Last month my wife and I walked to Cana Island. It doesn’t take supernatural powers, just a good pair of shoes and a willingness to be surprised. We followed a rocky isthmus a few yards wide from the Wisconsin mainland to the “island” and its private residence and lighthouse. Once there, a short woodsy path brought us to the buildings, which sat in the middle of an expanse of mowed grass and flowers, ringed by a stone wall and sheltered by bushes and trees. The whole island, I guessed, would fit in a couple of large suburban lots. The Coast Guard still runs the lighthouse and doesn’t welcome visitors, so we strolled around and enjoyed the shade and the lake. I passed the time by reading the island’s history as posted near an outbuilding–and was astonished. According to that sun-bleached piece of paper, everything green on Cana Island is as much people’s doing as the lighthouse.
The volunteers are doing the work, so in terms of historic preservation I suppose they’re entitled to choose their favorite period. But in terms of nature, “keeping it the way it was” makes no sense. Cana Island today is an artifact of human benevolence, not something precious and “natural” that must be defended against any human alteration.
These days Congress may be in the hands of optimistic idiots, but the White House, most of the media, and most environmental groups remain fixated on pessimism. There’s not much middle ground. If you care more about the natural world than about scratching an ideological itch, how can you get good information? You could immerse yourself in the scientific literature–if you had the advanced degrees and no job. You could read the admirably clear-headed Garbage magazine–but it folded last year.
Concentrated corporate power [is] the source of pollution,” declared James Ridgeway in 1970 in The Politics of Ecology, a book Studs Terkel praised as “brilliant” at the time. “It is impossible to do much of anything about pollution without first achieving some sort of fundamental idea of community and a political economy…opening up the possibilities of revolutionary change.”
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Factories have become cleaner, and not because they’ve been shutting down. For every million dollars’ worth of goods manufactured in 1973 Illinois smokestacks belched out four tons of particulate pollution. In 1989 (with output measured in constant dollars to correct for inflation) the amount was just over half a ton. The percentage reduction was even greater in Cook County. Similarly, sulfur dioxide emissions per million dollars dropped from 5.5 to 1.9 tons. Nitrogen oxides, hydrocarbons, and carbon monoxide each declined by more than half. Air pollution produced by fossil-fuel-burning power plants also improved, though not as much.
The once-foul Illinois River is cleaner. Pollution-tolerant goldfish and carp made up 61 percent of all fish surveyed in 1963, but less than 6 percent in 1992. Other species, including more native species, have taken their place. Dramatically fewer fish have the sores and eroded fins typical of severe pollution exposure. Sediment cores used to track pollution history confirm the biological evidence: lead levels in river water, for example, peaked in the late 1960s and have since declined by about half.
Strangely, these days the left is feeding the right its lines. Vice President Al Gore introduced a new edition of Silent Spring last year by writing that “the environmental crisis has grown worse, not better” since Rachel Carson’s landmark book was first published in 1962. (Gee, Al, if that’s really all the good we’ve gotten from 100-some relevant laws, why not repeal them?) In the June issue of the Progressive Review Richard Grossman of the Program on Corporations, Law & Democracy claims that past environmental struggles have achieved only the passage of “laws which legalized the poisoning of the air and water.” Moving from the dubious to the demented at a recent Utne Reader forum in New York City, author Kirkpatrick Sale declared that industrial civilization “is leading the world to the verge of ecocide, the final extinction of surface life as we know it,” then proceeded to smash a computer onstage.
