No More Sweeping Under the Rug

This isn’t science.  It’s probably not even logic.  It’s simply feeling.

I am hugely in favor of environmental protection.  I am a product of a successful education campaign when I was young, which imprinted on my young brain the importance of preserving the earth and all that dwells within it.

So I am a logical suspect to peg as being against wind mills on mountaintops . . . against mountaintop removal . . . against off-shore oil exploration . . . against pipelines running through a primary aquifer . . .

And it’s true to a certain extent: my impulse is to be against all of these things.

But, and it is a significant but . . . I have spent time in Iraq (with CPT, a faith-based violence reduction organization) and that time changed something about me that I didn’t expect.

My time in Iraq changed how I see environmental issues.

On top of war and the ruinous devastations of war, I have also witnessed in Iraq the disastrous impact of unchecked exploitation of resources such as oil and unregulated industries such as cement factories on the people of Iraq.

I actually asked a physician once if Palestinians were more prone to asthma than other groups since the Iraqi Palestinian children we accompanied to the Syrian and Jordanian borders all suffered from acute asthma.  The doctor was a kind soul, so he didn’t make fun of me for the stupid question.  Instead, he reminded me of what I had already seen and experienced: the pervasive pollution in Iraq, which is killing its population.

Many days, the skies in the south are black from oil burning and the massive use of gasoline generators to provide in-home electricity.  Many days, when I blew my nose, the tissue would be black.

It wasn’t the childrens’ Palestinian ancestry that attacked their lungs; it was the Iraqi air.

In the north, the pollution from the cement factories covers the land with white smog clouds.

I understand the complexities of a war fought in large measure about our import of oil.  I did not understand that we are exporting our pollution as much as we are importing their oil.

And that is what has changed my mind.

Creative Commons Image by Ferdi Rizkiyanto

If I am going to drive my car; if I am going to use electricity; if I am going to be a disproportionate consumer of the resources of the world (which, as a United States citizen, I am), it only seems fair to me that the results of that consumption be something I must look at up and close and personal, in my own back yard.

We in these United States have proven thus far that our consumption will not be reduced by attempts to price us out of the market.  We have proven that we will go to any lengths, economically, diplomatically, militarily, to preserve our perceived ‘right’ to consume at an unchecked pace.

And I am as guilty as the next person, perhaps even more so.

But maybe, just maybe, if the windmills sit atop my mountains . . . if the tops of my mountains are removed . . . if the oil derricks sit where I must look upon them every day . . . if I can no longer sweep the real harm my consuming ways does to this planet under the rug of my feigned ignorance . . . maybe then I’ll change my ways.

Maybe.