A River Ran Through It
Pliny the Elder was a Roman writer from the first century. His voluminous Natural History is his one surviving work. It concerns the science of life, such that it was understood at the time. Pliny wrote, parva si non fiant quotidie, loosely translated; things that would be trivial if they did not happen daily — an invaluable thought for politics in the 21st century.
The seventh chapter of Natural History concerns humankind and our inventions. By including human invention in his natural history, Pliny didn’t commit the greatest sin of industrialism, creating an artificial boundary between Homo sapiens and the greater environment, a separation that instilled a harmful and completely unwarranted notion of natural individuality.
In thought, combined with a little effort in deed, remedying this greatest of industrial transgressions is simple. Careful attention needs to be given to our daily trivialities — flipping a switch, eating packaged food, driving to the store, and placing clothes on our backs. Industrialism trained us to take all these daily trivialities for granted, encouraging a total disregard for the magnitude of the ecological impact the combined daily trivial actions of 350 million Americans produce. Not to mention, in many ways beyond all thought, the impact of the combined trivial actions of the 8 billion souls currently occupying this small, increasingly distressed planet.
A great example of unconscious daily trivial action, particularly for Americans, is water use. Everything from drinking, washing, cooking, and watering the lawn is taken entirely for granted. The Los Angeles Times has an excellent piece on one result of trivializing water, the last decades drying up of the great Colorado River Delta and the present attempts at a little restoration.
The Colorado is one of the world's great rivers, for millions of years traveling 1500 miles from the heights of the Rocky Mountains, across some of the starkest, most beautiful desert, then emptying into the Sea of Cortez, though I suppose the politically correct labeling is Gulf of California, but given an association with last century California, I'm not sure which designation should really be deemed more offensive.