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by Robert Shetterly
Sometimes it's useful to think like a fundamentalist. Not only does such thought free the mind of rational encumbrance and moral complexity, but it just may open the door to possibilities made unconscionable by the niggling precepts of justice and equality and environmental concern. The sweet little girl, who dons a Halloween mask of a tusked wild boar and then charges about the room snorting and pawing, striking fear into adults and children alike, is an apt metaphor. The mask enables, you might say frees, the girl to be fearsomely one-dimensional. Others, unmasked, retreat, accepting that such transformation is possible, as though the mask unleashed a power far greater than the child was known to possess. Fundamentalism is like that.
But I'm not suggesting that a wild boar is a fundamentalist. No, I would never impugn the nuanced lives of boars by diminishing them so. Rather, I wanted to put on the fundamentalist mask to help myself understand my recent experience and then extend it while masked.
I wrote an essay recently about my tour of mountaintop removal sites in West Virginia. Even when you see it, it's painfully hard to comprehend -- not because one's eyes cannot embrace the devastated landscape, nor even because three hundred million years of Nature's work was so easily desecrated by King Coal, but, hard because one's heart cannot accept the mentality that relished the destruction. I mean, why would a people want to bomb themselves back into the Stone Age? They wouldn't, of course. And they didn't.
Powerful outsiders in thrall of an alien god did. Their fundamentalist god ordained it. The fundamentalism at work here is not different in its mania from that of a serial killer. In fact, when the murderous tally has rendered, thus far, 450 of the world's oldest and most beautiful mountains into two million acres of rubble, the comparison seems more than apt.
This monotheism's fundamentalism is absurdly simple. Its name is Profit. All of its liturgies and canons, commandments and creeds, rituals and prayers are chanted repetitions of its own name. There shall be no other god before Profit. Neither respect for nature nor the lives of people shall inhibit the divine right of it to proclaim its name. Profit! Such proclamation shall echo from hill to hill…………….oh, but the hills are gone. No matter. Profit owns the airwaves.
So, I put on the mask of the god Profit. ( Part of the creed is that the word "god" is in lowercase, Profit in upper.) What do I see clairvoyantly through the thin slits of the eye holes? I see extreme waste, and I see a public relations bonanza. I see how billions of tons of mountains have been bulldozed into valleys, burying thousands of streams. What a missed opportunity! In the future I see a never ending convoy of coal trucks hauling all that blasted rubble to the East coast. I see the construction of a new, resurrected (!) mountain range, from Miami to Maine, the Appalachian Coastal Range! The top of the range will mimic mountainous undulations and also be a broad highway. Incredible water views. A toll road! Every twenty mile stretch named for a corporation that underwrote the trucking. Every fifty miles an Exxon and McDonald's. We'll call the whole thing the Appalachian Trail. (Not very original, but the former trail is gone.) No more tedious hiking! We'll pave it with all that coal slurry we have needlessly damned up back in West Virginia. Through the mask I see that we will need to take down all the mountains, even the ones without coal buried in them, to finish the greatest public works project since the Great Wall in China. (Memo: Relocation of mountains not-containing coal will be paid for by the taxpayers. Memo: As a public works project, all the expenses should be paid for but public funds!) We will build hundreds of new coal burning plants, which will, no doubt, accelerate climate change. But, our new Appalachian Coastal Range will protect the East Coast. The swelling Atlantic, thrashing and churning with steroidal storms, will be laughed at by mountaintop trekkers in their SUVs. People will be so grateful! Folks on the West coast will demand that Colorado and Wyoming be similarly re-positioned.
The benefits go on and on. Disney will make what's left of southern West Virginia into a high plains theme park for hunter gatherers. (Isn't that a nicer term than "hillbilly"?) African antelope and wildebeest will be imported to replace the extinct native bear and deer.
Damn, what is not possible when you put on the fundamentalist mask?!!
Sooner or later, though, you have to take it off. It's hard to breath in that confined space. Then you might listen to a new CD, The Fable True, by Maine's great singer/songwriter Dave Mallett. He's set quotations from Henry David Thoreau's 1846 book The Maine Woods, a journal of Thoreau's travel across northern Maine by foot and bateau and his climbing of Mt. Katahdin, to music. One of the quotations is this:
Strange that so few ever come to the woods to see how the pine lives and grows and spires, lifting its evergreen arms to the
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