Are we going to use the environment until it's gone?

I recall reading last fall about Avista doing its Agent Orange impersonation out on Bottle Bay Road, cleaning power lines, and that Chuck Hawley from the Idaho Department of Agriculture gave it the imprimatur of the specialist by saying that Avista was using some fairly common chemicals.

Later, I recalled how common DDT was before Rachel Carson's book, "Silent Spring," created the environmental movement.

In October, I glanced at the River Journal's latest testament to 19th century government policy, wherein, National Forest Supervisor Bob Castaneda confirmed what we always knew about the Rock Creek Mine Project, exclaiming: "I just can't flat say no." The next morning I saw a piece from an old quotation: "When they came for the Jews, I said nothing. And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak."

Finally, in December, on the eve of President Clinton's lame duck approval of the national roadless plan, I spied the knee-, calf- and foot-jerk reaction of Associated Logging Contractors Executive Director Shawn Keough, a.k.a. state Sen. Keough, saying it would be a travesty and a recipe for disaster. It reminded me of the foolish fears that if John Kennedy were to be elected president, the Pope would run the United States.

Disjointed impressions, perhaps. But ones that won't sit still and be quiet. And after three months, now writing on vacation by the Gulf Coast of Florida, where everything from manatees to golf courses to air force bases has become an environmental issue, I wonder how it is that the environment - our air, water and land, the animals and trees that they nurture, even the weeds and flowers by the roadside - have gone from cathedral to home to battleground. How is it that our environment is no longer a sacred creation but a war zone of control?

Activists like to call it the train wreck - ecological conflicts that derail our society. Spotted owl, salmon, bull trout, grizzly bear. But we don't need such sexy Hollywood distractions to see that everywhere, from Lake Coeur d'Alene heavy metals to Lake Pend Oreille Eurasian milfoil, we are in a relative state of ecological disrepair. But despite such dead canaries and evidence as basic as the kokanee, we still put on the gloves and duke it out.

In an age when economic value rules, where anything that can be boxed, labeled and sold, be it raft trips or timber, measures whether the environment has any value at all, the war proceeds not so much from corporate greed but from plain, old-fashioned selfishness: We want our sense of value protected.

Whether that be wood or trees, water or hydropower, we want the part that is marketed to us, that we will use (and overuse) to be available. Whether as loggers or hikers, we all just want the environment on the consumer shelf of our work and play lifestyle in the right time and right place to satisfy me, myself and mine.

The point is this: St. Francis did not see nature as a commodity either to exploit or to protect but as divine creation as sacred as Jesus himself. It is not the polarity of opinion, therefore, that is the problem. That is natural and healthy. What is wrong and what must be pulled out at the roots is seeing nature in its entirety as a marketable object, a NASDAQ stock, a consumable.

We have reached the point in "Indiana Jones and the Holy Grail" where Dr. Jones, Sr., is shot and Indiana is told by the evil Nazi guy, "It's time to decide, Mr. Jones, just what do you believe?" If he believes in the healing power of the grail, his father will live. If not, all is lost. And there you have it.

If we in the Panhandle, in this nation and this planet believe, bottom line, that nature is merely a commodity, just a pile of stuff for us to shape to our egotistical will, then let's just get on with it and rape the place bare.

If not, if we are still willing, as historian Max Weber, to entertain the possibility that the garden is enchanted, let's break bread and dedicate our own enchanted lives to saving what's left.

Copyright 2001 Cowles Publishing Company
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.