Be glad you’re not there
YOU ARE HERE:
Exposing the Vital Link Between
What We Do and What That Does to Our Planet
By Thomas M. Kostigen
272 pp. HarperOne, $25.95
Reviewed by Marty Carlock
A wise environmentalist I know says the environmental movement needs to stop shouting its doomsday message and begin to offer constructive ideas about what to do about it. Kostigen has already written The Green Book, suggesting more than 400 simple things individuals can do that will make a difference, so it doesn’t seem right to castigate him for this one, another doomsday sermon.
You Are Here appears to be a primer for people who have paid no attention at all for the past decade or so. Perhaps it’s unfair to have it reviewed by a dedicated tree-hugger, recycler, and thermostat monitor who has been at it for decades, but hey, somebody has to do it.
To my eye, there’s not much new here. Okay, Kostigen has embedded some interesting statistics, such as these:
It would now take the resources of five planet earths to support the current world’s population at U.S. standards of living.
Turning up your house temperature one degree in summer and down one degree in winter—if we all did it—would eliminate the expelling of 15 million tons of carbon dioxide and 25,000 tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere of the U.S.
One toilet flush, five gallons, consumes the total amount of water someone in a developing country would use for everything—drinking, bathing, washing things—in a day. Whereas we use almost 12 times that much, 20,000 gallons per person per year.
Kostigen has chosen to keep his arguments simple, making blanket statements preceded by “scientists say” or “experts predict” and supporting what he says they say with almost thirty pages of footnotes. I remain unconvinced when I see that almost all the sources are Websites.
This author’s thesis is that if he can put a face, a person, on the end results of our carelessness, we might be more inclined to take the extra moment to toss the plastic bottle in the recycle bin. So he travels to some of the worst, most polluted or most threatened places on the planet and tries to talk to the people there. He begins in Mumbai, once Bombay, home to 100,000 people per square mile.
His hope is to find something good going on, and, depending on your definition of “good,” he does. “There is work. There is money to be made. People aren’t dying of starvation as they likely would in the rural areas.” It’s not unlikely that they will die of toxic pollution, but, an educated Indian put it, “They cannot afford a long-term view.”
“The ugly underbelly of economic globalization,” Kostigen says, is that “a disproportionate burden of toxic waste, dangerous products and polluting technologies are (sic) currently being exported from rich industrialized countries to poor developing countries.” He watches workers disassemble a computer and then put its plastic housing through a shredder and other processes to produce contaminated plastic pellets.
Kostigen bribes an Indonesian to take him to the logging camps, said to be run by a criminal element. He sees the forest being clear-cut by young men who get about a dollar a tree—for mahogany that sells for $80 a log. He goes into the Amazonian jungle, where a foreign company will apply for a permit to cut a hundred trees and then “pay the right people” to let them cut a thousand trees. “Who’s to know and who’s to stop them?” asks one Brazilian.
He returns to our own turf and analyzes the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, for fifty years the destination of New York City’s debris. Then he tackles the Eastern Garbage Patch in the Pacific Ocean, where sea currents carry stupendous amounts of ocean-borne waste. After that Kostigen deals with “The Greatest Problem No One Has Heard About,” which is a pretty fatuous title for a chapter on water shortages.
The most effective story is the one he tells when he visits Shishmaref, a village in Alaska. In some other locales he’s kept at arm’s length from the people, but these friendly Inuits share their lifestyles and their worries. Because rising sea levels are eroding the very land on which their village is built, they will have to be moved. Says the author, “Their culture doesn’t really employ the concept of blame.”
“It is just something that we choose not to do—blame,” says one villager. “We just move on. We fix things and move on. And we want to fix this. We want to move.”
You can’t help loving them.
I found it peculiar that Kostigen writes in an Easy-Reader, Dick-and-Jane style, like this: “More people are being drawn to urban areas all over the world. And these urban areas are increasingly coastal. Coasts provide easier access to trade and transportation. Trade and transportation beget money and goods. Coasts are where most markets are created.” It reads like a middle-school textbook, and perhaps that’s where its future lies.
Free-lance journalist Marty Carlock, author of A Guide to Public Art in Greater Boston, has published more than 1,600 articles in thirty-plus publications. At present she writes for Sculpture and Landscape Architecture magazines and for her own amusement.
Mail this page