Keyword: Growth

I hate not quite being sure about something.

Years and years and years ago, when I was a young teen, I read an article about the Vietnam War.  I can still visualize myself, sitting on the top floor of my grandparents' house in Fire Island, leafing through the New York Times Sunday Edition.

The article was about the lingering effects of Agent Orange, as veterans of that war were increasingly suffering side effects from exposure.  Details from that reading still flit in my mind, about how soldiers would assuage concerned Vietnamese that the compound was harmless by drinking it.  

For some reason, I always assumed it would taste like Tang.

But the image that stuck in my mind, and that has always stuck in my mind, came from a short narrative about what happened to the jungles and rainforests of Vietnam after they'd been sprayed.  Agent Orange, or so I recalled, acted by massively ramping up growth.  Plants exploded in a riot of false fecundity.  Huge, pulpy, and misshapen fruit hung from branches.  Leaves became vast.   The forests, or so the article in my memory described, became almost alien in appearance.  Growth was everywhere...but also utterly unsustainable.

The plants would grow beyond their capacity to sustain the growth.  They'd burn through their own internal nutrients, exhaust their supplies of water and minerals, and then...as quickly as they'd grown...they'd die.  It was the growth that kills.

As a metaphor, that image of Agent Orange has legs.  

Being a pastor and all, it makes me think of the bureaucracies of old-line denominational churches, the big cumbersome governmental structures that once matched our size but now drain energy and passion from our fellowship.  It makes me think of the gargantuan megachurches, arisen in an era of consumerism and cheap, easy transportation.  Which, as we know, will always be the case, forever and ever, AMEN.  

It makes me think of fossil fuels, which have allowed us to cheat Malthus for three generations.  God help us all.  

Problem is, for years and years I could never find reference to that article, or anything in general articles about Agent Orange that would confirm that memory.  Reliant on only that, it felt too hazy.  Maybe I dreamed it.  One never knows.  But I never quite followed up on verifying the image.

Until I realized that I should just Google it, and add "growth" to my search parameters.  And there they were.  Article after article, confirming that the best way the military ever devised to make war on plant life was to make it grow and grow with no hope of ever stopping.

Ah, the internet.  

Agent Black

Though I have the same deep hardwired love of cars as most Amurrican males, I've always viewed our car-centric transportation system as a bit ..off. That comes, I suppose, from having to spend so much time in it. Yeah, I know, there are distractions for when we drive. I should be yammering away on my cell or texting or listening to people scream at each other on talk radio.

But more often than not, I pay attention to where I am, and what I'm doing. I look out across an expanse of tarmac and idling steel and flesh stretching to the horizon, and I think...this isn't progress. Progress should feel...graceful. Progress should be...moving. As our society has grown around the easy availability of petroleum, cities and towns and communities built on a human scale have vanished. The burbs have flourished and spread like a fungus on the inside of an unwashed thigh.

Oil has meant growth, without question. It has driven massive expansions in infrastructure, and underlies all modern commerce and industrial agriculture. It is the engine that made the explosive human population growth of the 20th century possible.

But I wonder: is it the growth that kills?

Agent Orange is my favorite metaphor for growth-unto-death. That narsty substance, in the event that you don't know your 20th century history, was a herbicide sprayed onto the forests of Vietnam by fleets of American planes. To kill Viet Cong, we had to deprive them of cover...so we killed their jungles. Agent Orange was the plant toxin we used, and it works in a very interesting way.

It simulates a plant growth hormone, and essentially causes most broadleaf plants to go into a period of explosive and unsustainable fecundity. After spraying, leaves would grow huge. Fruit would be immense, distended, mealy and inedible. A jungle poisoned by Agent Orange would, for a short while, be an alien wonderland of insane, outrageous production...and then, having exhausted itself, the jungle would die.

For 100 years, we've consumed the black blood of ancient dragons, and from that easy but finite energy have grown explosively. But the age of oil is ending. As I look out across what human society has become, I do now and again wonder.

Are fossil fuels our Agent Black?