Eco-Imagination

Have you ever had a guest come over for a visit - you know the type - a charmer. Interesting. Witty. Full of ideas and you just think "what a great friend".  When he/she leaves you find a red wine stain carefully covered up, food slopped on your good chair and a few pieces of good silver missing? That kinda friend.

Seems we have one in General Electric.  They have been telling us stories about their baby elephant that dances in a rain forest/Garden of Eden because he/she/it is so happy with the GE's effort to keep the world clean and green.

We missed the point.  GE is happy to sell you stuff so you and your business can do its part....that's the imagination stuff -- where you are imagining that GE is doing the right thing.  They just want you to spend money on their stuff. GE's sense of responsibility is actually in doubt.

On the east end of Long Island the big deal sport and commercial fishing has a lot to do with striped bass.  For commercial fisherman they get  sometimes $3.00/lb for a fish and to catch 50 or so (by line not net) in an evening of horribly hard work, each in the 15lb. category, well it is a big deal.  These fish have to be a certain length and NOT EXCEED a certain length so if you happen to hook a 40 pound lunker you can take it home and eat it but you can't sell it. The reason is that the older, bigger fish have had enough time in the water to soak up all kinds of PCBs.  Yes. Can you believe it? Someone dumped enough toxins in the Hudson River (part of the migration/spawning pattern) for a lot of these fish that they become poison pills with fins. Who might this miscreant be? 

Why our eco-imagination friends, that's who.

I lived for a year in the Hudson River Valley about 40 years ago. That was when they discovered that any living thing caught below a point in the Hudson River was death food - from stripped bass to crabs.... all as a result of about 40 years of dumping of PCBs by GE. Flash forward to 2006 when the EPA finally got GE to start to clean this stuff up...after all of us were jumping through hoops to avoid the aftermath of their polluting.  Now GE wants to take a year an assess how phase I of their clean up is going before they go on to Phase 2.  I'm not kidding.

The phrase "not in my lifetime" takes on new meaning.