Commentary—

With The Environment, You Can’t Start Over

By William A. Collins

Mother Nature

Doesn’t pout;

She throws back,

What we throw out.

Vice President Dick Cheney feels that adjusting one’s life in order to save nature is a commendable personal virtue — it’s just not realistic. There is oil to be drilled, power to be generated, homes to be cooled, lawns to be perfected, pork to be paid out, and all the other daily activities that constitute civilized life.

Of course, he’s right. Take Europe. In a spasm of self-flagellation, most Europeans drive small cars, live in small houses, ride the trolley, recycle, reuse, live without lawns, and pass up many of the other good things in life. There must be some stark religious dogma controlling them.

Here in the free world we live without such dogma. For example, Norwalk has no law requiring resplendent lawns — it’s just that everyone happens to want one and is willing to work to create it. Our family knows this because we live by the neighborhood pond where all that fertilizer eventually drains. The surface is now so thick with algae that the ducks will soon be able to walk across on top. Learning from this lesson, our own lawn features a world-class crop of crab grass.

Then there is the saintly lady across town who is hung up on clotheslines, so to speak. She writes periodically, castigating neighborhood covenants that prohibit them. The dryer, after all, is a leading villain in global warming. Of course, she’s right. Luckily, such covenants are of dubious legality, and would surely shrivel in the face of my wife’s family. They’re Swiss and maintain an only lightly veiled contempt for dryer users as long as the temperature manages to hover somewhere above absolute zero.

Yes, these are those extremist families that Dick Cheney tolerates. They don the hair shirt of personal environmentalism in hopes of saving the planet. Unfortunately, even though their number is growing, there aren’t yet enough to do the trick. If we were all like Jimmy Carter though, voluntarily turning off lights and putting on sweaters, there probably would be. But since we’re not that individually motivated, we need laws.

Connecticut is actually pretty good about passing laws. We keep nibbling away at environmental issues posed by cars, waterways, power plants, recycling, sewage and other things. The trouble is that successfully saving the whole world takes federal action. Remember when the United States boldly banned lead, and CFCs, and DDT, and imposed rationing?

No, probably not. But those brave actions worked. Today again, Americans are not likely to give up SUVs, phthalates, or lawn chemicals on their own until they’re banned nationally. Nor are we likely to run our air conditioning at 80 until manufacturers have made that the lowest setting on the dial, or 70 the highest setting on the furnace.

Given the clout of corporate lobbyists in Washington, Congress probably won’t do anything that dramatic until the Gulf Stream shifts from Maine to Moscow, more US beaches wash away, or India says it won’t accept our tossed computers anymore.

Whichever generation is unlucky enough to first face these crises will have to muddle along in a whole new world. Either parkas in July or malaria tablets in January. The hot new investments may then become sump pumps, water desalination plants, or mercury landfills.

Sure, it would make more sense for us to legislate prevention, but America isn’t into prevention. Luckily for us geezers though, there is comfort in knowing that we’ll all be gone by the time those chickens come home to roost.

(Columnist William A. Collins is a former state representative and a former mayor of Norwalk.)