham would decide to abandon previously planned talks on climate change legislation and nearly three weeks after President Obama decided to open offshore drilling areas along the Atlantic coastline and in the Gulf of Mexico (which he has just recently reconsidered in light of recent events). The further irony is that, forty years after the very first celebration of Earth Day, America seems to have made as many small steps forward as we have serious strides back.
That is, this photograph and the attendant comics reinforces our own deleterious dependence on oil alongside our all-too-often “so it goes” attitude (which is a perversion of Kurt Vonnegut’s usage, by the way), while depicting a scene that could easily be found in a never-written Vonnegut tale in which oil might have become as abundant as water and, oh, how the Western world rejoiced. What this photograph and these commentaries also reinforce, though, is that both environmental activism and the socio-political exigencies entailing everything from global warming to the creation of renewable energy sources to the acquisition of clean drinking water are no longer local, state or even national issues (and arguably have not been for a long time now). Indeed, the vast and varied social, political, economic, and environmental issues plaguing our world at present are issues that will only continue to impact more and more populations around the globe, and will only continue to exacerbate as we rely on complacency in lifestyles as much as we purport to promote change.
To be sure, some have gone so far as to cite the recent earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and deadly tornadoes as evidence that Mother Nature has had enough. No doubt, if I was Gaia, I would be just as ready to unleash my seismic discontent, to spit fire and retaliate with (other)worldly tumult. Yet this hardly mitigates the real, pressing earthly troubles we face, and does little more to change the fact that for too long our relationship with our natural world has been unclean. Perhaps the real irony, then, is that about which Vonnegut did write shortly before his death in a poem entitled “Requiem,” a snippet of which encapsulates the entire sentiment of the poem and reads like an apology for humankind:
that we know what
we are doing
Indeed, as Paul Wapner pronounces in his new book Living Through the End of Nature: The Future of American Environmentalism, we are well beyond protecting the natural world from the ways of humans. The challenge, then, is to work ever harder in a “postnature age” (first dubbed by Bill McKibben in The End of Nature) to establish and maintain an ecological balance, not between humankind and nature, but between the natural world and humankind’s unending quest to attain mastery over it—and perhaps we could begin with a recognition of the relationship of our lives to nature as what Michael Taussig might dub a “mastery of nonmastery.” The fact of the matter is, though, that when the language of activism does not lead to action (and, truly, what we need is progressive legislation and committed resources toward sweeping policy change), the words remain mere words.
There is much talk and much joking about who will “pay” for the clean-up of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. I think it should be painfully clear by now that we all end up paying, just not necessarily out of our wallets. So until wide-ranging change—and really, action—occurs, however, many of us will enact small modes of activism in our everyday purchases and practices, and others still will whisper in protest about political inaction; and all the while the children of Ghaziabad will continue to “cool off” (amidst 107 degree heat), the globe will continue to warm up, and more and more we will find that the effects of our environmental degradation creeping closer and closer to home. What is more, we just might have to come to terms with the fact that, if none of us can find a clean place to breath, it will be difficult for any of us to either swim or bathe or…. Either way, it will take more than a magical act of either science or smarts to reverse much of the damage we are doing to our Earthly home. Kidding aside, though, is anyone any good at magic? (Check out this article from The Atlantic for a touch of seriousness to be dashed upon this dish of play)
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