Albert E. Burke

HEGE Series

Rabbit-Hole 04

• Environment

  • Cosmology
  • Ecotheology
  • Pollution
  • Biodegradation
  • Recycling
  • Invasive Species
  • Alexander Solzhenitsyn
  • Albert E. Burke
  • Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
  • Beatrix Potter
  • Paul Kingsnorth

The Burke Center for Environmental and International Studies

Environmentalist
The excerpt below from Enough Good Men in the chapter Dirt, People and History is a fine example of how Dr. Burke related historical events to the environment around us. The only aspect missing is this is merely the printed word, and misses the timing and the inflection in the way Dr. Burke presented it:
Origin of "A Pact With the Unborn" Dr. Albert E. Burke - 1961
     That kind of freedom grew among a people with elbowroom; few Americans in a big land. With plenty of elbowroom, twenty-three million Americans back in 1889 were free to turn their Oklahoman upside down irresponsibly; and they didn't mind too much when the United States government stepped in to help them. Today's much larger American population has less of that "elbowroom," on farmlands, in mines, in good water, good air, or in any natural resource. Today's American has less, and poorer quality resources to work and live with. We are no longer free to do as we please with them; but many among us today still mind very much that, since stepping in to help deal with problems like that emergency in 1890, the government has never really stepped out of what were once our private affairs.
     This resentment has led to a new parlor game in this country during the last thirty years, a dangerous game of name-calling called "creeping socialism." It is played by too many Americans today who simplify things too much. Often they know little to nothing about the kind of American history made by irresponsible men who forced the government into what were then our private affairs. That record clearly shows what happens when individual Americans misuse their private affairs by making them public problems. When that point is reached, the government always steps in.
     Americans who play this dangerous new game of "creeping socialism" see that government, their government, as one of the greatest dangers to our future as a free people. In doing so they misuse the word "socialism" and they misread their own history. The problem has never been "creeping socialism" in our American government. It has always been creeping irresponsibility among too many Americans.

TV Productions

Cuba: The Battle of America
Albert Schweitzer Symposium Part 1 1947
Albert Schweitzer Symposium Part 2 1958