“Sustainability” and the disintegration of meaning, by gimleteye

Yesterday, anonymous wrote: “The degradation of Weeki Wachee Springs was foretold by opponents to the construction of a cement plant just a few miles away and the widespread use of deep-well injection of treated sewage effluent. Proponents of both, naturally, said there would be no impact on the Floridan Aquifer, of which Weeki Wachee is a part.”

Weeki Wachee is in Hernando County, on Florida’s west coast. Although the county’s population would scarcely fit into one of Miami-Dade County’s municipalities, the destruction of the spring, emblematic for so much of what Florida has lost, also calls attention to another shifting baseline: how we have lost the capacity to differentiate sustainable losses from the unsustainable.

It is as though we have become tone deaf to alarm signals. So here is a test question: do Florida’s industries, like cement producers, feed the growth machine, or, does the growth machine feed Florida’s industries?

The Chamber of Commerce and industry, whether production homebuilders, banks, or cement executives, claim to be responsibly fulfilling the needs of people and what the market wants.

Under the influence of the free market our Everglades, our springs and drinking water wells serving millions of Floridians are on the brink of collapse.

It is no mystery why such tragedies are accepted by the broad public as an inadvertent consequence of a benign, even positive quest for profit.

“It’s not what you say, it’s what people hear”. That’s the title of Dr. Frank Luntz’ latest book, “Words that matter”. Dr. Luntz describes himself as “… the go-to consultant when leading companies need communication and language guidance, from General Motors to FedEx, Disney to American Express, from AT&T to Pfizer, from Kroger supermarkets to McDonald’s to the entire soft drink and motion picture industries, as well as for the US Department of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and the Business Roundtable.”

The disintegration of meaning, hawked by experts in re-arranging language like Dr. Luntz, applies equally to our democracy, to our springs and aquifers, and to statements like this one “from CEMEX—the corporate parent of the facility only a few miles from Weeki Wachee Spring:

“As a global industry leader, we work to provide products of consistently high quality and reliable service to customers and communities around the world. We advance the well-being of those we serve through our unwavering focus on continuous improvement and our efforts to promote a sustainable future.”

A “sustainable future” includes the fierce resistance by cement manufacturers to mercury emission standards for their plants, encouragement by polluters of state-sponsored, governmental attacks on the Clean Water Act in the US Supreme Court to allow continued pollution of not just surface waters but aquifers, too, and lobbying the Florida legislature to soften regulations governing pollution of phosphate and nutrients discharged by industry into Florida waterways.

CEMEX, as a result of a $15 billion acquisition only a few months ago, also owns CSR Rinker and the problems it shares with other rock mining companies in illegally permitted activities near the Everglades.

CEMEX operates a huge rock mine in South Miami-Dade County that stretches from Card Sound Road all the way to the 18 Mile Stretch. It is now seeking a permit to massively expand that mine, despite accumulating evidence that rock mining in the area is speeding the salt water intrusion front from Biscayne Bay toward drinking water wells in Florida City, that serve the entire Florida Keys.

This is the growth machine at work: consuming Florida’s resources and putting taxpayers and consumers at an ever-increasing debt to service its needs.

No longer able to rely solely on aquifers fed by natural rainfall, coastal areas of Florida will soon be required to finance massively expensive desalination plants, that also require huge energy inputs.

The energy to power these desalination plants will have to be provided by Florida Power and Light, which is now trying to locate a massive new coal-fired power plant—that will emit more mercury into the atmosphere and millions of tons of carbon dioxide, too—at the edge of the Everglades.

"At FPL Group, one of the ways we’ve chosen to manage and measure our progress is by employing the concept of “sustainability.” At its core, sustainability requires demonstrated attention to, and excellence in, three key areas: economic accountability, environmental stewardship and social responsibility. Following is a review of many of our strengths, activities and strategies, using the three elements of this sustainability concept as a framework.” That's from the corporate website.

“Sustainability”--to FPL and corporate America--depends, first, on profits generated by expanding customer base and building more infrastructure to sustain more consumption.

Make no mistake: the growth machine of which we are willing taxpayers feeds industries whose continued profit depends on obliterating meaning, so that baselines will continue to shift in a miasma of pollution.

It is time for a new definition of progress before the mercury gets to all of us.