Living in Northwest Florida, where we have an astonishingly beautiful natural environment, I have frequently observed that those individuals with the least care for maintaining its purity are often the ones whose families have lived here, largely living off the land, for generations. The worst environmental offenders here, on the personal, non-corporate level, are the ones with the most knowledge and best skill sets for living and subsiding within the natural environment here. They are the ones who illegally dump their garbage on the river banks and throw their beer cans and bottles, as well as their spent oil and old gas, into the water from their boats. This has long troubled me. Why would the people who stand to derive the most from the natural resources here be the least careful in maintaining it?
One of the theories I have come up with is that these people are far ahead of the rest us in accepting the pessimistic outlook. They sense that what little harm they cause won’t really matter. When their grandfathers tell them stories about oil tankers anchoring in the Gulf and dumping the crude out of their tanks directly into the fishing waters, when their fathers tell them about the fat-cat businessman who illegally dumped outrageous amounts of lead into the river from his battery plant just north of their home and then paid off the politicians and law enforcement and declared bankruptcy when the Superfund stepped in to try and clean it up, when they watch oil platforms blazing and miles of oil spilling out in the Gulf of Mexico on the news (and from their boats), perhaps, unconsciously if not consciously, they just say “what the hell does it matter now anyway?”. They can live much better getting a job with the oil companies off-shore then by farming and fishing now. If you can’t beat them, empower them.
If we are to fight to save the world, we have to understand our enemies. It’s not just a matter of understanding corporate greed, but understanding also the individual workers and voters who empower them.
In this vein, I just read an enlightening article in The Nation about a book written 50 years ago by Hunter S. Thompson on the rise of the Hell’s Angels. The article suggests that this book will help us understand “Trumpism” as the book essentially predicted the phenomena all those years ago. The article states that, ” Thompson concluded that the most striking thing about [the Hell’s Angels] was not their hedonism but their ‘ethic of total retaliation’ against a technologically advanced and economically changing America in which they felt they’d been counted out and left behind.”
Perhaps that is how these mostly unskilled, uneducated locals now feel about the springs, rivers, forests, and the gulf in Northwest Florida. Their ancient skills of living off the land, passed down to them so carefully from the generations preceding them, will no longer give them the life they have come to want (or buy them the crack they have come to need to stay numb). A job with the oil company or the battery factory will give them that life. The springs, rivers, forests, and gulf are all pretty much doomed anyway. Why not help finish the job. Or more likely, this all happened with their parents’ generation and the drugs their fathers and mothers consumed to stay numb prevented them from passing down the full knowledge and spiritual lessons necessary for living within the natural world to the current generation.
We can never succeed in turning things around until we better understand the causes. Perhaps it will be helpful in that regard to read Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga
