​The New York Times front- and several page report May 1, 2022 on racist mythologist Tucker Carlson[i] (descended from Henry Miller, who gained ownership of vast tracts of land after the Mexican-American war), made me think about Karl Lueger, mayor of Vienna from 1897 until his death in 1910, whose “particularly aggressive anti-Semitism” was “central” to his election (Times of Israel).[ii]  Even though he tried to move away from “hatred of a minority” in office, that’s how he built his career.  Hitler viewed Lueger as a model in Mein Kampf.  The simple answer - it’s the fault of those people over there – that appealed to him, now draws many into the pernicious trap of “white grievance”.  

Carlson’s “data-driven” business approach taught him to step up what sells and he now has a lock on support from Lachlan Murdock.  They see no problem with this route to success, like Lueger.  They are dividing the house, and we will all reap the whirlwind they are stirring unless we meet this challenge with effective response. This Times coverage is of historical proportions and should be read by all environmental citizens because what’s coming could be more powerful than heated hurricanes and tornados. 

In Wittgenstein’s Vienna[iii] one reads how Lueger became more center-right, as if he were just using the appeal to people’s fears to get into power. Carlson may think of himself as center-right.  He began as a libertarian.  Now he is leading a cultural war.  He reminds us too of Nixon and others who were not devil madmen like Hitler or Putin, but in pandering to the right were great Pandoras (none of them women): people who open the box of social horrors.

If we are to turn back the Nazification of America we should stop anticipating the Night of the Living Dead, viewing Republican voters like zombie followers of leaders with dead souls.  We must instead think of other analogies in our effort to free them from the captured herd.  Cowboy heroes can help here, resisters of the mob, what Toto the dog does at the end of the Wizard of Oz, the crusty old town liberated by a Barbara Stanwyck vitality or a Gregory Peck integrity – there are so many stories that can inspire us to try to reach those now captured by what was described years ago as The Republic Noise Machine.[iv]  A cultural war is being waged against those of us who cling to the American Dream of equality, and we must learn to use stories as do the enemies of democracy. 

Purpose and Context

​What can the environmental citizen do?  When one pays attention to what is happening in the world, this question presses so large that it threatens to destroy focus.  The welter of messes is confusing and disorienting.  Clarity helps.

Some students bring the clarity of urgency to my classes.  They are clear that they want to do something even though they don't know what it is yet.  Even though such large problems loom and it must also be overwhelming to think how the generations before them failed, the determination to do something brings a sense of purpose, gives you a place in the world, a kind of light, a feeling of clarity.  You may not know how the hell you will make progress, but you have found something to believe in. 

Our stability is greatly tested when the world falls into war, and nuclear war threats suddenly rise up.  Now the environmental citizen has to be thinking about the peace movement.  War overshadows all of our plans to figure out what to do about plastics, toxics, climate change, loss of habitat.  The environmental movement did, at the beginning, feel like an outgrowth of the VietNam protest era, the next thing you did to change the world after marching wasn’t enough. Things have come full circle and we are back at the beginning, with peace.
​
I, like other children, was terrified of A- and H-bombs[1] before I knew about pesticides and birds.  It was the spreading of radioactive strontium-90 from nuclear testing that was one of the first great alarms about ourselves, about what “we” were doing to the world.  Barry Commoner[2] and Linus Pauling[3] helped people understand the relationship – to see the particles raining down on the grass and being eaten by the cows and then in the milk children drink, and then damaging their chromosomes.  Fallout’s poisoning showed how we are all connected in a tragedy.

​Even if no one cares, I feel bad that I have posted only one blog at this site in 2021.  I suppose I have been like so many who took the election of Joe Biden as a reason to take a break from what feels like the front lines of a very tiring war.  Constantly attending to environmental issues, and the battle for the rule of law, for reason and mutual respect, can be like carrying a heavy weight.  Environmental citizens need rest sometimes from carrying that weight.  But picking it up again can make you feel strong, purposeful, engaged.  And despite the continuing darkness of the news, there are signs of light – there is a real prospect now of money flowing to much-needed efforts, such as the removal of lead from our homes and surroundings.
​
In my class Research for Environmental Agencies and Organizations I offer students a list of projects, and each semester I include something about lead poisoning prevention.  One student signed on to help me promote a bill that is now before the Massachusetts legislature[1], submitted by Senator Patricia Jehlen, similar to a bill she submitted many years ago.  The intent of the bill is to overcome the barriers to suing those who recklessly placed lead in commerce, knowing it will harm people, and doing nothing to prevent that harm.  If companies make a product that they ought to know would likely harm people, the law should provide for both compensation to victims and punishment for those who unreasonably cause harm, so that others will be deterred from doing the same thing.  But when you can’t prove that the harm you experienced was caused by a particular company that company gets away with their malfeasance.  The bill that Jehlen put forth many years ago would have imposed “market share liability”, allowing the apportionment of liability according to the market share a company had of that product, treating all the members of industry who behaved the same way as culpable.  The current bill allows the court more flexibility to determine how to allocate responsibility, but it’s the same idea: no one should get away with such anti-social behavior simply because the specific product maker can’t be identified. 

​Among all the distressing news of our impact on the planet is evidence of rising awareness, which brings the hope of behavior change.  As a lifelong environmentalist I am used to hearing that “people don’t change”, and while my own profession showed me repeatedly that they can - for the better, too – the dominant trends have too often seemed to reflect arrested development of the body politic.  And while so many steps have been taken towards the world we deserve and the rest of life deserves from us, it has so often seemed pathetically not nearly enough.  Nevertheless, at the same time that one grapples with that feeling, one can and should also recognize good news.
​
To mention just a few highlights: Scott Cassel’s decades-long work with the Product Stewardship Institute, after quiet victories in state after state, got national attention with Maine’s plastic recycling mandate;[i] Norway, the leading European producer of fossil fuels, just had what is being called a “climate election”;[ii] Representative Barbara Lee, the sole opponent of the Authorization for Use of Military Force[iii] which gave G.W. Bush the power to wage war in Afghanistan and then Iraq, is now joined by “almost every Democrat” and 49 Republicans in her decades-long effort to repeal this open permission to wage war,[iv] and the aid provided during the pandemic has substantially reduced the poverty rate.  For those who realize that protecting the planet requires not just smart regulation but also reorienting government towards peace and prosperity, these are good signs.