I’ve worked at two different kinds of jobs in my brief 20
years—one that stimulates my mind and soul and satisfies the curious
outdoorsman in me, and retail. And I haven’t worked retail much—just long
enough to learn to despise it and that the biosphere is headed for the gutter.
Let me explain.
One particular day, during the few months I was employed by
The Orvis Company in Charlottesville prior to college, a woman entered the
store with her black lab. As she perused a shelf of gloves, I approached her
and asked if I could do anything for her. She asked a series of piercing
questions, to which I confidently provided answers I’d previously prepared by
reading the garment’s packaging. She became incredulous and irate at my
ineptitude after asking whether or not the gloves would conform to her hand
over time and, having never worn that particular pair of women’s gloves for
multiple seasons, I had to admit I didn’t know. She left the store silently,
leaving behind a fresh pile of scat on the pebbly floor that I confidently
identified as a black lab’s.
After sifting through some strong adjectives, I got to
thinking about the implications of her actions. Had she returned during my
employment, I likely wouldn’t have greeted her so cheerfully. But what if she
treated others the same way? I for one would think twice before allowing my dog
to defecate on my barber’s floor, before insulting a potentially vengeful chef.
But in an era when goods and services are acquired easily and impersonally, the
motivation to respect the origins of such things is voluntary at best. The
social ethic is weak.
In a simpler time, when small businesses ruled and
globalization hadn’t yet broken communal webs to bits, a respectful
relationship with a farmer would ensure that you and your family had quality
food when he had his. Loyalty to a mechanic or horseshoer would mean continued transportation
and help in a fix.
Small towns and the writing trade mimic this. Respect intel
entrusted to you by a fly shop owner in humble Roscoe, New York, and you’ll get
more. Betray that trust, and you’ll be the most hated individual in the
Catskills. Consistently meet deadlines and turn in quality, well-researched writing,
and editors will come to rely on your name. Fail to meet deadlines or make a
habit of using copyrighted materials or faulty facts, and you’ll be blacklisted
and your career will end before it began. These people talk.
Rewind to a time even longer ago, when asphalt paved no inch
of this continent, when people wore skins after eating what was inside. Hunting
enabled eating, and was directly tied to forest health. The Shawnees of the
Shenandoah Valley knew their fishing success depended on their relationship
with the river, and that the vitality of their agricultural crop was a factor
of soil health, which could be bolstered by applying fish for fertilizer.
I hadn’t quite been born to experience those times, but I
have a sneaking suspicion that any individual so blind to even think about clear-cutting
a mountain, or dumping human waste into the Shenandoah River—or, God forbid,
Naked Creek—would have been dutifully shunned. It’s most likely, however, that
such transgressions were committed only by angry, rogue individuals. It’s
downright dumb to think it inconsequential to torch your food supply.
Despite it being lawfully looked down upon, a modern person
of even base intelligence would comprehend the negative social impacts of
burning down the local grocery store or poisoning the water supply. But the
reality is that, though we’ve grown perceptually further apart from nature over
the course of industrial human history, our dependence on the greater world
ecosystem has remained static.
Maybe it’s not everyday news for someone to burn the grocery
store or poison the well, but acts like littering, spraying volumes of
pesticides and fertilizers, and even the occasional (and totally preventable) oil
spill achieve the same ends. Declining water quality due to contamination breeds
declining soil quality, which requires farmers to pump more chemicals into
their fields, lowering the nutritional value of our food, and killing the soil,
requiring increasingly larger volumes of chemical correction. These acts often
go unpunished, fly completely under the radar of the general public, or are
hardly thought of as harmful. Or, the effects raise a temporary eyebrow, soon
lowered with the idea that humans, in their fallacious, God-like reign over
planet Earth, can engineer their way to a happy ending.
Such thinking is irresponsible and short-sighted. Our social
contract with Mother Nature is weak, and until we recognize this, and learn
that we can’t poop on her floor without consequence, we will destroy ourselves
as a species, and the earth on which we live. □
*Originally published in the Rural Virginian
2 comments :
Thank you for your article, that all choices have consequences and that we should consider a few more them prior to making a decision, looking past the immediate gain and consider the longer term loss that come because of it. I enjoy your articles and look forward to reading them. Thank you again.
Many thanks for your readership! Don't hesitate in reaching out.
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