A Collapsible Spring

It’s impossible to enjoy a spring day like today in my America unless you love the whiff of cigarette smoke and the chirp of cell phone walkie-talkies. The place where I work, a mall cum office park across the polluted Hudson from NYC, is bound in every direction by interstates, onramps, parkways and roads, none of which have sidewalks for pedestrians. So, there is really no escape to exercise, or getting away for a minute of quiet, unless you think you can somehow slip through the constant stream of SUVs chugging past at 65 m.p.h. with grimacing grilles shining.

I take the bus to this office complex from New York City every day. Basically, if you work here without a car, you’re stuck here.

The denizens of this corporate park are, on the main, portly and sorrowful-looking working men and women with bad haircuts – Americans who pay taxes and play by the rules. Some of the guys walk with clenched fists or jaws, with cell phones strapped to their hips like guns. Jersey Girls teeter around in giggling gaggles, puffing smokes and snapping gum, leaving behind perfumed benzene. Restaurants in the outdoor plaza ‑ the Hoolihans, and the Unos and the Red Lobster ‑ blare 1980s music from bullhorn-like speakers fixed to their facades. Sometimes the songs are loud enough that they “smoosh” together, creating a cacophony that can feel like butterflies in your brain. Want to sit and read a book? Fuhgedaboudit!

Yes, please come along on a noontime stroll around this American corporate oasis! Security guards are everywhere, staring sullenly from their station near the Dunkin’ Donuts or riding around the multi-deck car garages in small red pickups with flashing lights, guarding the SUVs from … what? Usama and Saddam? Environmentalists? Meantime, the grounds crew operate howling leaf blowers to rid walkways of the tender blooms of budding trees, lest the plaza look blighted.

There is a construction crew here as well, converting the failed Sizzler into a soon-to-fail Chili’s. They have set up a pitch cooker for the roof work, which belches tar smoke and makes the air stink. In fact, there has been much construction around here as of late. Recently, a Wal-Mart box was erected just across the highway from my office park, and it’s bigger than a convention center. It replaced a field that was … well, a wetland.

I just finished reading Jared Diamond’s Collapse, which everybody should read. At the end of the book, Diamond presents the twelve most serious dilemmas facing humanity which we must solve in the coming years or decades. Each is as daunting and deadly as the next, but the first on his list was …

At an accelerating rate, we are destroying natural habitats or else converting them to human-made habitats, such as cities and villages, farmlands and pastures, roads, and golf courses. The natural habitats whose losses have provoked the most discussion are forests, wetlands, coral reefs, and the ocean bottom. …More than half of the world’s original areas of forest have already been converted to other uses and at present conversion rates one quarter of the forests that remain will become converted within the next half-century.
[…]
An even larger fraction of the world’s original wetlands than of its forests have been destroyed, damaged, or converted. Consequences for us arise from wetlands’ importance in maintaining the quality of our water supplies and the existence of commercially important freshwater fisheries, while even ocean fisheries depend on mangrove wetlands to provide habitat for the juvenile phase of many fish species.
[…]
About one-third of the world’s coral reefs‑ the oceanic equivalent of tropical rainforests, because they are home to a disproportionate fraction of the ocean’s species ‑ have already been severely damaged. If current trends continue, about half the remaining reefs will be lost by 2030.

There was a deal whereby the Wal-Mart near my office park had to set aside some wetlands as an offset for destroying some wetlands, and basically protect it as a habitat and a park. I’m proably woring on the specifics. But if you can make it through the 60 m.p.h. parade of SUVs, and walk over an overpass, and down to the enormous parking lot of the other mall across the highway, there is a wetlands park. I go there for my lunch hour when the sun is out on a warm day.

There are some beautiful birds, large and small, that I see there but not anywhere else. The park is bordered on one side by an Interstate; on the other side by housing and a complex of petrochemical storage tanks; and on the last side a mall and the mall’s extensive parking lot. So, no matter how deep into the park you walk, there’s a woosh of traffic and horns and lots of construction noise since something new is always going up around here. A Petco, a Bed, Bath and Beyond. Some shit like that.

Beyond the noise and pollution all around, the park is absolutely full of trash. Plastics, metal push carts, a hardhat, bottles of laundry detergent, clothing, you-name-it. It’s like a dumping ground now, or was before and they never cleaned it up. I can’t figure out which.

In case you don’t know, Al Gore is about to come out with the rockin’est movie on the environment ever, entitled “An Inconvenient Truth.” The trailer gives you goosebumps.