The environment is one of those issues that can put to sleep the most troubled insomniac. Full of statistics, scientific jargon, and the kind of flora and fauna one would only expect to find at about 2 a.m. on the Discovery Channel, it’s hard for us to get excited about it. We know that we live in the environment, that it provides us with air to breathe, water to drink, and food. We also know that when the environment turns nasty – as it is doing these days in South Florida and the Gulf of Mexico with an unprecedented hurricane season – it can cost us billions of dollars and hundreds if not thousands of lives.
Still, we find it hard to get as consumed over environmental issues as we do about, say, Valerie Plame or the Bolton nomination. The threat to us from global warming is not something immediately felt. The danger to the world seems to take place gradually, over many years.
Or it did.
Now we know that strange things are happening to the world and the culprit seems to be the one enemy the Bush administration does not wish to fight. Pollution has caused an incredible amount of damage, which is now being felt more rapidly than even the scientists have predicted. The bizarre hurricane season is one of these results; the plague of sick and dying fish and other aquatic life-forms is another. But how can anyone make us stand up and take notice? Even more importantly, what can we do about it?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr has tackled that subject head on in his deeply moving and compelling Crimes Against Nature. He has shown what has happened to the environment, especially in the last few years under a hostile presidential administration. The facts detailed in his book make for sober reading, especially concerning the wholesale rejection by the Bush White House of all the advances made under the Clinton administration. He shows beyond any reasonable doubt that the Bush administration dropped charges against major polluters – charges brought against them under Clinton – and actually installed some of these indicted individuals as environmental watchdogs, an act of obscenity that is only possible when committed by the coldly cynical. The very name of Kennedy, however, will guarantee that the book will be read and embraced by one element of our population while being studiously ignored by another.
It is perhaps no mere coincidence that the next great work about the environment and what can be done by ordinary citizens to stop the carnage would be written by an author with close ties to the Kennedy mystique.
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