I finished Timothy Egan’s “The Worst Hard Time” last night. It’s a story of how we, 100 years ago, ignorantly made wholesale changes to our environment, and have yet to pay the full price. It seemed like a good idea at the time; just plow up the idle grasslands of our great plains and put them to productive use. Some warned against this but we ignored them, or denounced them as crackpots, obstructionists. We saw land to be had, money to be made, and we turned the sod. When the next dry cycle came, soil that had been anchored and fertile for tens of thousands of years was transformed into killing black dusters that raged over the land for years. Widespread erosion. Swarms of locusts. Thousands dying by slow suffocation. Instead of solving the problem we postponed it. We tapped the Ogallala Aquifer, a huge, ancient, reservoir underlying eight states, and now we’re draining it far faster than it fills so we can keep farming in an area where we never should have broken ground.
The Dust Bowl should have taught us the risks of simply altering or consuming a resource, but here we are changing our world and consuming its resources on an unprecedented scale. Some are warning of the danger, others are calling them crackpots and obstructionists. Most of us just continue to scuttle about, termite-like, pursuing our own interests, doing what we do. Termites don’t learn when they ruin a floor joist, they just keep doing what they do until the entire building is a pile of sawdust. They can scurry next door, but what about us? When we’re finished with demolition where do we go?
R. Cuplin
Brier
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