Notes on Waste Land – How We Have Transformed Our Natural World

18 October 2018 (Wall Street International)* – The Aboriginal tribes of Australia are the earth’s oldest known continuous civilization, dating back forty thousand years. An Aboriginal tribal elder, when asked why his culture had left behind no structures that compared with the Pyramids, the Parthenon, or the great monuments of other civilizations, replied that his people had strived to leave the land just as they had found it: thatwas their most enduring monument.

It seems frightening yet strangely appropriate that the most enduring monuments the West will leave for future generations will not be Stonehenge, the Pyramids of Giza, or the cathedral at Chartres, but rather the hazardous remains of our industry and technology.

The temples of the Aztec and Mayan civilizations have survived a mere 500 to 2,000 years; Native American Anasazi cave dwellings and pictographs date back only 1,000 to 2,500 years.

How much longer lasting—and how tragic in consequence—will be the contemporary wasteland that has been created in the United States during the past 200 years, and especially the past 50.

The radioactive contamination from American plutonium factories will be in evidence long after the Pyramids have disappeared, our soaring modern architectural edifices have crumbled, and entire cultures have risen and fallen.

Remaining deadly for more than 250,000 years, this legacy of ours will last for 10,000 generationsinto the future. (To put this into perspective, Homo sapiensin its present form has been on the earth for 60,000 to 100,000 years.)

This then is the final stage in our exploration and development of the American continent. Instead of the Zen garden of Kyoto’s Ryoanji, we leave behind vast gardens of ashes and poisons. Instead of the sculpted temples of Borobudur in Java or Ajanta in India, we leave to future generations Rocky Flats and the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.