Feral in the Burbs by Sir Simon Schama (a reflection on the environment,Trump and nature)
Feral in the Burbs
By Sir Simon Schama For Writers Rebel
7th August 2020
... The force field of the elements all seems of a piece with our primal condition right now, especially in the stricken American Republic: a deadly plague prolonged by the bone-headed ideology equating mask-wearing with a violation of individual liberty; all presided over (mostly from his golf courses) by a president of breathtakingly dangerous ignorance, consuming egomania and calloused incapacity for empathy with the loved ones of 150,000 fatalities.
The election approaches: one of comparable momentousness for the life of American democracy as 1860 and 1932, in countless profound respects not least the fate of the national – and indeed international – environment. The damage Trump has done through executive orders alone over three and a half years of malign wreckage has been incalculable. One of his very first executive orders (after annulling a prohibition on unchecked firearms purchases for the mentally ill) was to gut prohibitions on the discharge of toxic industrial liquid waste into the headwaters of riparian systems. The destruction has gone on and on. The Environmental Protection Agency has been turned into a parody of its name, little more than a clearing house for fossil fuel and mineral extraction lobbyists who have been lent a helping hand in removing all impediments to a free-for-all acceleration of achieving short term profit at the expense of long term environmental and public health. It was unsurprising when, in an darkly hilarious attempt to present himself as guardian of national parks, Trump failed to correctly pronounce the name of the very first and most famous created by Abraham Lincoln for the state of California in 1863, voicing it as Yo-Semite – a greeting instantly available for all Jews…
... In wildness is the preservation of the world,” Thoreau famously preached, and rightly, but he also didn’t mean seeking and cherishing it in the far-off. Walden Pond, even then, was suburban. The places where millions of us live (and, as Trump will discover, vote), is not necessarily all about herbicide, lawnmowers and golf. It’s also the trill of the peeper and the skitter of the much-maligned bat, an entire lavish, robust ecology that asks no more than we do no harm for it to return, flourish and populate the magic fringes of the urban world.
Sir Simon Schama is University Professor of Art History and History at Columbia University; the author of 19 books including Landscape and Memory, and writer/ presenter of over fifty TV films for the BBC. His latest series, The Romantics and Us, will air on BBC2 in mid September.
https://writersrebel.com/feral-in-the-burbs/
Wonderful essay with his trademark expressive writing. Worth the entire read.
= new reply since forum marked as read
for being an author. That is quite an accomplishment!