COLUMN: Bush policies helping to ruin environment
When Dutch admiral Jakob Roggeveen visited Easter Island, in the South Pacific in 1722, he was floored by the contradiction. While monumental stone sculptures dotted the island, the island itself was a barren moonscape, populated by unpalatable grasses, lower insects and a sparse population of unorganized, warring islanders. Knowing little about ecological collapse in proto-industrial Europe, Roggeveen wrote, “The stone images … struck us with astonishment … because we could not comprehend how … these people, who are devoid of heavy thick timber for making any machines, as well as strong ropes, nevertheless had been able to erect such images.”
The collapse of Easter Island has become a classic treatise for students of ecological calamity, yet its lessons remain tragically opaque for George W. Bush, whose underlings are working tirelessly in Johannesburg, South Africa to sabotage the United Nations’ Earth Summit.
The Earth Summit, 10 years after its predecessor in Rio de Janeiro (and often called Rio+10), follows a decade of environmental non-progress. The United States has resisted every environmental initiative that emerged from Rio and played cheerleader to economic globalization by multinational corporations. The issues today’s college students learned about as children, such as global warming, rainforest destruction and species extinction, have reached a pitch surprising even the most aggressively prognosticating scientists of the 1980s.
The United States has fought the Kyoto Treaty on global warming to a near draw. U.S. corporations, facilitated by a trade-based foreign policy, have raised the destruction of rainforests and other ecosystems to an art form. Indigenous people have fought corporations in futile struggles to retain their land and lost. Many paid with their lives.
One culture, the U’we rainforest tribe of Colombia, has successfully repelled Occidental Petroleum, a California company, only to find themselves under fire from Repsol-YPF, a Spanish oil multinational.
Their kin in Peru, the Nahua tribe, are fighting a losing battle against the Camisea gas pipeline, after losing half their population to diseases introduced by foreign gas workers. Camisea is financially backed by Citibank, whose credit card may occupy your wallet.
Tuvalu, a Pacific island nation, is asking other nations to make room for about 10,000 people, as it sinks into the rising ocean, while George “global warming isn’t real” Bush fights the Kyoto Treaty. (My fellow columnist also denies the human cause of global warming, though I doubt USU Facilities has enough forklifts to deliver him the published scientific studies on this).
They are also preparing a last-ditch lawsuit against the United States, responsible for 25 percent of global carbon emissions, but the Bush administration is unlikely to respect the International Court of Justice. The momentum of these and other trends, and our failure to combat them, have led many scientists to conclude that some degree of ecological devastation is now inevitable.
Easter Island once hosted a similarly enterprising and headstrong race of people, who mercilessly converted their ecosystem into material profit. Trees were cut for firewood, housing and rope to transport the large stone blocks. Economies were constructed around the booming business of mining, logging and transport. Their loggers, no doubt, resisted calls for government control, and those who sounded the alarm were certainly called “tree huggers,” or an equivalent invective. Yet their fragile environment could not withstand this impact, and the island’s population was reduced to cannibalism as crops failed and soil washed into the ocean.
While their motivation was more spiritual, and George Bush’s materialistic, they share a religious fervor that denies our planet’s limitations. The Polynesians of Easter Island could no more escape into the ocean than we can escape into space from Earth, far more isolated (both geographically and functionally) in space than Easter Island was in the South Pacific.
If George Bush succeeds in sabotaging the Earth Summit, our civilization’s great monuments and infrastructure are more likely to become curiosities for some race of beings, billions of years hence. They will rummage through our great monuments of steel, plastic and wood, and discern the fossilized clues of deforestation, climate change and soil erosion. And they will read, in a strange alien language, of one “Bush,” and wonder how he could have possibly missed the warning signs. But surely we know better than the Polynesians did.
Or do we?
Jim Stetz is a senior majoring in environmental studies. Comments can be sent to him at sl8mh@cc.usu.edu