Guest column

Movement toward a sustainable future

Arkansans have a difficult choice to make, and at this season the good news of Easter can help us face it.

We can play our proper civic roles and help our society and the world move toward a sustainable future. Or we can continue to blindly follow the will of a few power brokers who are buying up the Arkansas legislature and our seats in Congress and thereby participate in the destruction of our democracy and the climate that sustains us all.

The mythical Pegasus was a white horse symbolizing wisdom, inspiration, poetry and sometimes pure spring waters. The ExxonMobil pipeline, which stretches diagonally across Arkansas, ignobly bears Pegasus’ name. Our Pegasus dramatically symbolizes not wisdom and purity but moral corruption.

Billionaire power brokers David and Charles Koch of Kansas are buying Arkansas politicians as fast as they can fund their ad campaigns. It just happens that they own leases on 1.4 million acres of tar-sands lands in Canada. These two fellows alone have the same amount of money as the poorest 40 percent (120 million) of all Americans.

One of my grandmother’s college friends, Adolphine Terry, whose husband, David D. Terry, was central Arkansas’ congressman in the 1930s, told me stories of how back in that decade lawyers from Reynolds and Alcoa in Pittsburgh came to our state representatives to lobby against an Arkansas severance tax on bauxite. It was in Reynolds’ and Alcoa’s interest to have the smallest possible tax on bauxite, the one strategic mineral of the day that lay almost entirely under Arkansas soil.

For the price of a few bottles of whiskey, good food and some fancy parties, those lawyers convinced our power brokers not to put a real severance tax on the bauxite mined from Arkansas, one of the poorest states in the country then and now. Mrs. Terry told me that starting then, in the Depression, we could have had the best school system in the country if we had gotten that severance tax. The owners of the aluminum companies would still have made a vast fortune from Arkansas, but they were greedy and we were stupid.

The Mayflower oil spill can be a wake-up call for Arkansas not to be stupid with our resources again. This time, it is our drinking water that is being put at risk by corporate greed, and our politicians are either asleep at the switch or, just as sadly, on the take.

So, here we are, a year after the Good Friday oil blowout into Mayflower residents’ yards and Lake Conway, and not one major Arkansas politician has said it is past time to permanently close the pipeline that was improperly constructed in the 1940s.

Since its “improperly made” excuse could jeopardize the reopening of the pipeline, the corporate story has changed. Now it says that the specific piece of pipe that split in Mayflower was made wrong. Who really believes this? No politician mentions that the Pegasus pipeline was built to ship crude oil north from Texas, not to send dilbit from the Canadian tar sands south. Dilbit is a far more corrosive chemical than that pipeline was designed to handle.

Our elected politicians have been fearful of standing up to the oil giants and demanding that Arkansas’ air and drinking water supplies assume more importance than the vast corporate profits that will be made by restarting that dog of a pipeline and sending Canadian tar-sands poison to China via Houston refineries.

Today is Easter and we are witness to the annual miracle of spring. It is a time to celebrate our world and to appreciate our responsibility for it. God gave us intelligence and the choice to do right or wrong by other humans and by the creatures with whom we share our world.

Unfortunately, like the HMS Titanic, the technological marvel of its age in 1912, our global society has already crashed into the iceberg of climate change that can just as easily sink our global economy, as did that actual iceberg sink that “unsinkable” ship.

If we keep on our course, what lies

ahead is social unrest on a scale we

have never seen, wars over vanishing resources, famine, superstorms, droughts, the extinction of a great many plant and animal species and vast loss of human life and well-being.

The vast majority of scientists are in agreement that climate disruption is not on its way but is already here. Our Titanic iceberg is behind us. We have already hit it. Dangerous levels of carbon are in the atmosphere and we are witnessing unprecedented melting of glaciers, the polar ice caps, and the massive ice sheet covering Greenland. Heat waves, cold waves, droughts, deluges, and tornadoes a mile wide are becoming more frequent.

Late at night some 40 years ago, one of my childhood friends, a man with good health, money, looks and intelligence, drove into his garage drunk and, as the automatic garage door closed behind him, passed out in the driver’s seat before turning off his ignition. He was found asphyxiated the next morning by carbon monoxide, a huge tragedy for his family.

It came to me recently that our civilization, drunk on power and unwilling to change our dependence on carbon-based fuels to energize our economy, is doing the same thing to our collective selves that my friend did to himself those many years ago. We are running industrial society’s motors at full blast and filling our atmosphere with more carbon than in all of recorded history and are pushing the earth rapidly toward where it will be unable to support humanity as we know it.

It’s the vast amount of carbon that is causing weather changes and sea-level rises, which will take down civilization within the next 100 years.

What is the promise of Easter this year? Where is the Prince of Peace, if not in our hearts, saying wake up, children? Take your power back. Take democracy back from the greedy.

Pratt Cates Remmel Jr. of Little Rock, a lifelong environmental and peace advocate and founder of Dunbar-Gibbs School Gardens, is currently an adult literacy tutor.

Perspective, Pages 79 on 04/20/2014

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