Ignorance--invincible ignorance--is a powerful political force.
There is a long-term, very powerful strain of politics in America that loves to hate government. Government, of course, is just the way a community, or nation, of people govern themselves. People without government might be a theme song in the mountains of Idaho or the swamps of right wing politicians, but a community of people who will not govern themselves is a dangerous place.
We lived in Minnesota for a decade, and learned to love almost everything about it except the brutal winter weather, and even it was a better form of winter than . . . oh, Chicago, for instance, where the snow was soggy, with the intent of turning every alley into a glacial bed with ruts. "The Land of 10,000 Lakes" is a beautiful place, and Minnesotans love their "cabins". Some are actually cabins, but thousands of them are lake homes. No lake? No point in building a summer home!
Now, Minnesotans are finally realizing that their lakes are dying, and the reason is that the lake shores are being stripped of their wildness to make room for cabins. The forests have become just trees, left for looks, and the land beyond has become fields and fertilizer, and everything the farmers and the cabin people waste ends up in the lakes; sometimes directly, and more often gradually and permanently.
So Mille Lacs is losing its enormous population of walleyes. And that is a crime against civilization itself!
Minnesota is, by most measurements, a very well-governed place. Minnesotans care for their lakes and schools and most of their roads and bridges, but like most of the rest of us, even Minnesotans are lured by the seduction of more personal freedom and less government and lower taxes and doing what they want to do, if they can. But the fact is that the lakes are dying because too many forests have been shaved off the lake shores, too many cabins and septic tanks have been buried, side by side, and too many tankloads of fertilizer have been oozing down to the lakes.
When people understand that, and if they want to change what is happening, they have to govern themselves and their habits. It is the lure of every man for his own cabin-if-he-can-squeeze-it-in that inevitably destroys the thing he loves most: the lake itself.
Minnesota is actually a poor example of "every man for himself"--it is not such a place--but to the extent that the common chant of individual freedom from government interference is there, it contributes to dead lakes, and shoulder-to-shoulder cabins, and green fields of corn and beans without a single weed, and big white tanks of liquid fertilizer on wheels like beads around a pasture. It is wilderness that makes lovely lakes. Sewage does not do that. Chemicals do not do that. Damning the regulations does not do that. Political dances, and chants about rugged individualism, and pretending that freedom is doing whatever you damned well can get away with, is not how either we or the lakes can live.
We have to govern ourselves, and that is a good thing, to be fervently desired, if for no other reason so that the lakes may live.
We lived in Minnesota for a decade, and learned to love almost everything about it except the brutal winter weather, and even it was a better form of winter than . . . oh, Chicago, for instance, where the snow was soggy, with the intent of turning every alley into a glacial bed with ruts. "The Land of 10,000 Lakes" is a beautiful place, and Minnesotans love their "cabins". Some are actually cabins, but thousands of them are lake homes. No lake? No point in building a summer home!
Now, Minnesotans are finally realizing that their lakes are dying, and the reason is that the lake shores are being stripped of their wildness to make room for cabins. The forests have become just trees, left for looks, and the land beyond has become fields and fertilizer, and everything the farmers and the cabin people waste ends up in the lakes; sometimes directly, and more often gradually and permanently.
So Mille Lacs is losing its enormous population of walleyes. And that is a crime against civilization itself!
Minnesota is, by most measurements, a very well-governed place. Minnesotans care for their lakes and schools and most of their roads and bridges, but like most of the rest of us, even Minnesotans are lured by the seduction of more personal freedom and less government and lower taxes and doing what they want to do, if they can. But the fact is that the lakes are dying because too many forests have been shaved off the lake shores, too many cabins and septic tanks have been buried, side by side, and too many tankloads of fertilizer have been oozing down to the lakes.
When people understand that, and if they want to change what is happening, they have to govern themselves and their habits. It is the lure of every man for his own cabin-if-he-can-squeeze-it-in that inevitably destroys the thing he loves most: the lake itself.
Minnesota is actually a poor example of "every man for himself"--it is not such a place--but to the extent that the common chant of individual freedom from government interference is there, it contributes to dead lakes, and shoulder-to-shoulder cabins, and green fields of corn and beans without a single weed, and big white tanks of liquid fertilizer on wheels like beads around a pasture. It is wilderness that makes lovely lakes. Sewage does not do that. Chemicals do not do that. Damning the regulations does not do that. Political dances, and chants about rugged individualism, and pretending that freedom is doing whatever you damned well can get away with, is not how either we or the lakes can live.
We have to govern ourselves, and that is a good thing, to be fervently desired, if for no other reason so that the lakes may live.
Comments
Post a Comment