There’s a set of ideas and practices known as Leave No Trace that encourage individuals leave no waste behind when they visit nature (i.e., leave no trace). The idea is for individuals to be nature’s stewards, preserving the natural world for the benefit of all, including future generations. An underlying presumption of this call to individuals is that people find the natural world to be beautiful, and humans naturally seek to preserve beauty.
Which is an interesting idea on multiple levels. One level is the idea that individuals need to be super responsible stewards of the natural world because corporations, organizations, governments, and institutions sure aren’t. Instead, you take little itty bitty groups of outdoor enthusiasts and place a heavy responsibility on them to preserve the beauty of a planet that has been destroyed by much larger forces for decades.
There’s another interesting thought embedded in the Leave No Trace ideas. Which is that corporations aren’t that interested in preserving nature because they don’t find it that beautiful.
That may be true. Hordes of Instagram-posting, selfie-seeking tourists flocking to Yellowstone en masse maybe aren’t that beautiful.
Part of the appeal of Leave No Trace is that it seeks to preserve those treasured areas of wilderness where there are hardly any people.
But it may also be that corporations, organizations, governments, and institutions don’t see the beauty of nature in the outdoors so much as they perceive the beauty of money.
To many people, money seems to be intoxicating in its allure, a siren, a vixen, a bewitching vision of such power that it lures people into its clutches, casting spells from which the enchanted never wake.
A pit mine stops looking like a pit mine and starts looking like golden dancing rays of beautiful money, tantalizing and teasing with its promises of infinite pleasure and infinite ease.
Money is a liar. The promise of money is a lie.
California, the Golden State, became a golden state when, of all things, gold was discovered there. The Gold Rush ensued. Most of the people who came west to mine gold went broke and found no gold to speak of.
Some people became very very very rich and those were the people who played to and preyed on the illusions of those mesmerized by the haunting beauty of the fantasy of infinite wealth, infinite gold, infinite ease. The people who sold mining equipment or liquor or lodging or horses or whatever – those people got rich. A lot of the rest went broke.
Money goggles lie.
A pit mine is still a pit mine. An oil well is still an oil well. A smokestack is still a smokestack. Industrial detritus is still just toxic trash.
But if outdoor enthusiasts should take responsibility for the effect they have on nature, shouldn’t wealth enthusiasts do the same?
So what would happen if we applied the Leave No Trace principles to the big guys? The guys who don’t so much tiptoe quietly through nature as bulldoze loudly through it.
Well, in no particular order, here are some of the things ordinary people would demand of corporations, governments, and institutions:
Prevent soil erosion and protect water sources.
As noted by Iowa State University, soil deterioration and low water quality due to erosion and surface runoff have become severe problems worldwide. Soil erosion is a major cause of the loss of arable land. In other words, if soil becomes eroded enough, people can’t farm on it anymore, and it becomes lost forever, abandoned and not recoverable. Soil erosion also has a negative effect on water quality in an area.
Climate change contributes to soil erosion. Sudden increases in temperature or drastic changes in rainfall patterns increase wind-caused and water-caused soil erosion. Climate change has also increased the number and severity of wildfires. Wildfires contribute to soil erosion because when trees and plant cover are lost to fire, subsequent rains trammel the soil unimpeded, washing away topsoil.
But the real culprit in soil erosion is the economics of agriculture and factory farming. The desire to squeeze every last drop of short-term profit out of large-scale farms leads to over-fertilization and over-irrigation, both of which reduce soil quality over the long run. Conventional tillage and monocropping, also encouraged by the economics of large-scale farming for profit, also contribute to soil erosion. And, not to leave out the ranchers, overgrazing also leads to soil erosion.
Meanwhile, overuse of pesticides puts water sources at risk. Fertilizers and pesticides both routinely make their way from soil to water.
Ironically, because these practices are mostly engaged in to increase profit, soil erosion costs US farmers a lot of money each year in the form of lost soil productivity.
In many areas of the world, lands are deforested to make way for farming and when this is done, soil erosion problems begin even before the farming does.
The trees that protected the soil from erosion by casting shade that helped the soils retain moisture and are gone. The tree and other vegetation roots that helped fix the soil in place disappear. Trees, shrubs, and other naturally occurring vegetation slow down water erosion by preventing large gullies from forming. But they’re gone.
Deforested land often loses its productivity very quickly and is often abandoned equally quickly. What’s left behind is land that has a difficult time supporting any kind of life. Arid and barren expanses replace the cool green forests.
Being a steward of nature means taking off the money goggles and preserving the natural qualities of the soil that make it productive for living things and protecting the water that nourishes it. That includes not using commercial septic tanks that release chemicals such as trichloroethane.
Reduce waste
This suggestion for leaving no trace by the big guys was nominated by Captain Obvious. Leaving waste anywhere is clearly leaving a trace. But it’s more than just the visible waste that leaves a trace on the environment. Chemicals from waste also leach into water sources. Not all waste is solid waste, either. There are many large-scale sources of liquid waste, which can also leach into the ground and cause water source contamination.
Let’s take just one example:
Find a better solution for waste than injection wells.
There are close to 700,000 injection or underground waste disposal wells used by industry in the United States alone. Oil and gas drilling produce literally tons of waste that go underground, where they can leak into groundwater sources of drinking water. If only 1 out of 100 injection wells leak (and the figure is likely higher) that is 7,000 injection wells leaking across the country. That works out to an average of 140 leaking injection wells per state.
The reason injection wells are injecting industrial waste into the nation’s water is – did you already guess money goggles? Of course you did.
People who use injection wells think they are cheaper to use than things like recycling or treating wastewater or…doing anything else. They might be right.
It’s easy in one sense to sympathize with the idea of injection wells. It seems like it’s better to put your waste far underground where you can’t see it then to leave on the top of the earth where you can. It’s only better, though, if you are not accidentally or negligently just putting your waste into water sources.
The truth is – stuff sometimes spurts back up from injection wells. And the things that go into injection wells include acids, asbestos, poisons like cyanide, and chemicals whose names you can’t pronounce. And the US Environmental Protection Agency doesn’t seem to keep track of how often stuff spurts back up or wells leak. It also doesn’t seem to keep track of how often companies that use injection wells violate the regulations that are supposed to make injection wells safe in the first place.
States sometimes record violations of regulations like how much pressure a well operator can use to inject waste into an injection well. Well operators violate those regulations thousands of times. Not surprising, given just how many injection wells there are. And no one in the entire country knows exactly how many wells are leaking, how much they’re leaking, or what they’re leaking.
The bottom line is that the more waste you produce, the more places you’re gonna need to put it.
Trying to push ever greater amounts of waste into an earth that never consented to be a dumping ground for artificial chemicals – is a recipe for problems with said earth. Eventually, there are going to be places where you just can’t stuff anymore junk into the ground without dire consequences.
Part of the problem is that “Geology is never what you think it is.” At least that’s what a geologist with the United States Geological Survey says.
Geology is never what you think it is because science doesn’t know nearly as much as it thinks it knows. For reasons that have never been that clear to me, scientists often like to think that things are ‘impossible.’ That volcanic eruptions can’t produce pyroclastic flows or that no virus can get any bigger than just so large or …. oh wait, pyroclastic flows turn out to be common and yes, here’s a virus bigger than you thought was possible.
Scientists like to think that the waste in injection wells can’t escape its narrow confines – until it does.
Shakespeare said ”There are more things in heaven and earth Horatio than is dreamt of in your philosophy.” Substitute the word ‘science’ for ‘philosophy’ and you’re about right on the money.
Stop Dumping Plastic Waste in the Ocean
The most exalted things in modern life seem to be chemicals and plastic.
Chemicals and plastic. Could anything be more inspiring than a planet awash in nothing but chemicals and plastic?
You know the answer to that question. Absolutely anything and everything is more inspiring than a planet awash in nothing but chemicals and plastic.
We’re a long way from getting rid of either chemicals or plastic. But that doesn’t mean you and I can’t get a jump on the future by disapproving of them now. Doesn’t mean we can’t make big fat frowny faces at the chemicals leaching into our soil and slowly wending their way down to the water table.
Nothing wrong with adopting mottos like “Man cannot live on chemicals and plastic alone.”
Especially since plastic waste, in the ocean, is set to double by 2030.
What does that mean? It means that plastic pollution is the ocean is going to going from ‘a shit ton’ to ‘are you fucking kidding me?’
Servants of the land would not even consider tossing all that trash into the ocean. People used to consider themselves servants or stewards of the land. People treated the environment with respect because the environment would periodically bonk them on the head real hard with drought, floods, earthquakes, diseases, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, and various other forms of mischief.
People learned to respect the mighty forces that govern the physical world of the planet. And then big corporations and other massive conglomerations of people started thinking, ‘who needs to be afraid of the mighty forces that govern the physical world of planet when we have a) plastics and b) chemicals?’
Bwah-ha-ha-ha, humanity cackled. We have conquered all. The earth bows before us and our industrial, chemical, plastical might.
The earth does not bow before our might. The earth is currently engaged in a carefree spree of bonking humanity on the head. It has done this to every human civilization that thinks it has conquered part of the planet. It’s doing it now.
There seemed to be a money-goggles induced idea that pollution couldn’t be hazardous. How could it be hazardous? The earth is really big. You can just keep destroying it for like – forever – and there will still be more of it to destroy. And make money from. It’s beautiful.
The earth is so big and the air is so big and the ocean is so big and there’s so much water – how can any of it be hazardous. Is peeing in the ocean hazardous? No, because the ocean is really big.
That’s what polluters seemed to think. That stuff like the earth just goes on forever. So pollution can go on forever. Without consequences.
Nothing goes on forever. There are always consequences.
If you want to know if water pollution is hazardous try asking the millions of people throughout history who have died of dysentery. Of course you can’t because they’re dead.
People before the modern age didn’t have proper sanitation and therefore had to live with polluted conditions caused by their own waste. This was not good. So humans figured out ways to solve the problem.
In the industrial age, people don’t have proper pollution control and therefore have to live with polluted conditions caused by industrial waste. So humans need to figure out ways to solve the problem.
It’s not rocket science. It’s not even hard. It just requires a change of attitude and a change of ideas.
Okay, well maybe a change of attitude is hard. Maybe humanity resists changes of ideas as ferociously as it resists anything else in life.
But you know what? It’s not that hard for you. You’re not making billions of dollars from polluting the earth.
Demanding that corporations, governments, and institutions stop tossing their waste around your planet is easy for you. Hell, you don’t even need to demand. You can just disapprovingly EXPECT it.
Money goggles are liars.
Today’s money is tomorrow’s bankruptcy or forcible closure. If you fuck everything up where you are located – you’re not going to be able to be located there anymore. Moving is expensive. You can’t afford it. That’s the reality for many polluting industries. They’re short-term plays. Not good for the economy. They’re not even good for the money goggles-donning capitalists who thought they could cash in on the wonders of ravaging the land.
And when something is not good for anyone – it’s time to get pretty fed up.
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