Every time we stick our head out the window to scrutinize the weather, thrill to the sudden glimpse of a cardinal’s scarlet plumage, or throw ourselves with gleeful abandon into the ocean’s stinging immensity, we engage with that encompassing reality that we may think of as nature, the earth, or the environment. To begin with, then, the environmental crisis betokens a deep and frightening shift in our relations to both our physical selves and to nature. Haunting the exquisiteness of nature—the cascading colors of a summer sunset, the exuberant rushing waters of an untamed river, the brilliant ferocity of a leopard—are gloomy, nagging questions. How much of the intensity of that particular sunset’s colors is caused by air pollution? Does the river contain invisible toxins that make it unsafe for swimming or fishing? How many leopards are left, and will our grandchildren even believe that such marvelous creatures ever existed outside of zoos or picture books? These questions, multiplied by our scrutiny of the chemicals in our food, by every half-suppressed, vaguely anxious thought about what will happen if the global warming predictions are true or if the hole in the ozone layer expands, darken our sense of nature’s majesty, peacefulness, and promise.
Such uncertainties are not limited to our sense of the “outside,” but are as intimate as an upcoming mammogram or a nagging asthmatic cough. For we have come to see that the environmental crisis is not only written on the land and water and air, but also permeates our own bodies. We know that our breasts, our prostates, our lungs, and our bloodstream are no longer what they were, and that just as we have put dioxins in the river and imperiled the last of the leopards, so a mother’s breast milk may be too polluted for her baby to drink, and cancer rates, deeply influenced by environmental pollution, continue to climb.
In our anxiety over what may be happening to us, in our deep grief when the possible becomes actual in our own lives, and in our aching sense of violation when we see a favorite bit of forest turned into a mall or notice how many fewer songbirds there are in the spring, these perils affect us personally. They are also a profound collective challenge. It is our nation’s health care system that must pay for the environmentally induced illnesses, our water treatment system that must take over the purifying functions of the now eliminated wetlands, and our land that suffers as chemical fertilizers degrade the topsoil. Beyond anyone’s national boundaries, comparable problems afflict the planet as a whole, taking particular forms in each locale and constituting a collective predicament without historical precedent. Industrial civilization, despite (or because of!) its technological brilliance, has created a grave threat unlike anything humanity has ever done before. No tyrant, emperor, or czar could have eliminated so much of the rain forests, raised the earth’s temperature, extinguished 150 species each day, or caused children’s lungs, as they do in certain highly polluted sections of Los Angeles, to grow abnormally small.
Armenian Minority and Safavid Economy
