521 prompt #10

“The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster,” so says Carson (277). Would she have revised her sentiment, surviving into the 21st century? Why, or why not? Pose a potential revision to this comment, based on your perception of our own attitudes toward the environment—such a hypothetical exercise need not harbor a cheerful outlook necessarily.

Progress is by no means easy, and I think in this lies the greatest threat to environmentalism: I believe Carson’s statement is actually less dire than the situation warrants. We are taught that we have attained our current understanding of the world, or current standard of living, our current lifestyle by forging ahead heroically against the current of chaos, entropy, barbarism. In our cultural imagination, we have reached high civilization (the type of civilization that can consume natural resources at a rate that threatens its own existence) through struggle, through war, through sacrifice. We have attained ease through a history of difficulty.

I wonder if convincing people to backpedal on this progress has thus been rendered impossible. It is analogous to asking a victorious army to give quarter to its enemy without any gain to itself.

Even if the end of our road is disaster (for us, if not the planet itself), it is difficult to convince people of the necessity of change when they aren’t directly threatened. Telling people that they are risking their great-great-grandchildren’s health means little to nothing to most, if they can live comfortably now. Since Carson’s time, we have become, as a culture, much more aware of our effect on the environment – at the same time, our effect on the environment has become more and more dramatic and destructive. People put recycling bins out on the curb, but they also create more trash than they did in the 1960s.

What we would need to not reach Carson’s prophesied doomsday is not a slowing-down of our idea of Progress, but instead a reversal of it. I don’t mean something as dramatic as going back to living in caves and hunting with sticks, but something that would require a massive cultural acknowledgment of our need to reestablish our place as a functional, and not simply destructive part of the natural ecosystem. We seem so far removed from such a position in America in the 21st century, that, unlike Edward Abbey, I cannot even begin to make suggestions as to how we would remedy this situation. It seems that our obsession with Progress can, at this point, only be given up by pitting our need to control against the ecosystem that first spawned us and as a result being made to realize how small we really are in the larger scheme of things.

This is all wonderfully bleak and world-ending-y, but perhaps Carson’s statement could be best reworded as: “The road we have long traveled has blinded us to the reality that we are not in fact our own masters, and our obstinacy on this point can only end in disaster”.