What Have We Done?

Introduction

We at the Foundation for Global Sustainability who work to defend and heal have long been frustrated at our inability to communicate the depth, breadth, and multiplicity of the assaults our region faces. Legislators, policymakers, educators, citizens have a fragmentary awareness of some of the problems, but few have the interest or patience to develop a long-term synoptic ecological understanding. Yet ecological deterioration is systematic; a piecemeal approach misses the interrelations and cumulative impacts that give it urgency. What is needed is a deep, broad, long-term, multidimensional, multidisciplinary understanding-an understanding large enough to match our predicament.

Our State of the Bioregion Report,What Have We Done?, is our contribution to such an understanding. Over two years in the making, it is the effort of dozens of volunteers to synthesize our own experience, common sense, and the data from hundreds of scientific researchers into a coherent narrative. The report is emphatically not just one more bureaucratic or scientific assessment. We have striven for accuracy and accountability and have made ample use of what bureaucrats and scientists have discovered. But no contributor to this report has made or will make any money from it, nor has the report been funded by any outside organization. As a result, we have not been subjected to the pressures to distort or minimize or put the best face on things that inevitably comes from an institution with vested interests. This does not, of course, mean that we are unbiased. On the contrary: we are passionately biased-by our love for the wild mountains, lush forests, and shining rivers of Southern Appalachia.

This bias is unavoidable. The land we inhabit is infinitely complex, and every description of it-including our State of the Bioregion-is finite. Every description, then, is infinitely negligent. All authors, even the most rigorously scientific, select the facts that seem significant to them (or to their dicipline-or their bosses) and ignore the rest, and so shape their descriptions with their values. Our discipline is protection and healing of our environment, and those aims guide our description.

The description itself takes the form of a biorgional narrative-that is, a synoptic story of a land and it's people. The land is the watershed of the Upper Tennessee Valley, which we conceive as a bioregion-a place with a unique ecology and culture. The people-the "we" of the title What have we done?-are the people, mostly of European descent, who conquered this land in the eighteenth century and who dominate it today. It's former inhabitants, the Cherokees, called this land Katuah. We do not yet know it well enough to give it a name of our own.

We have written a bioregional narrative, rather than a scientific report, because we aim not only at truth, but at meaning. Meaning, of course, is a function of what we value. In the public discourse of American culture, value is often reduced to its least common denominator: market value. This we mourn.

Our narrative is shaped by a different value: health. By "health" we mean wholesomeness, healedness, hallowedness, holiness, the integrity of the whole-health not just of the body, but also of the land, the community, and the spirit; not just for those alive today but for those who will live here when we are gone; not just for human beings but for the entire community of life. Valuing health, we value much: the black bear and the red wolf, the Fraser fir and the Smoky madtom, the Tennessee River and the Cherokee National Forest, the child on our lap and the children to come. Through our narrative we aim to convey not only what is true about these things, but also their meaning when so valued.

Some people still insist that their are no serious environmental problems. Others, while acknowledging some general problems, seek in particular instances to reassure us that "the impact is so small it's not worth bothering about" or "it's still not good, but we are doing much better than we were twenty years ago," or "don't worry, we are only cutting twenty percent of the forest here." Taken in isolation, each of these problems represented by such remarks may in fact be insignificant. But the mistake is to take them in isolation. The sum of many individually insignificant acts of greed and negligence is widespread tragedy. But to see the tragedy takes broad vision-and steady resolve to overcome the lethargy and forgetfulness and denial. Our report may cause pain, but (for those who value health) this pain has a purpose: an understanding to match the depth and complexity of our predicament.

What Have We Done?

Diagnosis: The Unhealthy System of our Bioregion

An ecosystem that is healthy has sustainable integrity. It is robust and hale, beautiful and invigorating to the spirit. It preserves and constantly renews the original delight of Creation. It generates little or no waste. It is self-healing. It develops, but in a dynamic equilibrium, harmony, or balance. It does not impose its pattern on everything else. It does not grow without limit.

A healthy human society, in our view, exhibits the same integrity, the same absence of waste, the same delight, the same self-sustaining, self-healing dynamic balance, the same creative development, and the same sensitivity to the limits of growth. In a healthy society, the pursuit of material gain is subordinated to deeper and more wholesome values: the love of family, friends, neighbors; responsibility to the community; work that is meaningful, healthful and beneficial to the whole; and respect for a Creation larger, more consequential, and more lasting than our material selves.

Our aim in the report has been to evaluate the state of the bioregion in the light of this ideal of health. The conclusion of that evaluation is now clear: the system of life that inhabits the watershed of the Upper Tennessee Valley is, in manifold and interconnected ways, unhealthy. The main syptoms are these:

Water
Much of the water is polluted and burdened with trash or silt, much has been deprived of oxygen by the building of the dams. High in the mountains, the water is destructively and unnaturally acidic-as is the fog, snow and rain. Much of our groundwater is contaminated. Many wetlands, nature's water purification systems, have been disabled or destroyed.

Air, Weather and Climate
The air, though generally improving in quality, is still polluted with particulate matter, ozone, sulfurous haze, and a host of toxic chemicals. Indoor air is often more poisonous than the air outdoors. The noise of human activity is ubiquitous and inescapable. Our enormous emissions of greenhouse gases are gradually changing the climate-and perhaps contributing to increasingly violent weather. The deterioration of the stratospheric ozone layer is exposing most life-forms to increased ultraviolet-B radiation. We are slowly decreasing the oxygen content of the atmosphere.

Flora and Fauna
Many plants and animals are in decline or already extinct. The main causes of these losses are habitat destruction, pollution, and the introduction of invasive species. Multinational lumber and paper operations, converging on the region's forests as forests elsewhere are being rapidly felled, are likely to accelerate this loss of biodiversity. On a larger scale, we are witnessing the homogenization of nature; delicate, rare, and local species are increasingly overwhelmed by tough, aggressive, "weedy," and globally-dominant species.

Food
We can no longer, as a bioregion, feed ourselves. Our food is mostly grown far away. Many of the processes used in growing, processing and transporting it are petroleum-intensive, soil-depleting, and unhealthy for both people and land. Our diet is unhealthy-not, generally, because of deficiencies, but because of the things we eat in excess: fats, meats, highly processed foods, artificial chemical additives, and pesticide residues.

Energy
THe electricity we consume (often wastefully) is produced mainly by the burning of strip-mined coal. Coal-fired powerplants are largely responsible for the smog and haze that veil the mountains and valleys and turn the sky white in hot summer months. They also contribute substantially to global warming. Much of the rest of our electricity is generated by nuclear fission, which creates long-lasting radioactive wastes and poses the small, but real, risk of a catastrophic nuclear accident. TVA's nuclear program has, moreover, accumulated an enormous debt, under the burden of which the agency has abdicted its leadership in energy conservation and begun to push for still more energy consumption.

Waste
We waste far too much. Litter pervades the landscape. Our landfills, already grown to the size of mountains, continue to grow. Mine waste, industrial waste, and nuclear waste contaminate large tracts of land

Transportation
Our transportation system runs on petroleum, which, though economically cheap, is socially and environmentally expensive. Roads and parking lots continually displace neighborhoods, farms, wetlands and forests. Driving deprives us of needed exercise, fouls the air, and makes us dependent on foreign oil. Excessive traffic frays nerves and increases stress. Accidents in the transportation system kill or injure thousands of people and millions of animals each year.

Population and Urbanization
Population is growing rapidly in nearly all areas of our bioregion, compounding the problems mentioned above. Exceedingly rapid development is destroying or degrading agricultural land, shorelines, and the Great SMokey Mountains National Park.

Conclusion: The New Environmentalism

Reflecting on the ills we have described, we see the need for a new environmentalism. Traditional environmentalism has two aims: