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| Yellowstone National Park |
The leafy suburban paradise of Northbrook dropped off a quintet of bottles this week, large squat containers, neatly arranged in a thick clear plastic bag. The letter accompanying them explained that water quality is being tested. We were to fill these five bottles, then they'd be picked up so the water could be checked for lead and copper.
I suppose I could have bristled at this, considered it an intrusion upon my precious personal liberties, and tossed the bottles. Don't tread on me! The effort by the Environmental Protection Agency is exactly the sort of wasteful government overreach that our dear president, Donald J. Trump, is committed to excising root and branch.
But honestly, keeping tabs on the water we drink seems something the government ought to do. When I phoned the village, I was told that this effort would be done every six months for the next five years. I couldn't help think, grimly, "Sure it will." I am not confident there will be an EPA in five years, nor an America, at least not one you or I would recognize from past experience.
That experience leads me to expect the water to be checked, along with bridges and airplane engines. The mail should arrive. When I take my handful of pills in the morning, I don't sniff them for the telltale odor of arsenic; I'm confident the Food and Drug Administration has done that already, thanks to the taxes I pay, without going through an agony of indignation at the thought they might also be used to buy hot lunches for poor children or maintain trails at a national park.
Have you ever gone to a national park? They're quite nice. In 2009, the paper went bankrupt — struggling to exist is nothing new here at the Chicago Sun-Times — and part of the effort to keep afloat, we were all forced to take two weeks of unpaid leave. That inspired me to take my boys on the road, to California. Five weeks, seven thousand miles, nine national parks — Badlands, Yellowstone, Grand Teton, Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon, Zion, Arches, Rocky Mountain and Redwood.
Before we left, I called the first park we'd be hitting for guidance. This is how I described the process:
"They have a phone number you can call, to talk to a park ranger, and it felt odd, to be sitting in my office at home, looking at the bright green leaves of the saucer magnolia tree, talking to some briskly polite ranger in Yellowstone. I phoned twice, so relieved to be able to consult an expert about what was best for us to do that the magic of telephones, dulled by long familiarity, flashed anew for a moment—from my home in Northbrook to a ranger’s office in Yellowstone National Park. Fantastic."
Would anybody be there now to answer the phone? I wondered about that when Elon Musk was carving apart the National Park Service, not only sending platoons of rangers packing, but insulting them as layabouts in the process. I remembered mailing in my application to secure a back country camping permit on Hell Roaring Creek Trail.
"Exactly one week later, an official-looking letter arrived in the mail. 'YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK—BACKCOUNTRY RESERVATION CONFIRMATION. Reservation #09-R1090 for 3 People, Travel by Foot.' God bless America, something in the government still works."
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I am sorry to say that I had the pleasure of visiting only one national park. It was the rain forest in the state of Washington. The employees I encountered were pure joy, nice and so helpful. It seems that Trump is attacking everyone who he is angry with. The citizens he is charged with protecting, foreign countries that he feels wronged him. Basically everyone. His head is filled with malice towards all. Wish old Abe was around.
ReplyDeleteThank you for the reminder of the benefits of civilization.
ReplyDeleteWhenever I hear people bitching about taxes, I like to think about what our tax dollars pay for. Water and sewer, roads and bridges, police and fire protection, schools.... I'm happy to pay taxes because I can imagine the hell we would live in without the services they pay for.
ReplyDeleteI remember, back in the early 70s, camping out on the side of a mountain for a month at Rocky Mountain State Park - just camping there, by myself, and having one of the greatest times of my life. Now... they'd be arresting me for trespassing on logging land.
ReplyDeleteClean water and national parks are nice things and we can't have nice things. We voted those away because as a whole we're ignorant and gullible and we lack empathy. Elections are nice things too.
ReplyDeleteI didn't have to travel to go to a national park.
ReplyDeleteOne of them came to me, 25 years ago..
Cuyahoga Valley National Park, in northeast Ohio , reclaims and preserves the industrial, commercial, and rural landscape along the Cuyahoga River, between Akron and Cleveland. It covers an area of almost 33,000 acres.
Cuyahoga Valley was originally designated as a national recreation area (NRA) in 1974, then re-designated as a national park in 2000, and remains the only national park that originated as a national recreation area. CVNP is adjacent to two large urban areas, and it includes a dense road network and a railroad. It was the twelfth-most visited American national park in 2023, attracting nearly 2.9 million visitors, primarily due to its proximity to Cleveland and Akron. [Wikipedia]
Yeah, 2009. That was a bad one, but not like this.
ReplyDeleteWhile the ongoing degradation of the nation continues, I'll be somewhat curious to see how this Tesla situation pans out. Elon, former favorite of the affluent, lefty environmental types who could afford to be early customers for his electric cars, has willfully, obnoxiously, and I believe very stupidly alienated them about as thoroughly as possible. (Plus a number of companies are now making fine electric vehicles, for cheaper.) So, sales here and overseas have plummeted.
ReplyDeleteThe orange felon, a transactional mob boss at his core, sees the problem and has, in his baldly corrupt manner, swooped in to try to give his new buddy a hand. Do you think Cap't. "Drill, drill, drill" ever had the slightest interest in electric cars before this?
So, will the MAGAt faithful, just back from a bracing outing sticking it to the libs by "rolling coal," shell out the bucks to buy a Tesla they have no interest in because their Fuhrer thinks they'd be doing the chainsaw chump a favor? I certainly don't think so, but I've been surprised so many times before.
To me, it recalls the MAGAt attitude toward the Covid vaccine. Il Douche really wanted credit for "Operation Warp Speed" and the actually impressive promptness with which the shots were made available. He was vaccinated himself. But the MAGAt crowd just would have none of it. Their clueless anti-vaccination animus was more significant than listening to the rare bit of reason that came from their dear leader in that instance.
I figure it will be the same with the cars. Their "fuck the environment," "climate change is a hoax" attitudes are too ingrained for them to buy an electric car just to prop up Elon. And that would require real money, to boot.
I could be wrong!
For the potential amusement of the EGD crowd, a recent New Yorker cartoon: https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a61061
The stunt with the car was dumb from the beginning. Tesla's price to earnings even after the recent plunge is around 120, historically it's been around 140-150. So it would take 120 years of company earnings to break even with the current cost of the shares For comparison, the S&P 500 average PE now is around 30, historically closer to 20.
DeleteTesla's stock price was never connected to the actual business' profitability, it was always a meme stock, going up and down with the mood of Musk fanboys playing stock market roulette. So as he reveals what an ignorant jackass he is and as the whole market is crashing all around, no one wants to be caught dead holding his stock and looks like the number of people shorting it is going up. No amount of publicity sales circuses can fix that.
Bonus: he used Tesla stock as collateral for his purchase of Twitter and if it gets low enough the banks just might repossess it (one can only wish). Double bonus: Trump's own stock DJT is down to about half what it was in mid-January (of course that one also has no relation to actual business profits).
The assault on the environment has been particularly vicious. The real estate king was thwarted by environmental laws when developing his golf courses, so of course there's a personal element to it. He also wants to enrich cronies like Doug Burgum (head of Dept of Interior - who wants to use public lands to extract fossil fuels to make us 'energy independent') and Lee Zeldin (head of EPA - who wants to go further and make us "energy dominant". Zeldin has taken a sledge hammer to environmental law and even changed the mission of the agency. It no longer exists to "protect the environment", despite its name. The mission is now to “lower the cost of buying a car, heating a home, and running a business.” That's the EPA! Wetland protections - gone, wildlife protections- gone. The cuts at National Park Service have been brutal. And the National Parks are revenue-generating! For every dollar invested by taxpayers into the NPS, our economy gets more than $10 in return, part of which goes to support local economies.This is not about money. Trump and his henchmen want the land. Once the land is developed, it is gone forever. We will have to retire the song, "America the Beautiful".
ReplyDeleteLove Yellowstone. Good column too.
ReplyDelete