18. Our Changing Environment

We are camping on an island in Lake George, near the eastern boundary of New York's Adirondacks. We delight in this lake for many reasons, but chief among them is the cool, clear water, so close that ten steps take us from our sleeping bags to the first swim of the day. We drink the lake water—wherever we are, and this is also a special pleasure.

But the water today is seldom as the explorers found it. Our campsite lake, which we drink from, is exceptional. Today no sensible person would dip a drinking cup into the Potomac River, or the Hudson, or the Ohio, or Lake Michigan. Even a woodland spring can not be trusted unless it has been tested and certified.

A few of the settlers who floated down the Ohio River went ashore and built homes beside a certain creek that flows into the river from the north. The creek was clear and bubbling then. In time it was used to turn a miller's wheel.

Recently I spent most of a day exploring this creek, but not for pleasure. The mill no longer stands. The settlement has become a city. Factories have displaced cornfields, and tall apartment buildings stand where trees once grew. The creek's banks are raw and ugly, strewn with rotting and rusting debris. Between the riverbanks a thick, repulsive, dark fluid flows sluggishly, carrying rags, paper, and assorted filth.

Shocking as this creek is, it is not the exception. Pollution of our rivers, streams, lakes, and ponds has become the common condition.

As I worked at my campsite table, a young man came by and asked what I was writing about. To keep it short, I said, "Air and water pollution." He nodded, then shrugged.

"So what's there to write about?" he demanded; "So the rivers are dirty. So we make people keep them clean. What else?"

It can seem just that simple. Pollution is often made to seem like a struggle between the Good Guys and the Bad Guys, the Good Guys seeking stiffer laws to stop the greedy Bad Guys from poisoning the air and fouling the water. Here at this lake, the Good Guys are still ahead. Here they have stopped the Bad Guys' occasional offenses. But an army of policemen could not clean up that horrid creek in Ohio. They could drag every offender into court, and the creek would still run foul. The causes of water pollution, and air pollution too, are deep in the fabric of our urban, industrial society. In truth, there are no Good Guys. We are all offenders. '

At our island camp we are far removed from such darkened air and befouled water. The air smells of pine, and the water is clear and blue. The landscape seems unmarked by ax or plow. But the appearance of wilderness is deceptive. Even this clear air and water carry the traces of contamination. Even here, birds and fish have been killed by man's new poisons. Here, and at home, we breathe the air and drink the water; we have no other choice. This is our environment.