What's Hidden

Busy, busy, busy.

And, even better--I'm learning how to deal with it...go with the flow...enjoy most of the moments no matter what I'm doing.

I've created a new website from scratch for my advisor's NSF final grant report on Science, Society, and Superfund (the link is on the sidebar) and its simple but effective. Like me? Perhaps. I've also entirely updated the BHWC website - well, not really entirely - but I did give it a new makeover an reorganized stuff. That was fun. It's on the sidebar as well.

I'm plowing through a renovation of the BHWC database ... it's one of those forever projects, like that poor guy who eternally pushed a boulder up the steep hill--Sisyphus. We all have projects like that.

My classes this semester are really great. I'm so excited by the readings I get to do: wolves, literature, semiotics, linguistics, philosophy, ethics, environmental communication, marxist theory, feminist theory, visual communication, nature writing ... I have four pages of references for my thesis proposal - and it grows every time I pick up a new book and find something else I want to explore.

Last week I had conversations with a few of my professors about how the way we choose to label things often hides other things. Not a real surprise to any of them. So - when I real the phrase "environmental problems" over and over and over and over again, I get cranky. That's because we don't have environmental problems - we have people problems.

The environment isn't going around making trouble--trashing playgrounds, slashing tires, beating up old ladies in the parks, stealing handbags. No, the environment is doing its best to cope with the people. People who are trashing forest, streams, and oceans; people who are slashing the earth wide open to mine for minerals, diamonds, and coal; people are beating up on responsible hiking trails with their four-wheelers; and people ... people are stealing the future.

By saying that we have "environmental problems" we are hiding our own responsibility. When I read that phrase, over and over again, I kept thinking of an abusive relationship. The abuser says "you've got a problem" and the abused one keeps trying to figure out how to change themselves, adapt to the situation, to fix themselves so as not to exacerbate the abuse. But, at some point one of three things can happen: the abuser kills the abused one; the abused one 'snaps' and kills the abuser; or ... the abused one walks away.

Is that where we are now with people and the environment?