Once you are outside, doesn’t this make you an environmentalist? True, you can have a home or office environment indoors, but the environment that’s creating all the hard feelings and political debate is the one out of doors. And that debate is beginning to drive me crazy.
When I was a kid, my fourth-grade teacher described the environment as made up of air and water and trees. If you wanted to see the environment, all you had to do was look out the window. To be in the environment, you just walked through a door to the outside and, bingo, like Dorothy clicking her heels to return to Kansas, you could be right in middle of nature’s big, beautiful environment before the door slammed shut behind you.
For the longest time I thought that except for people cooped up in their homes for health reasons, or locked down in death row, or workaholics who never left their offices, everyone was automatically an environmentalist. New Yorkers who never drove out to the country were environmentalists once they stepped outside, even if it was in downtown Manhattan.
The so-called Great Outdoors is part of the same environment as the out-of-doors – only wilder. Even if you never go into the Great Outdoors, or out-of-doors, you still have to have food to eat (generally grown outdoors), water to drink (generally piped in from the outdoors) and air to breathe (generally whooshed in with fans from the outdoors). Except in the case of space-shuttle travelers, it is very hard to escape the environment, and even then you take some of it with you.
So I’ve been asking myself recently, Who is not part of the environment, and therefore not an environmentalist? My answer: no one. Period.
This definition would include Newt Gingrich. And former secretary of the interior James Watt. It would include the president of Exxon, logging barons, mining executives and every member of the Izaak Walton League. To be an environmentalist you wouldn’t have to hug trees, volunteer to clean rivers for Trout Unlimited, join the Sierra Club, count migrating finches for the Audubon Society or do anything at all except eat, breathe, drink and go outside once in a while. Even the people trapped like rats in their concrete boxes inside the Beltway would, once they stepped outside, become environmentalists.
This characterization would clear up a lot of confusion, especially since it would give people with such dramatically differing views like Washington Sen. Slade Gorton, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and Idaho Rep. Helen Chenoweth equal standing – at least when they step outside. With my definition of an environmentalist, politics don’t matter. Don’t want to be an environmentalist? Stay inside. Want to protest against the environment? Stop breathing.
Somehow I don’t think my idea will sell. I don’t think everyone wants to be an environmentalist. Being part of the environment is hard work, at least for humans. Berry bushes and finches can get along without much thinking and planning, but we upright hominids, thanks to our taking over the planet, now have a duty to look out for every life form, including our own. It’s a duty many of us would just as soon ignore. It is, by the way, easier to ignore this duty by staying indoors. That way you don’t have to pay attention to what’s going on outdoors.
But if you do go outdoors, then you must deal with what you and your fellow man, intentionally or unintentionally, are doing to the air, water, food supplies and, generally, the environment we all share. You have to deal with whether or not to pave over, dam up, cut down, blow up or otherwise modify what little is left of the natural world that we’ve all agreed to call the environment.
It might save us all a lot of trouble if Steven Spielberg and Bill Gates got together and bailed us out of this predicament. Surely these two guys can create a whole new environment for us in cyberspace. With their help, creativity and leadership, we can regrow old-growth forests in a nanosecond, hatch enough spotted owls to open a general hunting season on them, purify mountain streams, scrub the air to its original, crystalline condition and fill the skies again with great flocks of passenger pigeons. With a game called ““Salmon’’ and a joystick, we could jump chrome-bright king salmon over the hydroelectric dams that currently block the few remaining endangered runs of real salmon from their soon-to-be legendary annual migrations up the Columbia River system. We could catch them, too, by the bucketful – even by the truckload.
This is the kind of Great Outdoors Americans need. A land of unlimited plenty. A land without controversy. A land with no hard work to protect what’s left, and no harm done by drilling, filling, logging, paving, mining, damming, avarice or unmitigated greed. The great thing about a healthy and robust cyberspace environment is that it requires no deliberate planning, no conservation ethic, no compromises, no teamwork and no personal sacrifice to protect it. Just a double click of the mouse and everything is bright and beautiful. Endangered Species Act? We don’t need the nuisance of an Endangered Species Act.
I can’t wait for the cyberspace version of outdoors to get here. The sooner the digital environment comes online the better. Mind you, I’m not going there myself. I still like the old-fashioned out-of-doors, the kind where you can smell pine needles and campfire smoke. But I’m delighted for those who’ve given up on this environment and can’t wait to get on to the next one. In fact, I’ll pack them a lunch.
