In every one of my pursuits, there’s always a common theme in the way that I approach the learning process. For one thing, I’m completely at peace with the idea of failing. I believe that learning from my own mistakes is one of the most important self-reflective mechanisms that I can take advantage of. But even moreso, I don’t think that having to deal with my own failure is always necessary. Family, friends, teachers, and mentors have experienced situations that taught them lessons and hardened their skins, and they make sure that other people learn from those particular mistakes that haven’t yet been committed. It’s this collective pool of failure, which certainly sounds depressing at first, that is the ultimate learning weapon for a developing society. It’s one of the many compelling purposes of analyzing history. Nevertheless, such analysis comes with a concession; not every situation that has already happened will be exactly the same as a future event. Sometimes, the problems won’t even be remotely the same, and the future will suffer from its own distinct set of tribulations.
But it seems that as our societal impact on the environment stands, our troubles come from two main reasons, historical semi-negligence and self-compounding ecological problems. The New Bedford case study takes us through a comprehensive analysis of historical events, allowing us to recognize the environmental situation in the present and at specific timeslices in the past. It helps us recognize the distinct effect that specific industries have had on the watershed in the area. The bridge that was built during the Whaling period, for example, caused the currents of the Acushnet River to change and led to the buildup of sediment on the Oxford village shoreline, thereby hampering any future development in that area. To some extent, I would hope that people took this as a lesson before building any bridges in the future, because the empirical reality of New Bedford shows us what can happen otherwise.
However, even in the next period when the prevalence of whaling declined, the new textile industry brought its own wave of problems. Since sewers were only beginning to be built, perhaps it is possible to say that no one could have foreseen the future detrimental effects of Combined Sewage Overflow. This impending problem, however, was also compounded by the construction of the textile mills that gave the Textile Period its name. These mills took up land that was originally wetlands, which serve the extremely important function of filtering pollutants, superfluous nutrients, and microorganisms in runoff from the land. In a way, this systemic destruction of the wetlands foreshadows the breaking down of the fishing industry along the river in the late 20th century. It’s almost unnerving to know that the sewers contaminated the river’s water with metals, acids, petroleum hydrocarbons, PCBs, cyanide, and other synthetic chemicals that could have been deterred by the existence of the wetlands.
Ignoring certain aspects of our environmental condition could indeed by caused by not taking lessons from history, but these problems that we choose to accept (and perhaps deal with later) are bound to become worse when new technologies and developments cause different sets of difficulties. We’ve started to cut down more and more trees to fulfill our needs for paper and lumber, but we’ve also started to emit huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, moreso than before. It’s this synergism of problems that makes future development so worrisome. Will we end up suffering from our negligence of old problems and make things even by making some new unforeseen one? I just hope not.
