The article last week about the continued efforts and failures to "clean up" after the meltdown at the Fukushima power plant brought up an old soap box topic for me: the issue of the difference between a naturally occurring environment and a closed system and how it relates to the waste we create as a species on a small planet. I've always found the idea of a closed system an academically convenient but purely theoretical one, that an environment smaller than our planet could be completely separated from those around it to substance (or people, idea, etc.) transfer. And yet, it seems that the idea of a closed system is central to our society's world view. When we hear about species extinction, chemical spills across the country, or even political upheaval in foreign countries, we may feel empathy, but rarely do we think about how our own small, daily environment will be effected by these tragedies.
With the continued nuclear contamination of the seawater off of the coast of Japan, the connection to our environment may be more obvious, as we share an ocean with currents, winds, and animals migrating back and forth all the time. In my opinion, to maintain the view that this pollution won't find its way into our bodies in some quantity (not to mention all people's bodies who share the Pacific coastline) would be naively optimistic. Now, I'm not nuclear expert, so I have no solutions to propose to stop the contamination, but it seems as though no one has any solutions. So, (some of) my questions are... why build it if you can't take it apart? Why create something (nuclear waste) that you can't get rid of? And, finally, why did no one think about this possibility? The world is connected in so many ways, and water that runs down the slopes of a mountain in Japan will certainly find its way to other countries and other people's gardens and childrens' bedside glasses of water.
But, on the bright side, I once heard a woman speak who said something along the lines of this: a caterpillar, when it is growing, consumes an unbelievable amount of food. It will eat everything around it, and some caterpillar's starve because they destroy their surroundings and, thus, cannot find enough to eat. However, after a little while of this, they make themselves a chrysalis, and in time emerge as butterflies, which go on to pollinate and live symbiotically with their surroundings. This woman postulated that this time in human history is our caterpillar phase, and that our inevitable course is that of the butterfly. I'll take it.
