by Joy Williams
I really don’t want to think about sewage, you say, but it sounds like progress.
It is true that the masters are struggling with the problems of your incessant flushing. Cuisine is also one of their concerns. Great advances have been made in sorbets—sorbet intermezzos—in their clubs and fine restaurants. They know what you want. You want A HAVEN FROM THE ORDINARY WORLD. If you’re a NATURE LOVER in the West, you want to live in a WILD ANIMAL HABITAT. If you’re eastern and consider yourself more hip, you want to live in a new town—a brand-new reconstructed-from-scratch town—in a house of NINETEENTH-CENTURY DESIGN. But in these new towns the masters are building, getting around can be confusing. There is an abundance of curves and an infrequency of through streets. It’s the new wilderness without any trees. You can get lost, even with all the “mental bread crumbs” the masters scatter about as visual landmarks—the windmill, the water views, the various groupings of landscape “material.” You are lost, you know. But you trust a Realtor will show you the way. There are many more Realtors than tiny masters, and many of them have to make do with less than a loaf—that is, trying to sell stuff that’s already been built in an environment already “enhanced” rather than something being planned—but they’re everywhere, willing to show you the path. If Dante returned to Hell today, he’d probably be escorted down by a Realtor talking all the while about how it was just another level of Paradise.
When have you last watched a sunset? Do you remember where you were? With whom? At Loews Ventana Canyon Resort, the Grand Foyer will provide you with that opportunity through lighting that is computerized to diminish with the approaching sunset!
The tiny masters are willing to arrange Nature for you. They will compose it into a picture that you can look at at your leisure, when you’re not doing work or something like that. Nature becomes scenery, a prop. At some golf courses in the Southwest, the saguaro cactuses are reported to be repaired with green paste when balls blast into their skin. The saguaro can attempt to heal themselves by growing over the balls, but this takes time, and the effect can be somewhat . . . baroque. It’s better to get out the pastepot. Nature has become simply a visual form of entertainment, and it had better look snappy.
Listen, you say, we’ve been at Ventana Canyon. It’s in the desert, right? It’s very, very nice, a world-class resort. A totally self-contained environment with everything that a person could possibly want, on more than a thousand acres in the middle of zip. It sprawls but nestles, like. And they’ve maintained the integrity of as much of the desert ecosystem as possible. Give them credit for that. Great restaurant, too. We had baby bay scallops there. Coming into the lobby there are these two big hand-carved coyotes, mutely howling. And that’s the way we like them, mute. God, why do those things howl like that?
Wildlife is a personal matter, you think. The attitude is up to you. You can prefer to see it dead or not dead. You might want to let it mosey about its business or blow it away. Wild things exist only if you have the graciousness to allow them to. Just outside Tucson, Arizona, there is a structure modeled after a French Foreign Legion outpost. It’s the International Wildlife Museum, and it’s full of dead animals. Three hundred species are there, at least a third of them—the rarest ones—killed and collected by one C. J. McElroy, who enjoyed doing it and now shares what’s left with you. The museum claims to be educational because you can watch a taxidermist at work or touch a lion’s tooth. You can get real close to these dead animals, closer than you can in a zoo. Some of you prefer zoos, however, which are becoming bigger, better, and bioclimatic. New-age zoo designers want the animals to flow right out into your space. In Dallas there’s a Wilds of Africa exhibit; in San Diego there’s a simulated rain forest, where you can thread your way “down the side of a lush canyon, the air filled with a fine mist from 300 high-pressure nozzles . . .”; in New Orleans you’ve constructed a swamp, the real swamp not far away being on the verge of disappearing. Animals in these places are abstractions—wandering relics of their true selves, but that doesn’t matter. Animal behavior in a zoo is nothing like natural behavior, but that doesn’t matter, either. Zoos are pretty, contained, and accessible. These new habitats can contain one hundred different species—not more than one or two of each thing, of course—on seven acres, three, one. You don’t want to see too much of anything, certainly. An example will suffice. Sort of like a biological Crabtree & Evelyn basket selected with you in mind. You like things reduced, simplified. It’s easier to take it all in, park it in your mind. You like things inside better than outside anyway. You are increasingly looking at and living in proxy environments created by substitution and simulation. Resource economists are a wee branch in the tree of tiny masters, and one, Martin Krieger, wrote, “Artificial prairies and wildernesses have been created, and there is no reason to believe that these artificial environments need be unsatisfactory for those who experience them. . . . We will have to realize that the way in which we experience nature is conditioned by our society—which more and more is seen to be receptive to responsible intervention.”
Fiddle, fiddle, fiddle. You support fiddling, as well as meddling. This is how you learn. Though it’s quite apparent that the environment has been grossly polluted and the natural world abused and defiled, you seem to prefer to continue pondering effects rather than preventing causes. You want proof, you insist on proof. A Dr. Lave from Carnegie-Mellon—and he’s an expert, an economist and an environmental expert—says that scientists will have to prove to you that you will suffer if you don’t become less of a “throw-away society.” If you really want me to give up my car or my air conditioner, you’d better prove to me first that the earth would otherwise be uninhabitable, Dr. Lave says. Me is you, I presume, whereas you refers to them. You as in me—that is, me, me, me—certainly strike a hard bargain. Uninhabitable the world has to get before you rein in your requirements. You’re a consumer after all, the consumer upon whom so much attention is lavished, the ultimate user of a commodity that has become, these days, everything. To try to appease your appetite for proof, for example, scientists have been leasing for experimentation forty-six pristine lakes in Canada.
They don’t want to keep them, they just want to borrow them.
They’ve been intentionally contaminating many of the lakes with a variety of pollutants dribbled into the propeller wash of research boats. It’s one of the boldest experiments in lake ecology ever conducted. They’ve turned these remote lakes into huge real-world test tubes. They’ve been doing this since 1976! And what they’ve found so far in these preliminary studies is that pollutants are really destructive. The lakes get gross. Life in them ceases. It took about eight years to make this happen in one of them, everything carefully measured and controlled all the while. Now the scientists are slowly reversing the process. But it will take hundreds of years for the lakes to recover. They think.
Remember when you used to like rain, the sound of it, the feel of it, the way it made the plants and trees all glisten? We needed that rain, you would say. It looked pretty too, you thought, particularly in the movies. Now it rains and you go, Oh-oh. A nice walloping rain these days means overtaxing our sewage treatment plants. It means untreated waste discharged directly into our waterways. It means . . .
Okay. Okay.
Acid rain! And we all know what this is. Or most of us do. People of power in government and industry still don’t seem to know what it is. Whatever it is, they say, they don’t want to curb it, but they’re willing to study it some more. Economists call air and water pollution “externalities” anyway. Oh, acid rain. You do get so sick of hearing about it. The words have already become a white-noise kind of thing. But you think in terms of mitigating it maybe. As for the greenhouse effect, you think in terms of countering that. One way that’s been discussed is the planting of new forests, not for the sake of the forests alone, oh my heavens, no. Not for the sake of majesty and mystery or of Thumper and Bambi, are you kidding me, but because, as every schoolchild knows,
trees absorb carbon dioxide. They just soak it up and store it. They just love it. So this is the plan: you can plant millions of acres of trees, and you go on doing pretty much whatever you’re doing—driving around, using staggering amounts of energy, keeping those power plants fired to the max. Isn’t Nature remarkable? So willing to serve? You wouldn’t think it had anything more to offer, but it seems it does. Of course, these “forests” wouldn’t exactly be forests. They would be more like trees. Managed trees. The Forest Service, which now manages our forests by cutting them down, might be called upon to evolve in its thinking and allow these trees to grow. They would probably be patented trees after a time. Fast-growing, uniform, genetically created toxin-eating machines. They would be new-age trees, because the problem with planting the old-fashioned variety to combat the greenhouse effect, which is caused by pollution, is that they’re already dying from it. All along the crest of the Appalachians from Maine to Georgia, forests struggle to survive in a toxic soup of poisons. They can’t help us if we’ve killed them, now can they?
All right, you say, wow, lighten up, will you? Relax. Tell about yourself.
Well, I say, I live in Florida . . .
Oh my God, you say. Florida! Florida is a joke! How do you expect us to take you seriously if you still live there! Florida is crazy, it’s pink concrete. It’s paved, it’s over. And a little girl just got eaten by an alligator down there. It came out of some swamp next to a subdivision and carried her off. That set your Endangered Species Act back fifty years, you can bet.
I . . .
Listen, we don’t want to hear any more about Florida. We don’t want to hear about Phoenix or California’s Central Valley. If our wetlands—our vanishing wetlands—are mentioned one more time, we’ll scream. And the talk about condors and grizzlies and wolves is becoming too de trop. We had just managed to get whales out of our minds. Now there are butterflies, frogs even that you want us to worry about. And those manatees. Don’t they know what a boat propeller can do to them by now? They’re not too smart. And those last condors are pathetic. Can’t we just get this over with?
Aristotle said that all living beings are ensouled and strive to participate in eternity.
Oh, I just bet he said that, you say. That doesn’t sound like Aristotle. He was a humanist. We’re all humanists here. This is the age of humanism. Militant humanism. And it has been for a long time.
You are driving with a stranger in the car, and it is the stranger who is behind the wheel. In the backseat are your pals for many years now—DO WHAT YOU LIKE and his swilling sidekick, WHY NOT. A deer, or some emblematic animal—something from that myriad natural world you’ve come from that you now treat with such indifference and scorn—steps from the dimming woods and tentatively upon the highway. The stranger does not decelerate or brake, not yet, maybe not at all. The feeling is that whatever it is will get out of the way. Oh, it’s a fine car you’ve got, a fine machine, and oddly you don’t mind the stranger driving it, because in a way, everything has gotten too complicated, way, way out of your control. You’ve given the wheel to the masters, the managers, the comptrollers. Something is wrong, maybe, you feel a little sick, actually, but the car is luxurious and fast and you’re moving, which is the most important thing by far.
Why make a fuss when you’re so comfortable? Don’t make a fuss, make a baby. Go out and get something to eat, build something. Make another baby. Babies are cute. Babies show you have faith in the future. Although faith is perhaps too strong a word. They’re everywhere these days; in all the crowds and traffic jams, there are the babies too. You don’t seem to associate them with the problems of population increase. They’re just babies! And you’ve come to believe in them again. They’re a lot more tangible than the afterlife, which, of course, you haven’t believed in in ages. At least not for yourself. The afterlife now belongs to plastics and poisons. Yes, plastics and poisons will have a far more extensive afterlife than you, that’s known. A disposable diaper, for example, which is all plastic and wood pulp, will take around four centuries to degrade. But you like disposables—so easy to use and toss—and now that marketing is urging you not to rush the potty training by making diapers for four-year-olds available and socially acceptable, there will be more and more dumped diapers around, each taking, like most plastics, centuries and centuries to deteriorate. In the sea, many marine animals die from ingesting or being entangled in discarded plastic. In the dumps, plastic squats on more than 25 percent of dump space. But your heart is disposed toward plastic. Someone, no doubt the plastics industry, told you it was convenient. This same industry avidly promotes recycling in an attempt to get the critics of their nefarious, multifarious products off their backs. That should make you feel better, because recycling has become an honorable word, no longer merely the hobby of Volvo owners. The fact is that people in plastics are born obscurants. Recycling won’t solve the plastic glut, only reduction of production will, and the plastics industry isn’t looking into that, you can be sure. Waste is not just the stuff you throw away, of course, it’s also the stuff you use to excess. With the exception of hazardous waste, which you do worry about from time to time, it’s even thought that you have a declining sense of emergency about the problem. Builders are building bigger houses because you want bigger. You’re trading up. Utility companies are beginning to worry about your constantly rising consumption. Utility companies! You haven’t entered a new age at all but one of upscale nihilism, deluxe nihilism.
With each election there is the possibility that the environment will become a political issue. But it never does. You don’t want it to be, preferring instead to continue in your politics of subsidizing and advancing avarice. The issues are the same as always—jobs, defense, the economy the economy the economy, maintaining the standard of living in this greedy, selfish, expansionistic, industrialized society.
You’re getting a little shrill here, you say.
You’re pretty well off. And you expect to become even better off. You do. What does this mean? More software, more scampi, more square footage, more communication towers to keep you in touch and amused and informed? You want to count birds? Go to the bases of communication towers being built all across the country. Three million migratory songbirds perish each year by slamming into towers and their attendant guy wires. The building of thousands of new digital television towers one thousand feet and taller is being expedited by the FCC, which proposes to preempt all local and state environmental laws. You have created an ecological crisis. The earth is infinitely variable and alive, and you are moderating it, simplifying it, killing it. It seems safer this way. But you are not safe. You want to find wholeness and happiness in a land increasingly damaged and betrayed, and you never will. More than material matters. You must change your ways.
What is this? Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God?
The ecological crisis cannot be resolved by politics. It cannot be resolved by science or technology. It is a crisis caused by culture and character, and a deep change in personal consciousness is needed. Your fundamental attitudes toward the earth have become twisted. You have made only brutal contact with Nature; you cannot comprehend its grace. You must change. Have few desires and simple pleasures. Honor nonhuman life. Control yourself, become more authentic. Live lightly upon the earth and treat it with respect. Redefine the word progress and dismiss the managers and masters. Grow inwardly and with knowledge become truly wiser. Think differently, behave differently. For this is essentially a moral issue we face, and moral decisions must be made.
A moral issue! Okay, this discussion is now over. A moral issue . . . And who’s this we now? Who are you, is what I’d like to know. You’re not me, anyway. I admit someone’s to blame and something should be done. But I’ve got to go. It’s getting late. Take care of yourself.
Key Lois
IN THE FLORIDA KEYS, JUST OFF CUDJOE IN THE ATLANTIC, IS Loggerhead Key, which looks a little odd, as well it might since its only occupants are monkeys. One h
alf of the key is gray, as though in shadow; the other half is a healthy, mangrove-wooded green. A narrow tidal river separates the two, a river that, it is said by those who put the monkeys on the island in the first place, they prefer not to cross. The monkeys, about sixteen hundred of them, inhabit the gray half, which they have denuded with their climbing, scrambling, swinging, and clinging. They are seventy-pound, dog-faced rhesus monkeys, bred and raised for laboratory research. As with the cattle one sees grazing in green pastures, they undoubtedly lead a happy life until they don’t. There is no natural food for them on the island and no fresh water, so someone arrives daily by boat with water and hundreds of pounds of Purina Monkey Chow. At other times a boat will arrive, collect some of the monkeys to fill an order from a laboratory, and take them away. The monkeys are purportedly the biggest, blondest, and healthiest in the world.