And He Is Us." --Pogo

It was my original intention in designing this course that it would look at the environmental crisis from the diverse perspectives of the worlds' sacred traditions. I wanted to look at some of our problems and see what these religions had to say or offer by way of help or solution or if in some cases they were themselves part of the problem. The course would explore historical and current environmental topics around the world through the texts and thought of classic thinkers of these traditions such as the Hebrew prophets and psalmists, Lao-Tzu and the nature philosophers of China, the Pure Land prophets of Buddhism, the austere monistic thinkers of Upanisadic Hinduism, the communal thinkers of the Native American tradition, the new theologies of the Gaia and feminist movements, and the emerging voices of the neo-ecological Christians. This was my plan when I first taught this course two years ago, and we largely followed it during that semester.

It had been my intention to follow the same syllabus again this year, but I have changed my mind. More directly: my mind has been changed by my observing once again in Sewanee the effects of our inability--not just as the Sewanee community or as the University of the South--as nation, as a people, to see and understand environmental and ecological problems in their double complexity as both local and systematic problems of our life upon the earth. We here come as close as any community to being an enlightened community--a common-minded group of people who have the resources of thought, tradition, experience to guide them. And unlike any other community in the country [excepting only perhaps the very artificial communities of military bases], we have virtually complete control over our extensive local environment. And as a major liberal arts university teaching a wide range of courses in earth sciences and moral theory and producing dozens of graduates from our full range of majors who go into environmental careers, we have exemplary educational resources to draw upon.

And yet our environmental failures in Sewanee are as generic [even if not as massive], as those of any other region or community. I do not mean that somehow Sewanee is a bad place or that it is "worse" than everywhere else. Far from it. What I mean is that the environmental and ecological problems that we too typically associate with high profile media environmentalism are present here in their generic but prosaic forms. Sewanee is not an arcadian paradise, "a city on a hill in a wood," set apart. We are not set apart. We seamlessly merge with Atlanta and Los Angeles and with east Tennessee and the Columbia River basin in our relation to and effect upon our environment. Solid waste management is an insidious urban problem: but no less so for us or for the people of Ladd Cove. In fact, I will argue that these are not two problems made different by geographic and demographic separation but are the same problem seamlessly extended across America and represented just as graphically in Sewanee as in Atlanta or Los Angeles.

It is, I believe, the great failure of media environmentalism--and of the accommodation of educated environmentalism to media driven awareness--that we as a people have come to stereotypically think of the environmental crisis in terms of big, system-breaking events, disasters, losses: Chernobyl, the "Rain Forest"--whatever that is--whales, the Exxon Valdez, snail darters and spotted owls. I certainly do not mean to minimize these matters--but they are distractions and I do mean to shift our angle of vision about them: they are carefully manipulated distractions that keep us from understanding or acting upon what we need to understand and act upon. And as we are learning, the consequence of our commitment to these causes has a peculiar way of eventually reversing itself and we often find things worse than before. The rage against the Spotted Owl now endangers more than one species. But as we have yet to learn, our passion for these causes blinds us to more important, but less dramatic, concerns that remain unaddressed even while we think we are saving some feature of the environment.

We cannot begin to understand the world until we understand where we live; we cannot begin to change the world until we can change our yard or our street. This is not impossible, but it is very, very difficult. And if it is very, very difficult in a place like Sewanee, it becomes more difficult as we move outward from here into places of less wisdom, experience, education. It may appear that by roundabout means I am endorsing the familar environmental slogan, "Think globally; act locally." I am not. We can do neither until we begin to think locally and we cannot think locally until we dispell the myths and stereotypes and see what is in front of us. If we cannot see that, if we cannot incorporate local thinking into a systems picture of environmental disorder, then we cannot think or act any where with integrity or effect.

Here are some examples taken from our life in Sewanee:

--waste management: this is the trashiest nice place I have ever seen; somehow Sewanee people--typically you as students, but including the University itself--has become convinced that Arcadia is an Applachian dump; and we throw our trash everywhere. Nor is this a practise only of the lower classes of our local society; it is an endemic practise of our community. Somehow the people who come here think they acquire a natural right to throw their trash on the ground. Until I moved to Sewanee I had accepted and thought in terms of the stereotype that it is poor people who do trashy things and pollute their environment with debris; conversely, I had thought that the refined people knew better and sought to keep their surroundings tidy and clean. Sewanee has dispelled this stereotype for me. [Mardi Gras trip, Hunter dorm, Berry College comparison]

--food: we generate a particularly disturbing form of waste here: every day of the year, we throw out over 1000 #--a pound per day per student--a half a ton--45,000# per semester, 45 tons per year--of usable food from your dining hall; this is mostly surplus food that was taken onto plates and then only partially eaten or not eaten at all; this particular waste is both an environmental and moral disorder in our life. Every pound of food we throw away here has the nutritional value to keep a child alive, but in the peculiar regulatory madness of our culture, it cannot even be used to feed pigs. Nor is this waste food recycled as compost; instead it is trucked to a neighboring county to be dumped into a multi-county landfill.

--automobile effects [traffic, emissions, noise, runoff]: locally our vision of envionmental management of the car is to throw rocks at it; the environmental effects of so much congestion in so small a place have not been addressed much less the ecological effects of runoff from our parking lots into the watersheds around us; we can hire a special crew whose job it is to use weedeaters around rocks but we cannot provide a campus bus service.

--wildness/wilderness, biodiversity: we have a 10,000 acre domain, the second largest of all American colleges or universities and yet our inherited forest is a cut-over wasteland of scrub trees and a century and a half into our ownership of this land we still do not have an environmental plan to guide our use of the land or to identify the critical elements of flora and fauna that need recognition and protection here. The original forest is gone without trace in memory or knowledge.[1] This absence, this loss, now keeps us from understanding what the healthy ecosystem of the plateau once was, leaving us to quarrel over cutting non-indigenous trash species.

--soil protection/siltation: our approach to construction site management is as callous and un-enlightened as I have seen anywhere; it represents--in the heart of a liberal university--as backward and benighted disregard for effects and example as any thing I know of on this campus. The construction practices at Fowler Center ruined a pleasant stream; it cast uncounted tons of silt over the edge of the bluff into the clear streams below. Local reaction to this abuse polarized powerful elements of the community and led to a story in the Tennessean. The reconstruction of Hodgson as a dormitory over the last year only reveals how little we learned from Fowler--or how willing we are to scorn even the simplest principles of watershed protection unless pressured by vocal watchdog groups. Unfortunately the favored status of Abbo's Alley did not extend to the stream once it crossed South Carolina Avenue and erosion cut that site without check. [By contrast, the Wiggins Creek development has been exemplary for runoff and erosion protection yet it never occurred to anyone to extend the practices at Wiggins Creek to Hodgson even though the same people were in charge and were in full knowledge of the concerns about watershed protection being voiced in the community, concerns given focal recognition by the Board of Regents.[2]]

--economic stratification: we know nationally, globally, locally that waste and pollution are driven by differentials of wealth; ultimately the environment and its management is not a problem of scientific ecology but of moral economics. Pollution and waste are driven by the greed of a few, the needs of many. Sewanee has been historically unable to overcome the powerful and blighting economic differentials that have trapped members of its community in the double spiral of poverty and ignorance. We are a community of high education yet we have in our community people who still cannot read. We are a community of affluence with vestiges of Third World poverty within two blocks of our chapel. As a community we wasted the economic resource base of our citizens for decades to come in the folly of our waste water treatment plant and grandiose incompetency of our utility district; the monetary burden of that incompetency falls disproportionately upon Sewanee's poor. The entire Sewanee community including the University must now deal with the effects of the multi-million dollar debt of the utility district--one half of which would have funded a new elementary school in this town or easily replaced all existing sub-standard housing along with providing a community center or childcare facility.

--population: we know that globally the single critical factor in environmental quality now and for the future is not the presence or absence of technology or industry but population growth. Population growth is outrunning all environmental agendas. But if an enlightened educational community such as ours cannot overcome prejudice about the use and availability of birth control education and protection, how on earth [in the name of God?] can we expect others to accomplish this?

--air pollution: the proven carcenogenic effects of the combustion products of tobacco is the deadliest form of environmental pollution in the world (in America alone 1000 people per day die from it), yet we here--as most of the rest of America--are locked in the throes of 18th Century individualist thinking as we try to defend our "right" to this abuse. (When I mention air pollution, of course, we all begin to protest: "But there are no smokestacks around Sewanee"--so complete is the effect of the stereotype about the sources of air pollution.) We are organizationally unable to deal with this product, to control its waste and safety dimensions, or to provide protection from it to those members of our community who wish to avoid it. If there is any issue that reveals the impossibility of any liberal agenda of environmental reform in the world today it is tobacco usage.

--watershed management: Sewanee is set upon the convergence of three watersheds--the Elk River, Crow Creek, and Battle Creek. We have downstream neighbors in three directions yet we build parking lots and spill silt without thought as if there were no effect whatever from our runoffs; we have tolerated septic tanks and septic pollution of these watersheds for decades when we already knew that our practices were bad for health and for the environment. Abbo's Alley most of the year is not only a trashed stream because of gross mismanagement of the Fowler Center site but is--literally--an open sewer. Only this year, after more than a quarter century of problems will the main sewer there be fixed; and even after it is fixed, sewerage still drains into the stream from defective domestic lines from the houses on the perimeter of the Alley. Most of the cave and spring water surrounding the Domain is polluted with our septic runoff: don't drink the water or wade in the streams! Further out from the center of campus we have acquired a property with a defective dam which under certain conditions could threaten the lives of everyone who lives in Ladd Cove. It is estimated that we face a potential $50 million liability in the event of the catastrophic failure of this dam. Yet we have chosen not to fix the dam but to close the property in order to take advantage of a loophole in Tennessee law that frees us of liability if the property is not in use.

I could go on. I will, during the course of this semester, go on. Before I do, however, you must understand this. I mention these things not because I believe that there is a dark force or evil hand at work; certainly I do not mention them because I believe some one individual is at fault. I do not believe that. I mention these things because they disclose that our Arcadia is no different from any other place--not in the material fact of our environmental problems and not in our capacity to temporize or to deny the existence of those problems. Not least in the complexity of the solutions to our problems. We are not a community of industrial moguls or greedy politicians or of callous citizens. We are informed, we care, and yet for our knowledge and care our problems are as general as in any other community. And like other communities we persist here in thinking silly solutions like recycling and roadside pickups and earth day make a difference. They do not. We will never understand natural ecology or environmental issues until we abandon utterly these comfortable refuges of commitment.

We must begin anew and we must begin here. Not in the rainforest; not with the whales; not with Spotted Owls. At Sewanee. Sewanee is the Chernobyl of romantic environmentalism.