An Environmental Hero

Heroes are not reasonable fellows. They do what they do because they see things differently from ordinary folks. Maybe they see things more clearly. And it's in their nature to take action when the opportunity presents.

These things come to mind because we went to the Sierra Club's farewell party for Bruce Nilles at which he was justly feted for doing some incredible heavy lifting on the issues of air pollution, global warming and coal power. To us and the other folks in that room, Bruce is clearly a hero and deserves to be.

But to others, he is not. Wednesday there appeared a nasty blog by a guy named Rich Trzupek, an industry apologist who is a pretty knowledgeable about pollution but who has let himself go straight over the edge in frustration and, I suspect, envy, in a completely outrageous personal attack on Bruce. Blogs like that are one of the things wrong with the world these days. You can google it; I won't give the link 'cause it seems too much like smut.

Bruce Nilles is an environmental hero and Mark Trzupek is not because heroes don't care about being reasonable, or making compromises, or measuring progress little by little. We need reasonable people and progress in fact does get made little by little. But the world would be a sad, gray place if we were all Mark Trzupek. We need the Bruce Nilles of the world even when they are unreasonable or difficult - even when they are wrong. (And he's not wrong on this!) This quote from Maurice Maeterlinck's Our Social Duty says it better than I can.

At every crossway on the road that leads to the future, each progressive spirit is opposed by a thousand men appointed to guard the past. Let us have no fear lest the fair towers of former days be sufficiently defended. The least that the most timid among us can do is not to add to the immense dead weight which nature drags along.

Let us think of the great invisible ship that carries our human destinies upon eternity. Like the vessels of our confined oceans, she has her sails and her ballast. The fear that she may pitch or roll on leaving the roadstead is no reason for increasing the weight of the ballast by stowing the fair white sails in the depths of the hold. They were not woven to molder side by side with cobblestones in the dark. Ballast exists everywhere; all the pebbles of the harbor, all the sand of the beach, will serve for that. But sails are rare and precious things; their place is not in the murk of the well, but amid the light of the tall masts where they will collect the winds of space.