 As
much as I value the reporting of the New York Times on political
matters, I find their environmental reporting to be...well...strange.
Perhaps it's the result of living in the overwhelmingly man-made
environment of the Big Apple, but when they talk about 'the
environment' it's almost as if they're describing what's happening on
Mars, or at least some rarely seen and exotic tourist attraction.
Two recent examples:
Last week David Brooks wrote an article called, Our Sprawling, Supersize Utopia.
In describing urban sprawl, one of the scourges of our time, an
epidemic that threatens to devour every inch of American agricultural
and wilderness land in this century, Brooks writes almost fondly, nostalgically:
The
reality is that modern suburbia is merely the latest iteration of the
American dream. Far from being dull, artificial and spiritually
vacuous, today's suburbs are the products of the same religious
longings and the same deep tensions that produced the American identity
from the start. The complex faith of Jonathan Edwards, the propelling
ambition of Benjamin Franklin, the dark, meritocratic fatalism of
Lincoln -- all these inheritances have shaped the outer suburbs.
One can almost imagine Brooks describing an atomic test in Nevada as an
"iridescent sheen resplendent of all the hopes and dreams of our
technology-driven future". For urban sprawl, with its waste, its
extravagant use of precious space, its depressing sameness and its
disrespect -- even total disregard -- for the unique natural qualities
of each community, razed and ploughed under to make every new sprawling
blight on the landscape an indifferent imitation of every other, is
nothing short of the A-bomb of the 21st century, inexorably destroying
everything in its wake. It is an issue that is tearing the Sierra Club and other environmental groups apart.
Then this week, Jennifer 8. Lee (anyone know why the NYT uses a period
after her middle 'name' -- what is '8' short for, anyway?), in an
article called Clear Skies No More for Millions as Pollution Rule Expands,
announces that, under 'new' 1997 guidelines, many counties will be
listed as violating clean air standards that did not make the list
under the old guidelines:
The
revised federal standards have wide economic and environmental
implications and the makeup of the list has been the subject of
lobbying in Washington. Areas in violation face the loss of federal
money for roads. Industrial development can be barred in those areas
unless companies prove that they would not make pollution worse.
"A lot of counties feel if they are in, it will have negative impact on
their economic development plans," said Senator George V. Voinovich,
Republican of Ohio. Like many members of Congress, he said he has been
deluged by letters and calls from local officials worried that the
revised standards "will cause the loss of jobs, restrict economic
growth, discourage plant location and encourage manufacturers to move
overseas."
Lee reports that the new guidelines survived challenges all the way up
to the arch-conservative Supreme Court. But there is no sense of crisis
in the story. It's almost as if the violations, which result in
millions of premature deaths, massive costs from disease, and
irreparable damage to the entire ecosystem, were some arbitrary and
minor zoning violation, waiting for saner heads to prevail and
overturn, in order to protect Brooks' 'latest iteration of the American
dream'. These regulations aren't designed to placate environmentalists,
they're designed to safeguard human health from egregious and pervasive
threats. So where is the sense of urgency, or outrage, that millions
will suffer profoundly and unnecessarily and die prematurely because of
the self-interested negligence of reckless commercial enterprises?
What will it take before Americans realize that rapacious, greedy,
destructive corporations do thousands of times more damage to the
health, safety, lives and property of the American people than the
worst terrorists could begin to imagine in their wildest dreams? What
will it take before we realize that restricting immigration to prevent
further urban sprawl and population explosion isn't a matter of racist
disregard for human suffering and inequality of opportunity, but a
first step to recognize that the growth we worship threatens the very
survival of our species and our world? What will it take before we
recognize the 'proximate connection' between pollution and human
disease and death, and prosecute and imprison the officers and
directors of polluters as we do murderers?
Maybe the venerable reporters of the Times should 'get out' more.
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