Cosmic Outlaws

In the mid-1950s Henry Beston, awestruck by the Great Beach on Cape Cod in Massachusetts spent a year, including a menacing winter, in his tiny Outermost House living on one of the greatest Atlantic beaches. Here he renewed his core beliefs concerning the elements of humanity.

This important quote comes from the foreword of the 1956 edition his book, he Outermost House:

“Nature is a part of our humanity, and without some awareness and experience of that divine mystery man ceases to be man. When the Pleiades and the wind in the grass are no longer part of the human spirit, a part of very flesh and bone, man becomes, as it were, a kind of cosmic outlaw, having neither a completeness and integrity of the animal nor the birthright of a true humanity.”


If we ignore nature our humanity ceases to exist.

Overhead, at night we can view the Pleiades, the brightest star cluster in the sky. The cluster is easily found by using the three stars in Orion’s belt as a pointer to the “thumb smudge” on the right, the Pleiades, visible to the naked eye, and easily examined in detail with binoculars. The 400 stars in the Pleiades, born about 20 million years ago, were never looked upon by the eye of a dinosaur, for the great beasts had disappeared for 35 million years, when these young nuclear furnaces took form. The point being that the beauty of the Pleiades is there for the looking. It is a vision that should not be left only for astronomers. It belongs to everyone. We only need to care enough to look up.

As to the wind in the grass, the pounding surf on the Great Beach, and the other simple measures of nature, it is our loss if we ignore them. Republicans would have us forget these simple, everyday delights in lieu of the fear of science jeopardizing their greedy agenda of commercial development with little regard for the environment and their fundamentalist cousins discounting the ancient age (really new arrivals, astronomically speaking) of the 400 stars in Pleiades to support their anti-science myth of a 6,000 year old universe. Are the Republicans and Christian fundamentalists then the cosmic outlaws of which Beston writes?

Beston tells us that beside nature being part of our humanity, humanity is part of nature. They are inseparable and we ignore their commonality at our own peril.

Radical Environmentalists: Radical in Whose Mind?

In just about every other speech he makes, former Senator Rick Santorum, when he’s not proselytizing and driving his religious myths into the electoral process and attempting to erase the distinct line between church and state, cries foul at the “radical environmentalists” who fight and question what the oil, gas and coal companies are doing to our environment. He sneers as he utters the phrase “radical environmentalists” with the same intensity as when he decries Satan’s attack on, and infiltration of, America and American values. He conveniently forgets/ignores/ disregards/conceals the fact that he was a spokesman and defacto lobbyist for the coal industry after his failed attempt at reelection to the Senate in 2006. An online article published by Mother Jones  discusses how, after his defeat, Rick Santorum received $142,500 for fronting for Consol Energy, one of the largest coal mining companies in the country, which Santorum depicted as a local Pennsylvania mining concern. During his tenure in the Senate, Santorum also received more than $73,800 in donations from Consol at the same time the coal company lobbied Congress “on pollution limits, mine reclamation, worker health benefits, and tax policy” and the industry spent millions on its fictitious “clean coal” campaign. Paul Blumenthal’s Huffington Post piece, posted January 5, 2012, links Santorum, while still in office, to disgraced Republican Congressman Tom Delay, convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff, and the Republican/Christian fundamentalist, anti-environmental lobbying efforts of the K Street Project.

Santorum never mentions any of these connections when he sneers his “radical environmentalist” taunts before his like-minded audiences.  After all, he is just a company man defending his livelihood.

Radical environmentalist is one of those skeletal, value-loaded phrases, without much meat attached to it. It reeks of panic and phobia. It also echoes the labels (and threats) put on a radical environmentalist from the 1960s who, in her book Silent Spring, identified the dangers of saturating our ecosystems and food chains with persistent insecticides. Chemical company executives, using scare tactics, claimed that Rachel Carson, a reserved marine biologist, wished to return to times of crops lost to great insect plagues resulting in national and worldwide famine. They referred to her as a fanatic in the cult of the balance of nature. Some (many) birds, fish, beneficial insects, and other wildlife species were poisoned and brought to the edge of extinction by disrupted reproductive cycles and pitiful chemical-induced birth defects. Entire ecosystems were in danger of destruction, but the millions of pounds of DDT applied to farmlands and forests and ultimately our lakes and rivers, in the name of national interest put fortunes into the pockets of chemical companies.

When did the American public hand over rights to the environment to corporations? Never is when. If Rachel Carson hadn’t spoken out how many species would be gone now and how many more waterways would be poisoned beyond reclamation? How many cancers? How many birth defects? Ask the chemical companies that ridiculed her findings in the face of repeated scientific conclusions.

Today’s “radical environmentalists” fight, among other things, Rick Santorums’s unfounded, anti-environmental, ant-science scare-tactic claims that environmentalists are destroying “clean coal” jobs and endangering our national interest, not to mention his paycheck. Sound familiar?

My book The Double-Crested Cormorant: Symbol of Ecological Conflict is now available in a  hardcover version at www.amazon.com, www.barnesandnoble.com and the University of Michigan Press, www.press.umich.edu which also offers an E-book edition. Also, check your local booksellers for availability.

For insights into the book, log on to my Author Page at Amazon at www.amazon.com/author/dennis-wild.