Pamela's Blog 33

Published on Thursday, July 9, 2009 by Nas2EndWork.org

“The Devastated Earthscapes From Lawrence Summers' "Logic"”

by Pamela Satterwhite

When Lawrence Summers was a World Bank economist he wrote in an internal memo that “the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that…I’ve always thought that underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly underpolluted.”

Well, what I think we need to face up to is that this mentality – this notion that nature, including you and me, exists at the pleasure of the world’s irreverents – has insinuated itself into the raw material – us – as well. How could it not, when those with the big, wide, open mouths have swallowed our forests, our farmlands, our commons – when our children are taught to take tests and follow orders… when they’re taught to take from the earth without reverence, rather than develop a relationship and systematically cultivate, in conversation with the earth – including the earth that is their brothers and sisters.

When my son and I moved to our small house in South Berkeley seventeen years ago, I didn’t know it but I was embarking on a long dialogue with the children of our neighborhood about the earth. I was a very unconscious participant in this dialogue and a distinctly grumpy one. Over the course of the conversation I’ve watched children pull up an entire strawberry plant to get a single strawberry; parents pull down a whole plum branch to get a plum; teenage “radicals” strip the peach tree overnight because they were living ‘light’ *; adults trample basil and thyme underfoot because they didn’t know they were there; teenage boys throw unripe fruit at each other like snowballs. Along the way I called myself trying to educate, but it always came across like selfishness. “Why is she tripping over a few plums?” I heard one mother say when I came out to ask them to please ask. Why indeed? I could never adequately explain my connection to the plants. I’d try, of course. “All of these trees grew from compost,” I said, “from seeds.” It was like they were my babies. “I‘ve watched that plum tree grow from just a tiny sprout.”

At some point, a year or two ago, it occurred to me that I really hadn’t been listening too well to the earth myself. For years I fumed at the children’s impatience, at their picking the plums before they were ripe. “How wasteful!” I’d think, “there won’t be any left to get sweet!”

But there always (well, mostly) were.

And even when there wasn’t (as happened last year when someone stripped the peach tree overnight, later returning all the pits…[wow…thanks…]), wasn’t I missing the trees for the fruit? Gradually, over time, more and more children have begun coveting the fruit as food rather than projectiles. Gradually, over time, perhaps the seed of a relationship is germinating?

A year ago a young man in our neighborhood was killed. I think about Brandon Terrell Jones often. He was about my son’s age, could easily have been one of the children climbing the plum tree. That we accept the deaths of children and youth, and the trashing of the planet, as a matter of course is...

Here in low-wage South Berkeley the message our children receive is that they don’t matter, that our bodies, our minds, our earth, are dumping grounds for a dying system’s toxic waste. Everything is upside down in this strange world, as Eduardo Galeano has pointed out. Junk has ‘value,’ and our precious fruit is ‘waste.’

Perhaps it’s time to awake from our long sleep and begin voting with our feet...and hands...and reverence, creating now – not in some distant future – the world we want. It was with this thought and Brandon Terrell Jones in mind that I began planting seeds, feet from where he fell. Will it make any difference? Time will tell.

* I never heard the end of it from Mrs. Trotter, who’d acquired a bunch of jars to hold all the peach preserves she’d been planning to make.

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Pamela's Blog 33

Published on Thursday, July 9, 2009 by Nas2EndWork.org

“The Devastated Earthscapes From Lawrence Summers' "Logic"”