DAVID COKER
(special to the Courier & Press, Monday May 10. 1999)

        It was an overcast afternoon, during which about a dozen mostly familiar faces
gathered in the conference room of Bethel United Church of Christ for an Earth Day
observance and to discuss the local environment of Southwestern Indiana.

       Meanwhile, the airways were filled with the comments of the Monday morning
quarterbacks in the news media -- Christian televangelists and others attempted to find the
proper vocabulary to explain the tragic episode that took place at Columbine High School in
LIttleton, Colo.

       During the same week, there were no fewer than three such local observances:

 *  A speech at the University of Southern Indiana by the renowned attorney Jan
    Schlichtmann, whose legal exploits representing the parents of sick and dying
    children in Woburn, Mass. -- the result of industrial water pollution -- were
    portrayed in the film “A Civil Action.”

 *  A panel discussion and several other presentations at Bethel Church featuring L
     Linda King of the Environmental Health Network, a nationally recognized
     expert on environmental pollution who addressed food safety and herbal remedies
     to rid our bodies of toxic chemicals to which we are exposed.

  *  Presentations by Dr. Alfred Johnson of the Environmental Health Center of Dallas
     and by King.

        With little in the way of advance publicity and public announcements from the
sponsors, these presentations generated a few column inches of copy in the Courier & press,
and which the exception of the Schlichtmann speech, were poorly covered by the local
television and radio stations.

        To bring to a close this annual observance of environmental awareness, Valley
Watch and about 15 local activists marched down Main Street in a March for Clean Air.

       The news coverage, while better this time, was quick to observe the sparse
attendance at the rally.
 
      Locally, for many years, those who express an intense concern about the quality of
the air, water and land use issue which affect us on a daily basis remain puzzled as to how
so many people can remain in such deeply rooted denial as to the seriousness of the
environmental imperatives around us.

     They raise the issue of one plant -- GE Plastics in Mount Vernon, Ind. -- emitting
one-third the amount of cancer-causing chemical toxins of the entire state of California, a
state in which fully one-fifth of the entire U.S. population resides.

     Elsewhere in the world, we are witnessing the eradication or deformation of many
species of trees, flowering plants, birds, fish, whales and frogs and other threatened animal
populations.
 
     Some express concerns for the overpopulation of abandoned domestic animals in our
local detention facility, but fail to see the hand of individual man and women in all of this.

     So it is within the context that we return to the issue of the senseless murders in
Littleton.

     Linda King made reference to the waning enthusiasm in environmental matters as
representing the detachment that post-industrial man has evolved from the earth.

      Beyond the Spaceship Earth rhetoric, and the beautiful images we frequently see of
our planet, we who remain publicly concerned continue to wonder:  Where is everybody?

      Just as Mother Nature attempts to communicate with us, as a species, through
beached whales and three-legged frogs, the perverse actions of the chidden of Littleton are
screaming out serious warnings as to the extent to which we have become detached from
one anoth3er -- as individuals, as neighborhoods, as churches, as institutions and as
communities.

       There are no political solutions.  We must look to the nature of the human heart.
 
       Until we fully address this heart-wrenching denial which afflicts us, the most
prosperous nation in the world, we can expect no more or less than similar senseless acts of
violence and environmental catastrophes.