Putting Things in Perspective
Build a wall with the gate open wide
and shut out the color Blue.
Birds wake up, covered in oil
slick with grease
and oysters can't breathe--driving in a haze of lights,
oil slides into the sea--the wall can't keep it out.
We all die in sludge
and the Coast of Death spreads wider daily--
define the world we live in: a wall--a sea--an oily grave.
On Tuesday November 19, 2002, the United States Senate voted 90 to 9, following House passage the week earlier, in favor of forming a huge anti-terror organization called the Homeland Security Department, delivering a triumph to President Bush and setting the stage for the expenditure of at least between 40 and 90 billion dollars of federal tax money per year. The agency will coordinate protection of the nation's borders, coastlines, airports, landmarks, utilities, and other public and private facilities. The goal: to prevent attack from any foreign or internal source. Emphasis will be on determining the potential use of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. All this represents Washington's response to the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center where about 3000 people were killed.
The death of even one person is lamentable, but let's try to put this incident in the perspective of a few other tragedies that regularly befall the American people. The number of people who died on September 11th is less than the number of casualties that occur every month on the U.S. freeways. Consequently, in the year following the September 11th disaster, well over 10 times as many Americans, nearly 50,000, died in automobile accidents. Moreover, the number of deaths from car accidents over the past 10 years is well over 100 times the number caused by terrorist attacks. Yet what is being done to correct the slaughter of Americans on the highways?
We can similarly ask about deaths caused by cigarette smoking. On the average, smoking cuts 20 years off a person's natural life span, so the number of deaths due to smoking must far exceed that due to car accidents. Yet smoking is still legal in the U.S. How can we rationalize spending over 50 billion dollars for security when the number of people dying from car accidents and smoking exceeds the number of past, present and expected future deaths attributable to terrorism by many orders of magnitude? It might be accurate to suggest that certain members of society, including various governmental officials, will personally benefit financially from the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars for military purposes. However, it's unlikely that these same people would benefit from expenditures that minimize threats to the statistically more significant causes of mortality and morbidity.
One argument in favor of a $50 billion budget for Home Security is that the Trade Center attack was premeditated while deaths caused by car accidents or smoking are accidental and unintentional. Why does this make a difference? Maybe because our egos play a role. We thought of the U.S. as the mightiest nation on Earth, and from a military standpoint, this might have been true. But we also thought of ourselves as being invulnerable, and this proved to be false. So to make ourselves feel secure again, we'll spend hundreds of billions of dollars, even though there are no guarantees that using the country's resources in this way will achieve the desired goal. Although our chances of dying in a car accident or from smoking are infinitely greater than our chances of dying from a terrorist attack, this knowledge doesn't alter the conviction of a majority of Americans that the Homeland Security expenditures are justified. We're dealing with an emotional issue, not a rational one.
On the same day the Homeland Security bill passed in the Senate, an oil tanker, the Prestige, carrying 77,000 tons of oil, broke in half in a storm off the craggy coast of Spain. The oil spill that resulted proved to be an environmental disaster more than twice as significant as the one that resulted from the well-publicized Exxon Valdez spill in 1989. Such oil spills smother birds and marine mammals in the released tar-like goop, and they kill millions of fish and other oceanic inhabitants. After a mere two days following the Prestige disaster, Spanish beaches were covered with oil, and millions of birds and shellfish were either dead or dying in the sludge. The area was called "the Coast of Death."
Although it's difficult to imagine a worse disaster, over a dozen oil spills of this magnitude have already occurred. The largest was that of the Atlantic Empress off Trinidad and Tobago in 1979. In that case 287,000 tons of oil was spilled. The fact that these incidents have occurred repeatedly in the past means they will continue to take place in the future. At least as long as we depend on fossil fuels as our primary source of energy, such accidents are going to happen.
So let's try to put this incident into perspective with respect to the World Trade Center bombing on September 11th. Which was worse, the deaths of about 3000 people, or the deaths of hundreds of millions of marine plants and animals? From a purely personal or emotional standpoint, the former might seem worse, particularly for people who value human life above all else, but from an ecological standpoint, or if we consider the total number of lives lost, there is absolutely no comparison. In fact, the loss of 3000 people out of 6,000,000,000 is insignificant compared to the loss of life resulting from a major oil spill. Yet, how many billions of dollars did Bush and the American government fork over in an attempt to alleviate the conditions resulting from the oil spill off the coast of Spain? The answer is: not one. The 26 year-old Japanese-built vessel was owned by a Liberian firm, registered in the Bahamas, managed in Greece, chartered by a Swiss-based Russian oil trader, and classed as seaworthy by the American Bureau of Shipping. You can understand why no one felt the need to assume responsibility. Nevertheless, it's difficult to understand why a country with the financial resources of the U.S. wouldn't act to minimize the loss that would result from a disaster of the magnitude of this oil spill.
The sad fact is that as long as we use fossil fuels, we will continue to add CO2 to the atmosphere and continue to pollute the land and sea with spills of oil and other damaging industrial products. Our shortcomings seem to lie with the fact that most Americans think nationally, not internationally. Yet we all share one planet, and destruction of the environment anywhere on Earth will ultimately affect all of us. The human population will only come to realize how important environmental issues are when things get too hot on Earth, and billions (not thousands) of people are dying. How then will the American nation and their currently popular president fair?
It seems likely that Bush will go down in history as the president (1) who withdrew all federal funding for international birth control, (2) who pulled the U.S. out of the Kyoto Protocol, the international agreement addressing global warming, (3) who provided no representation at the 2002 Summit on Global Environmental Conditions in Johannesburg, and (4) who increased military spending and spearheaded a Homeland Security plan that ended up costing our country a major fraction of its resources while allowing the deterioration of the social and environmental conditions upon which we all depend. He has neglected, and indeed even now seems to be unaware of the key population and environmental issues which in a few decades will be recognized as the only issues of importance to the maintenance of quality life. He will also go down in history as the president who proposed and implemented a 1.3 trillion dollar tax cut while continuing to carelessly spend money that was not available. And worse, he spent it for purposes of questionable importance! He'll be held responsible for taking the U.S. out of the black and putting it into the red. He and his advisors have behaved with no foresight or knowledge of a tomorrow. His actions may be popular for a moment, but they will prove to be devastating in the long run. Bush will be blamed for these actions regardless of whether he was a leader or a puppet. Internationally though, because it was the American people who put him into office, they collectively will be blamed and ridiculed. Perhaps only then will the shamed American public realize their folly.
The world we live in has many problems: terrorism, war, lawlessness, corruption, and pestilence to name just a few, but none of these issues even begins to compare in magnitude with the environmental problems that we have been creating since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. It was in 1850 that we began using fossil fuels on a large scale, and this event, together with the advent of modern medicine, allowed a tremendous increase in the human population. These "advances" have created problems that far outweigh those for which our government is spending hundreds of billions of dollars. Overpopulation and global warming are more important than the issue of war and peace, more important than individual life and death, more important than the economy, even more important than the harm done to our egos by the terrorist attacks on September 11th. Our human activities are leading straight to the extermination of the entire human race as well as most animal and plant species. Yet few Americans are willing to admit that they have not set their priorities right. Why? Because they lack the foresight to put things in proper perspective.