by Tom Kruzen, Chair Mining Committee
The Katrina and Taum Sauk disasters demonstrated remarkable lessons for us. They weren’t disasters so much from natural forces as they were from human-caused problems. These were lessons on how not to be good citizens.
For years, politicians allowed the offshore oil industry to channelize the natural delta of the Mississippi river, and, before that, the Army Corps of Engineers built levees along the Mississippi to keep water out of small towns, farmland and cities like St. Louis and New Orleans. While we pinched the “hose” we call the Mississippi, Mother Nature fought back, giving us ever increasing and destructive floods. (Remember 1995 and 1993). What did we expect the water to do? The Dutch-born physicist, Daniel Bernoulli, figured out the principles of hydraulics in the 1730’s!
Over the years, many environmentalists and conservationists fought this meddling. All too often their objections were drowned out by the cries for higher levees, drier farmland and quicker fixes. Likewise in Missouri, the few voices of objection to the Taum Sauk Reservoir were easily ignored or overridden. In those days, as with the Army Corps, government oversight of the Taum Sauk project was minimal. No one paid much attention to inferior construction just as with the levees in New Orleans. A little cheating seemed harmless enough and was quickly forgotten. Money was made and people moved on. Time and water marched on. In the last year, water’s memory finally caught up with both Missouri and New Orleans.
For decades, groups like the Sierra Club scolded agencies like the Army Corps and politicians for not seeing the value of wetlands and for not adhering to scientific principles. The Club and others were ignored or demonized as Enviro-wackos! One cold night last December, water remembered what people had forgotten and ignored. A state park was destroyed, a river was altered forever, and a family almost died. The chickens came home to roost also for New Orleans when Katrina hit. The president was on vacation, Condoleeza Rice was buying Gucci shoes by the peck in NYC, and no one had anticipated what came to be America’s largest man-made “natural” disaster.
The local government had no clue as to what to do. There were no means by which the poor, the indigent and the very young could escape the hurricane or the flood to come. The state government was equally inept and the federal response, or rather lack of it, was shameful, if not disgusting. Water piled up to the attics, people piled into whatever was dry and the excuses for years of neglect and bad decision-making piled up like so much silt in the Black River or so much excrement in the coliseum in New Orleans. Finger pointing was rampant and accountability was a joke (“You’re doin’ a heckuva job, Brownie,” chortled the president, who couldn’t break himself away from a vacation or a money-making political dinner!).
In Missouri, the governor’s toadies quickly pointed out a conflict of interest. Attorney General Jay Nixon suffered when he accepted money from AmerenUE. Of course the governor neglected to tell us that his brother, Andy Blunt, was a lobbyist for one and the same AmerenUE. Along comes another shift of blame, another half-truth and another abrogation of responsibility.
Respondeo is Latin for “giving back.” When does an elected citizen find the wherewithal to give back to the citizens who put him or her in power to do something? Modern American civics has deteriorated into “what can I get out of it or what can I get away with?” Thus, we are plagued with the likes of a Rumsfeld or a Cheney, flip-flopping from industry to government and back again.
All too often in the environmental movement, we do research, we study science and come to some pretty good answers to life’s persistent questions (in the words of Guy Noire). Most generally we aren’t paid for our efforts. We are given the death of the messenger or, worse yet, marginalized and ignored. It is our duty as grassroots citizens, (we, who generally are closer to the nitty-gritty of the universe) to be a constant thorn in our “leaders” sides and remind them of their communal charges (com-munis is Latin for “duties with”). If they refuse to pay us heed, it is our duty to replace them till we find someone who will do the will of the people. Water remembers, air remembers, earth remembers when our self-appointed memories fail.
“Every people may establish what form of government they please, and change it as they please, the will of the nation being the only thing essential,” said Thomas Jefferson in 1792. Missouri’s state motto reflects a similar message: “Salus populi suprema lex esto” means “Let the will of the people be the supreme law”!
A final Jeffersonian thought from the age of Bernoulli, the Age of Enlightenment: “A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt. If the game runs against us sometimes at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake.”
Louder, please, Mr. Jefferson!