I saw a picture taken by a reader of National Geographic in the magazine a little while ago (November issue?) which was a fish floating in the opening in an aluminum can. In the photo's caption the photographer bemoaned the effects of mankind on the sea.
Let's break this whole thing down, parse it out. We infer that the writer of the caption (who may or may not have taken the picture, but my impression was that they were the same person) thinks that mankind has a negative effect (if even only, at times) on the sea. Similarly, we infer the writer thinks the presence of the can in the sea is due to some act of mankind; after all we don't find aluminum cans in the wild. The picture of the fish in the can must also have some poinancy for the writer, as though a picture of the can without the fish, or just the fish alone, would not convey the same message. The writer must also ascribe human attributes to the fish, in order for the message to be poiniant--that the fish is in the can and not pleased, or not happy with the can's presence. Perhaps the writer feels the fish is trapped in the can, or harmed by the can's presence in the sea.
A picture really is worth a thousand words, isn't it? I dont have the picture in front of me, so it may be worth far more or less--I'm doing this from my memory, though that's largely irrelevant to what follows.
How do we know the fish is unhappy with the can? It seems to me if I'm small enough to fit in the mouth of an aluminum can, I'd probably fit in the mouth of just about every other predator in the sea. As such, the can offers me a significant level of protection from those predators--"I'm pretty damn happy that someone was concerned enough to throw this can into the water for me! How thoughtful of them!"
That being the other extreme interpretation of an expressionless fish's presence in an aluminum can, what about the mundane? "I'm just swimming around looking for food, and happened to find this thing nearby that I wanted to check out."
Further still, the can is made of aluminum. The dry surface of the Earth is covered in seashells, including mountaintops, that represent what used to be the bottoms of bodies of water now pushed high into the air by tectonic forces. The land under your feet was probably under water at some point in its history. Where do we mine aluminum? We pull it out of the land that probably used to be under water at some point in its history. So at some point, aluminum was under water (and continues to be underwater). Aluminum found in the Earth's crust is under water, and this pictured aluminum can that was made from aluminum mined from the Earth's crust is under water too. Since the writer of the caption probably doesn't object to the presence of aluminum in the Earth's crust under water, the writer must be objecting specifically to this aluminum. Because the only difference between the aluminum in the Earth's crust and the aluminum can is the form the aluminum takes, the crucial point of offense for the writer of the caption must be that the aluminum is shaped like a can.
Burying the cans in the earth would probably be considered a similar travesty, an act likely called "pollution." However burying the cans in the Earth from which it came could also be returning it to its "natural" state, because after all, we don't commonly consider burying dead people to be pollution, do we? Here again, burying aluminum itself isnt the issue, but rather the form the aluminum takes.
Now extrapolate the consequences of this for everything we consider to be pollution, all of which was made by extracting resources from the Earth--nothing came from outside the Earth, say from Mars or Venus. Glass bottles (made from silica sand), plastics (a form of petroleum products, extracted from the ground), wood, all metals, etc, are all natural materials. Yet when they go into a landfill to be reburied after we've used these elements, we consider them to be garbage or pollution. What has turned natural materials into pollution? Little more than the form which these materials take from one case to the next.
When you think about environmentalism in this way, it seems rather silly, doesn't it? It's all a matter of perspective!
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