"People assumed we were playing the role of a junior, weird Audobon Society," said an Ecology Action organizer, "almost as though they felt safest with us in that role."
The people at Ecology Action, though they believed conservation and anti-pollution campaigns were important, sought a more radical, personal approach. To them, ecology especially implied human relationships, in which man can live together harmoniously with his species. They changed the focus of the organization, leaving it less structured and planned, providing for the greatest amount of human interaction.
In cities today, they realized, men no longer act with even the slightest civility to one another. As men continue to despoil the natural environment, they replace it with a completely despoiled, brusque, quasi-human environment. This is the most criminal aspect of the destruction of the ecology of the planet.
And with more people, more brusqueness. Everyone spends as much money as possible accumulating the waste, amassing symbols of status and trading them in order to keep their magic potent. Civilized society is judged by its material products, yet civilized society is rapidly approaching a state where its members will envy the serenity of the Hobbesian state of nature.
As long as land is judged by the profit it can provide a developer, ugly high-rises will continue to puncture the horizon, woods will be considered valuable logging areas, the hillsides will turn into strip mines. Yet the economic fabric in America is constructed so as to encourage shoddy ravaging of the human and natural resources for the profit which they might yield. Man and nature both have a higher potential than to be oppressed for quick dollars. The ecology campaign must strike right at the heart of the industrialized insensitive society, where it destroys natural beauty for a capitalist or a socialist fatherland.
Yet, thus far the ecology campaign has missed many of these needs. Though committed to deeply basic human values, these white middle-class reformers often manifest a profound insensitivity to the more pressing problems of continued human degradation in ghettos, defoliated forests, massacred villages, and impoverished mountain communities. Often, they simply fall into the snares of the technocratic society itself, attempting technological solutions of an over-technologized problem.
Burning Bikes and Banks
In San Jose, California, recently, ecology activists purchased a new automobile and immediately buried it to protest against automobile pollution.
Local blacks loudly protested, demanding that the students auction the car to reimburse the black community with the money they had wasted on the car. The students finally raised the money to pay the blacks.
Yet after the San Jose ecology protest, all that the well-intentioned but misguided reformers could claim was that they had protested automobiles by providing one more sale to the Detroit carmakers.
"The students who burned the Bank of America in Santa Barbara," remarks a Ramparts editorialist, "mayhave done more towards saving the environment than all the Teach-ins put together." The Bank of America had opposed the Delano grape strikers. Its branches in Saigon and Bangkok had aided the American military occupation of Southeast Asia. Two of its directors sit on the board of Union Oil, which had killed much of the wildlife and destroyed the once-beautiful beaches of Santa Barbara with its oil spills. Students in Santa Barbara were angry as its bosses mouthed corporate concern for the beaches and the oil companies returned to their drilling.
CORPORATE greed has almost completely destroyed our environment. Men in power aim for continued growth, ripping away at nature's vital parts to obtain the greates possible profit in the shortest possible time. Government agencies are equally reluctant to enforce environmental protection policies.
Public outcry may move the politicians somewhat, especially if they see in ecology a possible way to shove Vietnam, poverty, and racism conveniently into the background. To the Nixon Administration, however, the business of America remains basically business, as American corporations piously multiply and subdue the earth.
All of these issues are part of the same battle. The government must not be allowed to continue its war in Vietnam and in the ghettos while activists marvel at the bravery of minks and muskrats.
Our ravaged society will be saved only by concerted radical action directed at all portions of our exploited environment-the cities, the poverty, the wars, the hatred-that condemns us to lives of desperation. If the ecology movement can survive the strong pressures to emasculate its thrust, it can strike at the fragile materialist cooptation underpinning our wasteful industrial society. Otherwise, ecology as an issue will become a tool of the enemy.