Sand in the Gears

Where we live, work, and play.  It's the point of living, and working.. hard, day in and day out, to make money, and live amongst friends and family, kids and neighbors and provide a roof, clean water and food and air for them, all of them, and watch them thrive.  It's why we live, and it's what we live.  It's everything. 


The environment. 


Almost absurd to define, the environment is everything that was here, is here, and will be here after we're gone, and it responds, as all things do, to how we treat it.  If we burn copious amounts of carbon, it will rise into the air, and stay there, creating acidity in our water, and poisoning that breath we breathe.  Likewise, if fish ingest too many hormones that they're not supposed to come into contact with, the balance gets skewed, and we disrupt population dynamics that have been in motion for millennia upon millennia.  When we frack the rock far beneath the green meniscus on this sphere, we get lots of gas, some would say clean gas, but it comes at a cost.  That cost is heavy metal-laden drilling mud brought to the surface, disrupted karst and aquifer, and disruption of a system of rock and metal and crust that man understands all too little. 


Between man's need for resources to drive our innovation and feed our intellect, and the challenge of facing the future with more and more people, burning more and more fuel, all with the same finite globe, is the environment.  The pursuit of fairly distributing healthy, satisfying life to all mankind, that's environmental justice. 


Environmental justice is defined in a myriad of ways by all sorts of people and agencies and governments.  My definition is simple.  Environmental justice is everything it will take, all of the spokes of this moving wheel, to give each creature a healthy existence.  That means hard work, and deep thought, and lasting peace, and innovative technology, and radical public policy.  Some of the work for Environmental Justice is really hard, and requires all of the spokes to work together around a hub, connected in a common vision for sustainability.  Yet some of the other work is simple, and just requires a sustained daily effort to live with less, or in a smarter way. 


Bookmark this blog, and write to me, and help me start a new discussion on how we look at Environmental Justice, and how we'll achieve it, and when. 



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