A Nagging Sense

by Cody Kilgore

I have spent a great deal of my life arguing and living both sides of the issues involved in ecological responsibility, and today I consider myself a Moderate Tree Hugger. That may warrant some definition.

A Moderate Tree Hugger is someone that admires the lifestyle, words, and deeds of those that are on the cutting edge of “green” living, but is unable to bring themselves to rise to that level of commitment. In other words, I would very much like to have little or zero impact on the ecosystem, but find that I lack the willpower and ability to sacrifice what it takes to do so. I’m too addicted, I guess, to many of the conveniences of modern life that make zero impact a near impossibility. Besides, I have a teenage daughter, which means my home houses one of the world’s most notorious consuming machines, where food, energy, resources, my income, and my patience is concerned.

So I resolve myself to do as much as I am able. It ends up being a blend that helps my conscience, and maybe in some degree, the environment. It is something likely not too different from what many of us do. I recycle what I can at home and work. I turn out lights whenever I leave a room. I turn off the water between shaving strokes and tooth brush rinses. I don’t let my PC run 24/7. I’ve traded the monster Expedition for a Grand Prix (Okay, so that was begrudgingly done more because of the divorce, but I can still claim it is a greener ride, can’t I?).

My point: I do what I can, given where I am in my life right now. I also tend to stay out of the arguments about whether or not global warming is either real or imagined or man-made or not. To me, that argument is too specific, and I would much rather see us debate whether or not humankind is negatively impacting the ecosystem, or positively.

I am not sure there is much argument on that idea; our very existence on the planet is going to impact and drain resources, even if we were all living at the basic level of hunter-gatherers of centuries ago. Our population volume today is itself a drain. I would not propose we do anything to reverse that, because I think the planet will one day do that for us, as one of the many miraculous cycles that it carries off, no matter our will or invention. But our subsistence comes at the cost of something, much in the same way other certainties of physics operate, like heat lost must be heat gained, water runs downhill, and teenagers must text. The trick, for the sake of our longevity, is in minimizing that cost.

So I do what I can. But, it has been a long and storied path that has brought me to this—at best—mediocre approach, because I worked for decades in industries that committed the worst of environmental crimes.

My first real job during summers at college, and for over a decade after leaving college, was with a railroad contractor that was hired to apply herbicides along the tracks to control vegetation. It was a company hired to do the right thing via the wrong methods. It is vitally important that there are no weeds in railroad beds; vegetation in the road bed holds moisture, which then can cause the rails and ties themselves to “float” along the top of a fairly hard subsurface. It is not a good thing to drive a vehicle of massive tonnage over floating tracks. They tend to go askew and veer off into any direction, and the end result can be wrecks, damage, and lost lives. Additionally, vegetation at points where cars and trains intersect needs to be kept low for the sake of visibility.

In those days of my career, we dealt with environmentalists, I think, just as much as many industries do today, thanks to Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring. And, like many view environmentalists today, we saw them as radical whackos. We dismissed them. We convinced ourselves that we knew what we were doing, that we were doing it responsibly, and that we were a necessary evil. So long as we were professional and responsible about how we applied all those tons of herbicide, we thought we were doing mankind a service and not really causing the problem. We, in fact, pointed fingers at farmers, who at the time were applying way more than we ever dreamed of using.

Truth be told, within the industry, we were fairly cavalier about the whole thing. Sometimes we did stupid things for the sake of logistics and profit, all the while knowing it was not the right thing to do. I remember the practice of draining the residue from our tanks—which we always said was legal and not damaging—so long as it was within the boundaries of our customer’s right-of-way. I remember pumping herbicides high into the air on windy days when we were applying brush killer to trees, and telling ourselves that it was okay so long as the wind was in the right direction and we had enough drift-prevention additives in the tank to make the droplets too large to travel off target. I once watched one of the principals of my company take a drink of mixed herbicides in front of a reporter, just to prove the point he was trying to make that the massive spill we had just released was harmless to nearby residents. I myself took a dive in a tank car mixture heavy laden with atrazine and 2,4-d to recover an expensive tool that I needed and feared would lodge in and clog the valve system.

And then, one day, deep in my career with that company, I was called in to give a deposition about a family that lived near the tracks of a job I had worked on. I don’t want to go into the details of a case that has been resolved decades ago, but I remember it as a moment where my conscience first started speaking louder than my wallet. I left that industry not long after that, because of that conscience, some changes in the leadership of the company, and to get off the endless months of travel.

My next step was not much better, however. I became a manager in the lawn care industry. Again, I used, we all used, the same rationale for what we did. We were the pros and we were not the culprits, and we were necessary. But, by now I knew I was kidding myself. It grew harder and harder to believe my own rationalizations.

It was during this time that I started a family. Somewhere along the line my oldest daughter came home from school one day and started asking me questions about what my company did, and what it was doing to the environment. Where I could kid myself about what it was I did, and I could spout off all the propaganda to any customer, reporter, or “whacko” that I had to confront while in my business persona, I could not bring myself to answer her sweet innocence in the same way. That was the day I decided I wanted out.

Today, I feel like I am in a career that makes far less impact (retail), even though it may not be perfect. But, ours is not a perfect world. It is never going to be. It never was before us. We are ludicrous to think we can ever get there from here. It is not ludicrous, however, to think we can minimize our cost and extend our time on this planet, for the sake of those that will live on it after us. We just have to try to think outside the scope of whether or not it affects our own little piece of the world.

Most importantly, we have to be responsible on some very basic levels. By that I mean we cannot be criminal in our neglect, and cannot be reckless in our exploitation.

BP (you had to know this was coming) is a company that is both criminal and reckless, and represents the worst attitude and behavior toward our planet and all of the planet’s dependant populations. They profess they are acting in the best interest of everyone, when in fact they are only acting in the interest of their profits. They are willing to put the environment and their employees in harm’s way, and they are quick to spin their defense whenever challenged on what they do, or what damage they have done. They dismiss anyone critical of them and anyone that might get in the way of their profiteering recklessness. And they are only one example of the very worst of companies that brazenly exploit resources and tear up our ecosystem in the process.

I know these guys and how they think, because I used to be one of them. Nowadays, I feel fortunate to have learned not to be, even if I am not the best steward of the planet that I could be. But, I am an individual capable of change, where BP is instead an investment driven monster, motivated only by the profits it can generate for those investors and its executives. Change won’t happen for them unless forced.

I’m laughing a bit at the predicament that BP finds itself in because of the catastrophe in the gulf. The damage they have done is nothing to laugh at, mind you, but BP’s attitude and behavior that has been put in the spotlight as a result is comical to watch exposed. They have no defense for what they have caused, and nearly every turn they take at trying to rationalize their actions is more absurd than the last. My hope is that they are turned into an example of what will happen to a corporation that is willing to flirt with disaster, and that a larger part of the public is made aware of how widespread this type of corporate behavior is, all across the globe.

If not, then we return to being quietly complicit, and we lose an opportunity to affect some real change that could benefit us and generations after us. We can learn from this, or we can continue to spin our way around the solar system, whistling all the way.

Which (finally) brings me to my feelings about global warming, that I guess can be summed up this way: if enough evidence points toward the possibility, even without a certainty, then why wouldn’t we want to do what is possible to avoid causing more harm, maybe even dial it back a little? Wouldn’t it be more prudent to be cautious, rather than argue its reality? I would prefer we err on the side of caution, rather than find out, at a stage too late, we can’t reverse the damage. I worry about what our disagreements on the issue display, which I see as reluctance to admit we might be doing something wrong.

I’ve had that feeling before in my life. Just saying…