State’s environmental failure

threatens very source of life

Special to the Courier & Press

Thursday, April 20. 2000

Environmentalists from around the state are seriously discussing a major protest demonstration on the White River in Indianapolis on April 28th. The demonstration is meant to coincide with a fish-release ceremony by Governor Frank O'Bannon who hopes to use the occasion during his Governor's Conference on the Environment to emphasize his administration's dedication to environmental safeguards and protecting natural resources throughout the state of Indiana.

What has prompted this feigned attempt at public empathy by the state's highest elected official was an apparent chemical release into the Anderson wastewater treatment plant which poisoned some 112 tons of fish gathered from the banks of the White River from Anderson to Noblesville in late December and early January of this year. O'Bannon, in releasing the hatchling fish from Broad Ripple Park where the river runs through Indianapolis, seeks to demonstrate that the state is sincere about cleaning up the river and discovering once and for all who precisely was responsible for this, the state's most serious environmental tragedy in recorded history.

For human beings, gathering together at rivers is perhaps one of the oldest natural tendencies. The very cradles of ancient civilizations occurred along the Nile, Tigress and Euphrates Rivers in northern Africa and what is now modern-day Iraq. Native American populations on both continents settled along river basins and worshiped them as a source of food, refreshment and transportation, facilitating trade among different tribes and settlements.

Indeed, the symbolic importance of rivers to the progress and spiritual evolution of mankind was underscored in one of the Gospel stories of Jesus Christ.

In Matthew 4 and elsewhere, the authors of the Gospels record the only witnessed assembly of the transfiguration -- the congregation of the Father (God), the Son (Christ) and the Holy Spirit which descended in the form of a dove from heaven to sit on Christ's shoulder. This event, during which God said "This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased," took place in the cool, flowing waters of the Jordan River when John the Baptist perform the fateful act which served as the ordination of Jesus for his teaching mission. With this act, the Messiah assumed responsibility for all human sin as foretold by Biblical prophesies written many centuries before.

Today, many of us continue to be lured to the flowing waters of rivers in our midst. They remain a source of emotional solace, artistic inspiration and the liquid molecules that comprise our very being.

But how many of us can be pleased when every year about this time we look at the amount of garbage which litters the banks of the Ohio River in our own region? How many are overjoyed by the outrageous chemical spills which occur all too frequently throughout this region?

With fish consumption advisories for PCBs, Mercury and other toxic chemicals in most of the surface waters of this state, the coal combustion waste controversy and an overall culture of environmental appeasement when it comes to utilities and big polluting industries, Frank O’Bannon’s photo opportunity on the White River next week will appear as a pathetic admission of the total failure of his administration to do anything to reverse the multi-faceted environmental degradation occurring throughout this state.

It should set off alarm bells for those among us steeped in complacency, ignorance, ideological persuasion or insular negligence.

Those who worship at the alter of economic development at all costs and seem to have forgotten that we are trashing the very planet from which we each receive our very fragile, mortal existence.

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