Hazelwood Heaven

Look at that beautiful hillside across the river. It wasn't always there, and it won't always be there. Things change. A few years ago, when the mill was running, you could rarely see across the river for the smoke. Can you see the water from where you are? As in the distant past, we may one day witness even more variety and quantity of life in that river than has already returned. Diminishing levels of pollution because of the loss of industry here has allowed a resurgence of Nature.


Each decision each of us makes leads to what there will be some day. Right at this moment people, animals, plants, and microbes are being born and dying in vast numbers. Knowing we're not going to be here forever, knowing that what we do affects the future, we can use each of our lives to make this wonderful and troubled world better.




Daily it becomes more obvious that none of us humans is immune to the effects of the problems of others. There are maybe 7 billion of us now, and we are not living sustainably, by any stretch of the imagination. We all need oxygen. We all breathe out carbon dioxide. We all burn things. Burning anything uses up oxygen and makes carbon dioxide. So we're all making the oceans more acidic due to this increase in carbon dioxide getting into the waters - increasing the amount of carbonic acid. Sugars and salts and co2 and radioactive materials and water and mercury and cadmium and lead and coal and natural gas and oil are all natural parts of the Earth's ecosystem. But we have extracted and refined and mined and concentrated and reacted so many things (purposely and accidentally) in so many ways that there is no longer any stability to Earth's patterns. We don't know when winter or spring is any more. The melted down nuclear power reactors in Japan continue to leak huge amounts of radioactivity into the ocean, and Japanese decision-makers are allowing the burning of radioactive materials to get rid of them (releasing at least some of those materials' radioactivity into the air) - exposing humans and other living things to levels we're not used to.



We in the Pittsburgh area are in some ways in a heaven compared to those in some other parts of the world. But our cleaner air and water (and lower average incomes) are not just the result of our passive acceptance of the shift of so much manufacturing and jobs to other countries. We chose NOT to make money building any new polluting mills, on the premise that we can do better. The transition away from combustion processes is long overdue, and if it takes worldwide revolution to make it happen that's what we need to do.



The whole society has to change, radically, because (as is made clearer every day by the news) our present course is not working.



By using what we do have (a variety of life forms which still provide ecosystem services such as flood control and weather moderation, along with our unparallelled technological advancements in communication) and with the discernment to develop only appropriate technologies, we can do our part in service to life on Earth while earning our living by being one of the planet's still-functioning providers rather than just one more of the world's many wounded and disabled places.



We need to go for the best. We don't need to fight wars over fossil fuels, and we don't have to pollute. Solutions are all around us, waiting to be discovered or rediscovered. Imagine your own version of Heaven on Earth and act on it.