As a boy, I lived for a time in the country and I clearly remember an experience from those days: I used to walk school in a nearby village along a cart track through the fields and, on the way, see on the horizon a huge smokestack of war. It spewed dense brown smoke and scattered it across the sky. Each time I saw it, I had an intense sense of something profoundly wrong, of humans soiling the heavens. I have no idea whether there was something like a science of ecology in those days; if there was, I certainly knew nothing of it. It seemed to me that, in it, humans are guilty of something, that they destroy something important, arbitrarily disrupting the natural order of things, and that such things cannot go unpunished. To be sure, my revulsion was largely aesthetic; I knew nothing then of the noxious emissions which would one day devastate our forests, exterminate game, and endanger the health of the people.
If a medieval man were to see something like that suddenly on the horizon — say, while out hunting — he would probably think it the work of the Devil and would fall on his knees and pray that he and his kin be saved.
Văclav Havel, Politics and Conscience, 1984 speech
Kit Stolz 
I’ve always felt the same way. Being born and raised and living my whole life in coastal California, certain kinds of “smokestack” realities have always shocked me. The train ride from Southhampton to the grimy suburbs of London in 1972 was deeply disturbing as was the cab ride from the airport to downtown Tokyo in the same year, not to mention the train ride by the thankfully dead factories on Lake Michigan in the 1990s. Closer to home, the grotesque energy plants on the way to San Pedro and Long Beach and the entire freeway culture of the formerly paradisical Los Angeles County have always struck me as stupendously wrong, and the phrase you quote from Havel, “arbitrarily disrupting the natural order of things, and that such things cannot go unpunished,” is disturbingly obvious but not to the majority of people who, for whatever reasons, simply accept reality as served and explained by the culture around them.
Thanks for the post.
LikeLike
Thanks Mike. The intuitive aspect of this is fascinating to me. Knowing it’s wrong without science, as Havel says. How do we do that?
LikeLike