I was out in the dark one blissful evening last week and noticed faint vapor trails of jets and blinking lights from planes amid the stars. “We’re still flying,” my mind said as if it were news. On the news, of course, have been horror stories from Cuba where we’ve cut off their oil supply. Maybe your news carries those stories, maybe not. But there in the dark my heart was taking notice of the contrast: we’re still streaking through the air burning tons of fuel while they’re starving to death for want of a gallon of gas thanks to us.
One of my all-time favorite books, John Steinbeck’s “Sweet Thursday” (1954) starts “When the war came….” Supposedly the sequel to his rollicking “Cannery Row,” the book for me describes a holy beginning, a humble post-war society re-forming in a place abandoned by the monied people after they’d raked it bare of the easy pickings.
When the war was over, he continued, “everyone had his wounds.” Written tongue-in-cheek, the paragraph that follows made space in my mind the first time I read it, and last week that is what bounced back first from the stars.
“The canneries themselves fought the war by getting the limit taken off fish and catching them all. It was done for patriotic reasons, but that didn’t bring the fish back. As with the oysters in Alice, ‘They’d eaten every one.’ It was the same noble impulse that stripped the forests of the West and right now is pumping water out of California’s earth faster than it can rain back in. When the desert comes, people will be sad; just as Cannery Row was sad when all the pilchards were caught and canned and eaten. The pearl-gray canneries of corrugated iron were silent and a pacing watchman was their only life. The street that once roared with trucks was quiet and empty.”
When the desert comes, people will be sad… and some communities will become silent and empty.
It has taken me years to realize that what he’s saying is that our economy, under the stimulus of war, has the capacity to completely exhaust renewable resources, resources which otherwise could have survived given proper attention and sustainable management. Of course we have that capacity in peacetime, too, but when war comes we put our immediate survival above the survival of the planet and hope for the best.
The second thing the stars shot back was a fragment of a song, the line “All the oil’s near gone and we keep going on like our destiny’s in our own hands.” It’s from another Pitney song, “What On Earth Are We Doing?” (1989) touching on just one of the ways our consumer society is leading us over a precipice. We’ve seen this edge coming for half a century now, since the Arab Oil Embargo of the early 1970s. The current disorientation of the global oil supply by our Disrupter-In-Chief may be serving a greater purpose in a backhanded sort of way. Oil is an exhaustible resource, not a renewable one, and by giving every country around the world a taste of what it’s going to be like when we run out, Donald Trump may be performing a long-overdue service.
When the war came that Steinbeck mentioned, at least there were a couple of rabid dictators trying to take over parts of the globe to serve as the reason for fighting. Insane as it was, we could justify the huge expenditure of exhaustible resources to hold back those enemies. When this war came, however, it came out of the blue, without stated purpose, without battle plans, without alerting much less engaging our allies, and without appropriations by Congress much less permission. No American citizen had a clue it was coming or time to prepare for the sacrifices we will be forced, not asked, to make. In fact, this war seems like it was designed to spend American resources, not defend them. Already we see the regulations on resource preservation being cut in the name of wartime. It appears to some that war was declared in order to deregulate everything.
When war came eighty-plus years ago, one thing that came with it was rations. What if everybody had to decide how to spend their 10-gallon allotment of gas per week, or 100 gallons of water? We might start to work out a new plan.
Trudy Wischemann is a rural advocate who writes. Send her your dreams of equality c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247. This column is not a news article but the opinion of the writer and does not reflect the views of the Mid Valley Times newspaper.
