Thursday, July 24, 2014

What is Environmentalism?

Katherine Evatt recently posted on her Facebook page a call to appear at the upcoming Calaveras County BOS to support the Wild & Scenic designation for part of the Mokelumne River. In that posting, she used the expression “anti-environmental forces”. She is defining, based on her point of view, what is environmental and what isn’t. I find this to be a statement of supreme arrogance. Here at the Sutter Gold Mine all the groundwater that seeps into the mine goes through a filtration system that removes the arsenic. This is environmental, and I suspect that all Amadorians agree.

I know what lack of environmental protection is, coming from Buffalo, NY. Every Spring time we would go to the Erie Canal section of river and see dead fish so dense that the surface of the water could not be seen. But after several years, there were no more dead fish because there were no more fish left to die. As I got older, I watched my father’s friends die of liver and kidney cancer. In grad school, I read environmental studies where I could find the childhood homes of those men on the maps of factory smokestack plumes. I have always advocated environmental protection and still do. We can manufacture products in an environmentally safe manner, and I have seen state of the art factories where this occurs.

Instead, we buy goods from Third World countries where the populace is poisoned and smugly state how America is now environmental. We can, and should, manufacture here in a safe manner. Because I care about other people, believe in economic development projects that need water from the Mokelumne River, and well up with tears every time I read another article about the increasing size of our food banks I am considered, as are many others, anti-environmental. I resent this, and suspect many others do.

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