Rick Santorum spoke a couple of weeks ago about President Obama’s attitude toward environmental matters. In dismissing concerns for the environment, Santorum said his god gave people this planet to use.

   How can a person be so short-sighted and such a poor student of history? When Richard Nixon—yes, that Richard Nixon—signed into law environmental protection laws, there were a lot of problems with our environment.

   On the west side of Kokomo was a steel mill. When I was in grade school, the place was called Continental Steel. It later sold to a corporation called Penn-Dixie, but locals usually called it "Continental." Even when I was eight or nine years old, I remember riding past big ponds of orange sludge generated by the plant. People lived within one hundred feet of the place. The closest probably were in the mobile home park across Markland Avenue. Wildkat Creek wound through the area and carried, ultimately to the Wabash River, whatever it picked up.

   During the EPA cleanup that ultimately took place, under auspices of the Superfund, 2,450 barrels of toxic waste were unburied. Wildcat Creek was dredged. Asbestos was removed.

   Management sacked the workers’ pension fund while simultaneously dumping toxic waste into the ground, water, and air. Continental went bankrupt. Former workers were left without pensions they had earned. Area residents were left with carcinogenic waste. Jerome Castle, the head of Penn-Dixie, spent time in prison for defrauding—Penn-Dixie, by selling the corporation Florida swampland at inflated prices.

   If people unnecessarily commit waste on the land and in the water and air, this is not a matter to glibly dismiss. Concern for environment is concern for people who will live in the same environment in the future. Santorum’s accusation that President Obama somehow worships the Earth, presumably because President Obama believes the government should take measures to protect the environment, is poppycock. To protect our environment is a utilitarian thing. Soldiers in the 1800s wondered why they suffered from various intestinal diseases. In the Civil War more soldiers died from disease than bullets. Today was know that drinking water from the same source as that into which one relives one’s bladder and bowels is not healthy. The same can be said for our activities and our planet.

   Perhaps because Santorum believes we live in the end times, it is okay to lay waste to our lands and waters. His beliefs certainly resonate with concepts of those who believe in Dominionism. If those are the beliefs that drive him, he should say so. I would like to know whether a person who seeks the office in which he will have the nuclear "football" believes that Armageddon is not just a good thing, but the ultimate will of the deity he worships. After all, if the world is about to end, why not use it up as fast as one can?

   This Saturday, March 10, 2012, at 11 am at Big Hat Books, 6510 Cornell Avenue, we shall discuss global climate change.