Another Day Older

You load sixteen tons, what do you get,

Another day older and deeper in debt.

Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go,

I owe my soul to the company store.

Sixteen Tons, Merle Travis (1947 recording)

Over the river-crossing trestle adjacent River's Edge Sports Complex, the site of last weekend's Outdoor Circus, Roanoke's first ever, three-day celebration of alfresco pursuits, i.e., hiking, camping, cycling, paddle boarding, kayaking, fly fishing and rock climbing - hopper cars mounded high with West Virginia coal make their way north by rail, payloads destined for a slow boat to China.

Here we are presented with a textbook case of pretzel logic, a conundrum of global proportion: this dirty-burning, carbon-emitting, fossil-fuel commodity that endangers domestic lives in subterranean mines, rapes and lays bare mountaintops - fouling ground water and endangering the health of rural communities - is increasingly earmarked for foreign markets (Exports skyrocketed between 2009 and 2010, from 387,000 to 4 million tons). And adding insult to injury, Shanghai's polluted industrial exhalations are about as respectful of boundaries as the once-common secondhand smoke in airline cabins (Non-smoking sections on passenger jets? Talk about your ludicrous concepts). And I hate to get all up-in-your-face NIMBY on ya, Shanghai, but we're just across the aisle from you on Spaceship Earth, and your belching factories' carbon emissions are heating up my backyard.

Familiar with The Tragedy of the Commons? No? Well, maybe this is as good a time as any. In an 1968 article in Science, Garrett Hardin put forth a theory describing “the dilemma arising from the situation in which multiple individuals acting independently and rationally consulting their own self-interest, deplete a shared limited resource, even when it is clear that it is not in anyone's long-term interest for this to happen” (from Wikipedia). For our purposes above, the shared limited resources are clean air and a habitable atmosphere for planetary creatures, human or otherwise.

In his book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond provides several examples of Tragedy of the Commons, including the following:

Many centuries ago, immigrants came to a fertile land blessed with apparently inexhaustible resources. While the land lacked a few raw materials useful for industry, those materials were readily obtained by overseas trade with poorer lands that happened to have deposits of them. For a time, all the lands prospered, and their populations multiplied.

But the population of that rich land eventually multiplied beyond the numbers that even its abundant resources could support. As its forests were felled and its soils eroded, its agricultural productivity was no longer sufficient to generate export surpluses, build ships, or even to nourish its own population. With that decline of trade, shortages of the imported raw materials developed. Civil war spread, as established political institutions were overthrown by a kaleidoscopically changing succession of local military leaders. The starving populace of the rich land survived by turning to cannibalism. Their former overseas trade partners met an even worse fate: deprived of the imports on which they had depended, they in turn ravaged their own environment until no one was left alive.

Pretty dismal, huh? I suppose I could have projected a G-rated preview of coming attractions, but what would be the point. We are like the proverbial frog in a pot, unaware of the gradually rising water temperature ... until it's too late. Unless current trends are brought into high relief, most people will fail to notice the emerging patterns; unless drastic measures are undertaken, we will reach peak everything without a leg to stand on. The clock is ticking, reminding us time is a limited resource, too. It is up to each of us decide how we want to spend it.

For my part, I've jumped off the road, as we say, for a three-day visit with two dear friends in Floyd, Virginia, while the rest of my fellow SLRians pitch in at Acorn, an egalitarian intentional community in Mineral, about four hours NNE. On Thursday I will rendezvous with Julia back in Roanoke, as a group of us travel to Occupy sites in the Southern region to learn about and perhaps teach what we've heretofore learned about sustainable practices and political action. Meanwhile a crew aboard Priscilla will make its way to the 6th annual Mountain Justice Fall Summit in the Coal River Valley of Southern West Virginia, hosted by Coal River Mountain Watch and RAMPS (Radical Action for Mountain Peoples' Survival), a direct action campaign to end strip mining.

Saving the planet, it turns out, is a full time job.