THE NYT ON THE ENVIRONMENT

Two recent examples:

Last week David Brooks wrote an article called, Our Sprawling, Supersize Utopia. In describing urban sprawl, one of the scourges of our time, an epidemic that threatens to devour every inch of American agricultural and wilderness land in this century, Brooks writes almost fondly, nostalgically:

One can almost imagine Brooks describing an atomic test in Nevada as an “iridescent sheen resplendent of all the hopes and dreams of our technology-driven future”. For urban sprawl, with its waste, its extravagant use of precious space, its depressing sameness and its disrespect — even total disregard — for the unique natural qualities of each community, razed and ploughed under to make every new sprawling blight on the landscape an indifferent imitation of every other, is nothing short of the A-bomb of the 21st century, inexorably destroying everything in its wake. It is an issue that is tearing the Sierra Club and other environmental groups apart.

Then this week, Jennifer 8. Lee (anyone know why the NYT uses a period after her middle ‘name’ — what is ‘8’ short for, anyway?), in an article called Clear Skies No More for Millions as Pollution Rule Expands, announces that, under ‘new’ 1997 guidelines, many counties will be listed as violating clean air standards that did not make the list under the old guidelines:

Lee reports that the new guidelines survived challenges all the way up to the arch-conservative Supreme Court. But there is no sense of crisis in the story. It’s almost as if the violations, which result in millions of premature deaths, massive costs from disease, and irreparable damage to the entire ecosystem, were some arbitrary and minor zoning violation, waiting for saner heads to prevail and overturn, in order to protect Brooks’ ‘latest iteration of the American dream’. These regulations aren’t designed to placate environmentalists, they’re designed to safeguard human health from egregious and pervasive threats. So where is the sense of urgency, or outrage, that millions will suffer profoundly and unnecessarily and die prematurely because of the self-interested negligence of reckless commercial enterprises?

What will it take before Americans realize that rapacious, greedy, destructive corporations do thousands of times more damage to the health, safety, lives and property of the American people than the worst terrorists could begin to imagine in their wildest dreams? What will it take before we realize that restricting immigration to prevent further urban sprawl and population explosion isn’t a matter of racist disregard for human suffering and inequality of opportunity, but a first step to recognize that the growth we worship threatens the very survival of our species and our world? What will it take before we recognize the ‘proximate connection’ between pollution and human disease and death, and prosecute and imprison the officers and directors of polluters as we do murderers?

Maybe the venerable reporters of the Times should ‘get out’ more.