(If you haven't already, please scroll down and read Part 1 before reading this post.)
August 12, 9:30 a.m., in northern North Dakota
“O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain...”
“The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it.” (Psalm 24:1)
We’re in the Great Plains. The sky is spacious and amber waves of grain stretch out for miles. Everything is vast – the wheat fields, the hayfields, the corn fields – all except people, who are sparse, living in remote houses on well-kept lawns.
Last night, while we were eating in the dining car, we crossed and then followed the Mississippi River where it forms the border between Wisconsin and Minnesota. The craggy hills on the Minnesota side feature odd outcroppings that jut out toward the river. In Winona, a pinnacle, aptly named “Sugarloaf,” shoots straight up out of a bluff, the result of 19th-century quarrying. The river was beautiful at sunset. Several lighted marinas along the way and nice homes overlooking the water suggest the area is coveted resort territory.
We woke up this morning in the flat farmland of North Dakota. Out here, the railroad tracks often cross long, straight dirt roads with no crossing guardrails. The train horn always blows, but I’ve yet to see a vehicle kicking up dust on any of those roads. Most of the settlements we’ve passed since the sun came up have been just a collection of a few houses. But once in while, there’s an honest-to-goodness town with a main street fronted by brick two-story buildings on both sides for about a city block, a diner, a post office, and a modest rail yard. One memorable town was Rugby, boasting itself as the geographic center of North America. And Minot (Where we stopped long enough to get out and stretch our legs) looks like a substantial commercial and industrial center for the surrounding country. (I looked it up. Minot has a population of nearly 50,000, which must be enormous by regional standards.)
We’re in that wide-open part of the country where states only have three electoral votes, and, even at that, are over-represented in Congress and the Electoral College. Since the culture wars began in the 1960s, this whole area has been reliably Republican, not so much out of loyalty to an ideology as resistance to the coastal politics of identity, whose adherents seem increasingly disinterested in anything that happens in America’s breadbasket. I doubt these upper-plains farmers are anything like the stereotypical white working-class, Confederate-Flag-waving “Trumpsters” further east. Over the last 24 hours, I’ve seen a good number of American flags, but not once have I seen stars-and-bars.
Having never before been to the Great Plains, I can only speculate. But my suspicion, partly informed by what I learned as a pastor of a farming community in northern Kentucky, is that these people are too close to the land to be caught up in a personality cult. They belong to a culture that has been forgotten by both major political parties. As small farms have been replaced by gigantic monoculture farms, the sheer number of people in rural America has plummeted in the last century into political insignificance. Their politics, to the extent they even have a political identity, is understandably one of resentment. Theirs is the latest chapter in a tragic American saga of undervaluing land as mere dirt and discounting those who work it as the nation’s serfdom – whether slaves, grossly underpaid sharecroppers, or just plain ignorant rural people. This historical narrative has resulted in alienation of both land and people. The topsoil has eroded and been made dependent on unnatural and finally unsustainable methods of farming, while genuine agriculture, the ways of life developed in community with the land, has been mostly discarded in favor of agribusiness, which treats the land as mere resource for industrialized methods of feeding the nation.
The people who live here, though, are not cogs in a machine. Their families came here generations ago. They carry within them the memory, maybe even the impulses, of what used to be a quintessentially American way of life celebrating freedom to own and husband the land. Before World War II, farming communities were honored as the backbone of America. Public school teachers of vocational agriculture were exempted from the military draft because they were considered “vital to national security.” As recently as 1900, 70% of the nation’s population lived on the farm or in villages serving as markets for rural America. Today, the few true rural Americans left are reduced to being a marginal but reliable voting bloc that provides a crucial edge in close elections. What a waste.
2:30 p.m., in northeastern Montana
Straight boundaries between states, such as the one we crossed a while ago between North Dakota and Montana, don’t usually follow any natural features like rivers or mountain ranges. They are too severe to be anything but arbitrary. And yet, North Dakota’s westerly neighbor almost immediately announced itself with a series of “badlands,” deeply worn rock formations that look like elephant feet dropped down from the sky.
Today, their beigy-gray color matches the sky. The temperature has soared to over 100 degrees throughout this area, creating a milky-white haze. Today’s forecasted high for Williston, the last stop in North Dakota, is 106. Meanwhile, passengers in our sleeper car are commenting and joking about how cold our compartments are. Closing the air vent and turning the thermostat to its warmest setting doesn’t seem to make any difference. A slight draft from up around the top of the enclosed toilet/shower stalls is cold enough to make us shiver. Martha and I have draped ourselves with the blankets provided for sleep cover.
But, we’ll take the chill over the oppressive heat, which we felt when we were outside at the Minot Station this morning. (At 10:00 a.m., the temperature was already 96.) As we Central New Yorkers know, you can always throw on another layer of clothes, but you can only strip down to naked.
The warming of the planet is accelerating. Decades of dismissed warnings about anthropocentric climate change are now starting to sound like the words of Hebrew prophets who were ridiculed, exiled and executed in their own day, but whose direst warnings all came true. Barely two decades ago, profit-driven industrialists and their staunchest political supporters were still denying the existence of climate change with a straight face. Then, about a decade ago, they began admitting that climate change was a reality, but still denied it resulted from human activity. Today, the goal posts have been moved again. Yes, the planet is warming, and yes, it’s due to human production of carbon dioxide, but, hey, we’re creative, and we’ll adjust. In another decade, as coastal areas and arid inlands become uninhabitable, I suppose we’ll start championing the colonization of Mars.
Or, we could just start acting sensibly. Greater investment in public transportation, like the train I’m riding, would probably do more than anything to cut carbon dioxide emissions that trap heat within the atmosphere. And rather than try to salvage what is left of the fossil fuel industry, why aren’t we accelerating the development of renewable energy? Why don’t oil companies seize the opportunity to lead the way, rather than spend billions to protect an industry that is unarguably unsustainable?
In a few days, we’ll be in California, which is suffering through eight major wildfires. Warmer winters mean more moisture, which leads to higher brush in the spring and summer, which in turn more easily catches fire when hot winds blow. The flames are raging through cherished wilderness areas as well as populated developments, not because somebody dropped a cigarette in the forest, but rather because the developed world has spent the last 300 years ignoring millennia of wisdom about living responsibility within the limits set by nature.
Wildfires are, of course, nature’s way of replenishing the forest with new growth. But cancer is natural, too. It’s one of the ways our bodies shut themselves down. The frequency of early onset cancer, however, indicates something unhealthy about our way of life – too many carcinogens in the air, water, and food supply. So the frequency and breadth of wildfires in this part of the country is an alarm about the unhealthy ways we inhabit the earth and abuse its resources.
The Clean Air Act of 1963 and Clean Water Act of 1972 significantly reduced urban smog, stopped black smoke from billowing out of industrial stacks, and reduced contaminants in our lakes, rivers, streams, and taps. But as effective as both pieces of legislation continue to be, neither has managed to change our fundamental behavior. In fact, the assumption that clean air and water will always be available has lulled us into complacency about our increasingly self-indulgent Western lifestyle. We profligately spend finite resources with little or no accounting. Nature, however, will maintain a balance sheet even if we don’t. Eventually, she will demand payment without forgiveness. It will be too late for us to make arrangements for retiring our debt. We’ll pay the whole amount, even if it requires our own extinction.
©2018 by J. Mark Lawson
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