Week 14 on the Campaign Trail or Why Green is Good!

I grew up in East Hartford – a blue collar working class community whose principle employer was Pratt & Whitney Aircraft. The family lived on Stanley Street just down from St. Mary’s School, and the closest I ever got to wildlife in my childhood was playing on the great dike where I would see an occasional garter snake or rabbit. I still vividly recall the first deer I saw as a child driving out Silver Lane past the old pickle barn and processing facility and just crossing into Manchester where the entrance ramp to I 384 East is now. There, by the side of the road, stood a fawn grazing with no apparent concern for our family car that had pulled over to observe what struck me at the time as an absolutely wondrous experience.

Back then, there was no zoning to speak of and tank farms sprouted like dandelions along the shores of the Connecticut and other state rivers. Back then, the agricultural farms growing vegetables and tobacco that lined Silver Lane and stretched into Manchester enticed developers with local encouragement to erect box stores to house J. M. Fields, Bradley’s, K-Mart and other retail outlets that if not extinct, then have abandoned both the store and the community that once housed them. Back then, builders managed wetlands (I still prefer the term swampland) by dumping fill and building upon the uncompacted soil. Back then, if a stream meandered in such a way as to interfere with the cookie cutter layout of a subdivision then a contractor in Glastonbury was known to bulldoze that stream straight down the hill!

In the late 50’s, Steinbeck was driving across America with his dog, Charlie.   As he stopped and visited small towns chosen from the WPA (Works Progress Administration) Guide in his possession, he expressed amazement that many Americans were unaware of their surroundings, their life, even their culture.

His semi-fictional account of that journey Travels with Charlie was published in 1962 and sold well reaching the number one position on the New York Times Best Seller list before it was displaced by Rachel’s Carson’s, Silent Spring.

I recently reread both books and in that revisiting of two old friends found parallels between them that I had not noticed before. The first, Steinbeck’s lament written during the twilight of post war America with Eisenhower interstate highways opening or under construction, disposable plastics replacing returnable glass, and “Better Living Through Chemistry” – the bywords of the day - echoing a widely held set of beliefs that nature could and should be improved upon. While the second, Carson’s book, speaking slowly and deliberately into that same echo chamber of public opinion a warning that the materialism, scientism, and technologically engineered control of nature if left unfettered ultimately would destroy us.

Over the past half century, these two very different voices one of an author with advancing heart disease the other battling cancer have influenced generations of young people who have taken the first steps in a very long journey of returning our society to one (to steal a phrase from another time and place) that will live in peaceful co-existence with the earth.

Few, if any, of these efforts like deposits on bottles, land use regulations and improvements in sewage waste purification were made easily. Each faced a tenuous journey when introduced to the legislature as each small step towards living in harmony with the environment meant that some small special interest group would lose money. Like the wolf in that children’s tale about three little pigs, these wolves huffed, puffed, and spent freely to influence the decision making process in their direction. Fortunately, they were not completely successful. Laws in some states like Connecticut were enacted to reduce the waste stream of plastic bottles into the environment, rules were created to make the development of wetlands (swampland) and flood plains more difficult, and ever-so-slowly Connecticut’s rivers are becoming less the open sewers they once were. Still, this journey to a cleaner and healthier environment has just begun. It will require the public’s continued demands on its local, state, and federal legislators (of which I hope to be one of those state legislators representing the people of the 13th State House District) that breathing fresh air, drinking clean water, and not living in a sea of asphalt is not the privilege of the few but the right of us all.