They grew up in places like Connecticut.

Growing up between the woodsy New York suburbs of Fairfield County and the smaller towns of Litchfield County, “Housatonic” was one of my first words.  Since I was a child I was aware that I was not to touch this lovely river that winds through the town I grew up in because it was poisoned by PCB’s dumped into it by companies like General Electric and Eastman-Kodak.  This massive watershed has been poisoned since I can remember.  For decades it was known by fishermen and those drinking the water and getting sick from it that the water was being poisoned, but nothing was done about it.

When I was young, Wilton, Connecticut was a suburb and had long since lost all of its farms, but it was a woodsy suburb.  Like so many other towns around the US in the 70’s and 80’s, the woods were replaced each year by more and more houses, and what I thought of as my backyard got smaller and smaller.  Part of my backyard was a 700-acre watershed with a reservoir in it, a local water supply.  When I was a child it was always full, but by the time I was a teenager it was often nearly empty, as more and more people moved into the area and used more and more water, and as droughts started happening with increasing frequency.

The main road going through town was a two-lane road, Route 7, with woods lining much of it on either side.  Later it became an unrecognizable mass of parking lots and strip malls.  As I grew up, left home, and started feeding my desire to see the country, I was appalled to find that most of it had already been destroyed far more thoroughly than Wilton.

I saw New Jersey, where much of my extended family lived, and south Florida, where one set of my grandparents moved to when I was a teenager.  I couldn’t believe people could live in these places, where what used to be the landscape was completely unrecognizable, covered with asphalt, highways, parking lots, condominiums, and sports utility vehicles stuck in traffic as far as the eye can see.

And indeed, were the people really living?  In such an alienating environment, more and more of them were turning towards pharmaceutical drugs in order to cope with this life they had inherited from the corporations. 

 

Time and again, the few who attempted to stop this “progress” -- this process of turning the world into a giant Wal-Mart -- were defeated, one community after another destroyed, physically, psychologically, the forests decimated, the common areas gone, even the sidewalks.

The downtowns closed, one after another, replaced by alien landscapes only accessible by car.  What was left of the gutted former cities of places like New Jersey was populated by impoverished, unemployed people surrounded by abandoned and boarded-up buildings, the downtowns replaced by soulless suburbs indistinguishable from each other except that the chain stores appear in a different order depending on the town, if the word “town” can accurately be used to describe these places.

When it seemed like there couldn’t possibly be more highways, there were more.  When it seemed the strip malls couldn’t possibly be uglier and more impersonal, they became bigger, uglier and without the modicum of public space the first ones often had.  When it seemed public transportation couldn’t possibly get any worse, in so many places it ceased to exist altogether.  When it seemed the general population couldn’t get any less healthy that it was, somehow pharmaceutical drug use increased even more, people got even more obese, and there was yet another spate of high school massacres to add to the last series.

And so many people just seemed to accept this new reality.  New generations were born that never knew life could be any different.  The concept of a neighbor, a front porch, or a bicycle became a thing of distant memories and old movies. 

 

The cancer rate grew and then it grew faster, but people would say this is how life is, cancer has always been with us, it just wasn’t diagnosed before.  It’s easy to prove that this isn’t true, since there are societies outside the US to compare ourselves to, but nobody talked about that on TV, and most people never heard about these places, never traveled to them.  Wal-Mart doesn’t pay people enough to take vacations outside of New Jersey, let alone to other countries.  But they do pay just enough to keep the car running and to get the next prescription of Prozac.

Having spent much of my childhood hiking in the forests of northwestern Connecticut, on the Appalachian Trail, I spent a summer in the forests of western North Carolina.  Although on the map you can see that 10% of the US land mass is identified as “National Forest,” I learned firsthand what that misnomer really meant.  Much of it would more appropriately be called National Sacrifice Zones.  I learned that the main job of the Forest Service is to subsidize logging operations and clean up the mess afterwards.  I saw clearcut after clearcut.  Eroded hillsides covered in stumps, mud sliding into stream after stream.  Mountaintops covered with dead trees, killed by beetles emboldened by climate change.

I saw Louisiana.  First the “National Forest” tree farms in the north of the state, then the coast.  I drove and drove for hundreds of miles along the coast, smelling the stench of the oil industry that had laid waste to everything from Mississippi to Texas.  I saw the flames shooting wildly out of the smokestacks, tried to imagine how anybody could live in such an environment.  Fisheries devastated, communities ruined, economies struggling, the only jobs left being on the oil rigs and refineries that constantly mar the coastline, spewing carcinogens, the EPA never to be seen.

I saw the people there on the Gulf Coast living in the midst of a distopian nightmare, their trailers and little houses sandwiched between the highways and smokestacks, just to keep all the miserable occupants of the suburbs of New Jersey and Connecticut and Florida in their SUVs, driving to the next mall, driving to their jobs, ever further and further away, ever harder to find.

I saw Los Angeles.  I had never been to a city where there was so much smog you couldn’t see the sky.  Everything was grey.  I read about how LA used to have a great trolley system, but it was bought by GM and Exxon and destroyed, along with the mass transit systems in other cities they bought in order to destroy.  Somehow this was allowed to happen.  Somehow civil society couldn’t stop it.  I read about the cancer rate and the number of people with asthma there, one of the highest rates in the country, mostly because of all the cars spewing smog into the soup bowl that is LA.

LA, one more of so many examples of what happens when massive corporations are able to make all the important decisions.  It’s good for Exxon and GM, so we will have suburbs.  It’s good for Exxon and GM, so we will have endless expanses of highways, malls and cars.  It’s good for Exxon and GM, so the natural world will be systematically destroyed and replaced by asphalt.  Society will be systematically destroyed and replaced by people kept alive by inhalers, chemotherapy and psych drugs.  It’s good for Exxon and GM, so we will send our young people off to die and kill off half the Muslim world.

And so many times I wondered, don’t the billionaires also breath the air?  Are they happy with all their money?  Will they be happy once they’re living in climate-controlled bubbles?  Maybe if the bubbles are big enough…?  Won’t it also affect them when the oceans rise?  Maybe not when they only rise one foot, or two, but twenty…?  Wouldn’t they also rather live in a sane society, or are their imaginations as damaged as those of so many of the people living in the suburbs they have created for us?  Or do they just live on pure cynicism, figuring if they don’t profit from this madness, someone else will, and the economic system they’ve been fuelling all their lives is unstoppable, so just let it be…?  That’s life, that’s death, it was a nice world once upon a time.

There in the west, there at the end of the continent, I went north.  Like so many other people, when I first visited Muir Woods just north of San Francisco it changed me forever.

It was like going back in time, way back.  The forest felt alive, sentient.  The trees were so massive they blocked out the sky.  Some were two hundred feet tall, ten feet wide, unlike anything I had ever seen or heard of.

Someone from an environmental group was handing out literature there.  Almost the entire west coast had been full of forests like this, up and down the coast, from the ocean to the mountains.  These were some of the very few that remained.  Many of these trees had been there since before Columbus first began pillaging the Americas.  Some of them were older than Jesus.

Many of the remaining few were in private hands, belonging to energy corporations that had inherited their vast expanses of land through theft, bribery and government handouts, corporate welfare.  The rest was on “National Forest” land.  Most of it was being logged at a rate faster than the logging of the Amazon.


And what was being done with these indescribably majestic trees? 

 

These magical beings that took my breath away, that had such an impact on everyone I ever brought to the coast to see them?  These ancient creatures that converted me to paganism overnight, that filled me simultaneously with calm and excitement, hope and despair, that made me feel truly whole for the first time.  Were they at least making beautiful musical instruments or homes with these forces of nature?

Toilet paper. They were making toilet paper.