What hath man wrought?
By John Darling
Water is not falling into our world much this winter and spring (2001). There will be fires and smoky skies, maybe all summer. Drought is leaving the Applegate River at one-fifth normal and looking like its old self, flowing in its ancient banks across the muddy bottom of dam-created Applegate Lake.
Water isn’t flowing enough in the Klamath watershed to allow both farmers and salmon to survive, so the feds chose farmers. Then a judge said, ‘scuse me, but farmers won’t die if they go broke farming, but fish without water will die, maybe forever. The enraged farmers are demonstrating with signs.
It’s getting warmer all over the world and it’s because of us. We’ve established that as fact now, but we’ve never warmed the globe before and we don’t know what it means. It’s human nature to plunge onward and find out, so we are. We understand we’re rolling the dice on our survival by continuing to drive everywhere — to pick up the kids, to go get a newspaper and coffee and, most ironically, to go exercise at the gym. I want my SUV, we whine. That vehicle is a hybrid Caddy-Jeep, a statement, a shout, that, hey, I’m riding in a very large pile of metal, 2 feet higher than you, I’m sorta outdoorsy and — oh, I can afford 10-12 miles a gallon.
In recent months, Oregon, this cradle of Wobblies, pot-farmers and petition-pushing gay bashers again established itself at the fringe when radicals burned a car lot full of SUVs in Eugene, leaving a note explaining that Earth didn’t appreciate these resource-guzzling chariots. They, of course, know what Earth thinks, just as fundamentalists on the other end of the spectrum have always known what God thinks.
Behaving as if he were elected by a majority of Americans, George W. each week rolls back something environmental, deleting Clinton wilderness areas, blowing off arsenic restrictions in drinking water, halving the solar energy development budget, getting rid of stricter energy standards for home appliances and going after gas under the Arctic Wildlife Refuge. He brings to mind that earlier Texan in the White House who also looked at decision-making as an instinctive, macho activity — hey, stand back fellas, we ain’t gonna let no dang environment push us around, we got energy to mine and profits to make, so let ‘er buck.
The other night, Discovery Channel runs an innocuous-sounding show on what causes Ice Ages. We humans have lived through dozens of ice ages and, as every school child knows, we’ve been in an “interglacial period” for 10,000 years. What’s stunning to realize is that all civilization, every house, wall, bridge, town, city, library, temple, stonehenge, all of it, has been constructed during the present interglacial and, looking at it with cold logic, it will all be ground to dust, down to about the middle of the U.S. and Europe under the next mile-deep glacier.
Not troubled yet? Discovery goes on to point out that the North Atlantic current brings warm water from the tropics to polar regions, keeping ice at bay and that reversal of this current triggers ice ages. Global warming could well reverse that current and do the ice thing again. Discovery then points out that glaciers don’t happen with glacier-like slowness; they get into full bloom within a single human lifetime. But, instead of worrying about every little red flag being waved by tree-hugging nervous nellies, let’s just announce we won’t sign the Kyoto Treaty rolling back greenhouse gas emissions because, hey, them dang underdeveloped countries get to spew all the gases they want and they ain’t signing diddly.
But enough of this globalness. Let us shift to thinking locally. Back in the 1930s, an Ashland pioneer named Perozzi gave 40 acres of wooded foothills to the old Normal School. They never did much with it. But when zooming real estate values made it worth almost a mil, they finally could think of something to do with it. The city tried to buy it for hikers and wildlife and to protect the watershed, from which we get all our water, but they could only come up with maybe a third of its market value. Meanwhile, a developer waved an $890,000 check under the school’s nose and by gosh, they took it.
How did the student body react to this? Activists have become feisty in recent years, protesting possible use of underpaid labor in making school sweatshirts 10,000 miles away in Asia, but they uttered not a peep about this event in the hills right there behind the school. We’ll never know, but it’s very likely that Mr. Perozzi, the man who gave Perozzi fountain to this city, willed his land to the school because he appreciated the nature up there and saw this school full of cultured people as the ones least likely to commercialize it. But times are tough and a mil is a mighty juicy chunk of change, so let ‘er sprawl.
But enough of the political. Let us shift to the personal, where my son Colin stands in the kitchen practicing his oral report on John Muir, noting that Muir once carried bushels of wildflowers from the Sierras down to San Francisco. The people dwelling in the “crowded noise and filth” of The City had never seen them and begged to touch and smell them. We clapped. I love stories like that. He said, dad, you remind me of John Muir. You even have the same name. I put his compliment in some shrine in the back of my mind and will reflect on it sometime in the last hours of my life. Yes, I’m a bit like Muir. I often write to bring “the tidings of the mountains” and also my words, my wildflowers to the city — but mine, in 2001, do not smell as sweet.
John Darling lived in Ashland from 1971 until he died at age 77 in January 2021. A US Marine Corps journalist, he went on to write for the Oregonian, Mail Tribune, Daily Tidings, and United Press International, among others, along with stints as a news anchor at KOBI, executive assistant to the Oregon Senate President and press secretary of campaigns for Oregon governor and U.S. Senate. Ashland.news is, with permission, publishing excerpts from his collection “The Divine Addiction: Essays Out of Oregon.”
