ROCK ISLAND, IL

If  “anniversary” is the right word, which of course it isn’t.

It might be the right word had we spent the last twenty years getting smarter and becoming better people, which is what you’d expect of progressive people—because, you know, “progress” and all that, etc.

But of course we’re still destroying ourselves and impoverishing our posterity in a mad attempt to wring just a little more ancient sunlight from the earth. We’re still doing a poor job of taking responsibility for our actions. We’re no more noble than Exxon spokesman David Parish, who, according to a  New York Times article published twenty years ago today, “did not expect major environmental damage as a result of the spill.” Yesterday Fox News assured us—and this is a relief—that Exxon has pronounced Prince William Sound “healthy and thriving.” The Sound is sound. And Exxon, a local company based just down the road in Irving, Texas, should know.

No retrospective would be complete if we didn’t congratulate ourselves in it for our “advanced technology,” because, you know, technology is always improving, etc. Exxon itself, notwithstanding a Wall Street Journal report claiming that it still uses more single-hulled oil tankers “than the rest of the ten biggest oil companies combined,” has nevertheless, according to current Exxon spokesman Alan Jeffers, made significant reforms. These include—you guessed it—improved technologies (but wait—there’s more!) and better management strategies. Fox News again assures us—another relief—that Exxon “has instituted drug and alcohol testing for safety sensitive positions, jobs that cannot be held by those with substance abuse histories”—like Joseph Hazelwood, the pilot who skillfully steered the Valdez safely into a reef so it could be delivered more effectively of its black gold.

“We learned from this tragedy and went about developing a system to prevent this from ever happening again,” Jeffers said—because, you know, we’re achieving complete mastery over nature, etc. and so forth and so on.

In fact, twenty years later we have even more evidence that mastery leads to degradation and that progress, as e.e. cummings said, is just a “comfortable disease.” And yet we still exert more “mastery”and settle even more comfortably into our debilitating sickness. The only real comfort in all this is that we’ve got other people to blame.

But it’s time to see that we’ve all got oil on our hands. “It was not just the greed of corporate shareholders and the hubris of corporate executives that put the fate of Prince William Sound into one ship,” wrote one of FPR’s tutelary spirits back in 1989. “It was also our demand that energy be cheap and plentiful.”

Wendell Berry went on to say:

The religion and the environmentalism of the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something that they do not really wish to destroy. We all live by robbing nature, but our standard of living demands that the robbery continue. . . .

 

Were the catastrophes of Love Canal, Bhopal, Chernobyl, and the Exxon Valdez episodes of war or of peace? They were, in fact, peacetime acts of aggression, intentional to the extent that the risks were known and ignored.

 

We are involved unremittingly in a war not against “foreign enemies,” but against the world, against our freedom, and indeed against our existence. Our so-called industrial accidents should be looked upon as revenges of Nature. We forget that Nature is necessarily party to all our enterprises and that she imposes conditions of her own.

 

Now she is plainly saying to us: “If you put the fates of whole communities or cities or regions or ecosystems at risk in single ships or factories or power plants, then I will furnish the drunk or the fool or the imbecile who will make the necessary small mistake.”

(from “Word and Flesh” in What Are People For?)

 

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