I can still feel the hot air coming from the heater vent in the corner of my parents’ living room. I sat on the vent, hoarding all the heat with the blanket that covered me like a tent. I was oblivious to the scattered and loud conversation of my six brothers, two sisters, and parents. While my siblings all fought for attention from my parents, I was completely absorbed by my newly-discovered world of books. Earlier that afternoon I had found a book called My Side of the Mountain and I couldn’t put it down. Although the protagonist, Sam Gribley, was in his early teens and I was only ten, we seemed to have everything else in common. Just like me, he had a huge family that didn’t take him seriously. He and I loved the outdoors, wanted to be independent, and worked hard. Unlike me, however, Sam’s desires led him to run away and make a new home in the mountains. Instead of running away, I worked hard at everything I did: my paper route, school, yard work on the huge lot of the elderly couple my family befriended, scouting, and all the other odd jobs that got me through school. Also, I made the outdoors an integral part of my life. Whenever I could, I went camping or took a hike through the canyons. Sam’s vivid descriptions of the thriving wilderness with its clean streams, thick green trees, and abundant wildlife still inspire me today. Beautiful sunsets and hawks in the sky never cease to captivate me. I love to breathe the clean air of the mountains and the deep foliage of the forest always takes my breath away.
About ten years after Sam Gribley changed my life with his story of trees and falcons I found myself in Ukraine. Profanities in both English and Russian blazed through my mind as I plunked six hryvnias on the counter and paid for the two bottles of Coca-Cola. As a representative of my church, it wasn’t right for me to have such foul language on the tip of my tongue, but it also wasn’t right that I was being forced to bribe corrupt cops. Fifteen minutes earlier, as the Ukrainian police approached my friend and me, I thought two teens dressed up as cops and robbers were playing a prank on us. The officers demanded to see our passports; when we insisted on keeping them in our hands while we showed them the necessary documents they began swearing and yelling at us as though we were soldiers in boot camp. I was irate. As the law allowed, we insisted on keeping them in our hands for fear of crooked police stealing them. There was no way out of the situation, however, so we finally acquiesced and handed over our passports. The officers didn’t steal our documentation; instead, they claimed that my friend didn’t have sufficient registration to be in the city. That was a lie, but they wanted a bribe. I toyed with the idea of making them take us to the station instead of participating in their corrupt antics, but after some debate, we gave in and bought them a couple bottles of Coke.
Just as Sam taught me to love and respect nature, to work hard, and to be independent, this experience taught me to love justice. The corruption of these cops made me sick. I had naively assumed that police officers were committed to helping those who needed protection and enforcing laws even if doing so didn’t serve their pecuniary interest. I now realize that I can’t take justice for granted; it’s something that I need to fight for.
Unfortunately, a callous disregard for justice isn’t unique to Ukrainian police. Everyone who has an opinion about the environment fits somewhere on a spectrum, and those on the extremes are much like the Ukrainian policemen demanding bribes. They have no respect for the rule of law, fundamental fairness, or others’ rights. Those at one end of the spectrum deny the existence of global warming and don’t consider the rights of people to enjoy the land the way that Sam taught me to. Some even go so far as to intentionally and illegally pollute for monetary gain. Those on the other end of the spectrum are aptly described by Michael Crichton: they view environmental concerns as a religion rather than a science. They see what they want to see in environmental data and some even fabricate scientific results in an effort to thwart development. They have no tolerance or respect for other viewpoints, rational though they may be. Many have destroyed property and have advocated putting human lives in danger in the name of conservation.
My wife and I will be having a baby girl in May of this year and I am determined to do my part to make sure that our daughter will have the same opportunities that I enjoy. I want her to be able to breathe deeply without wondering what harmful particles are entering her lungs. I want her to smell the fresh pines and not wonder whether they’ll always be there. I want her to see all the wildlife that the mountains have to offer. But I also don’t want extremists to destroy her property to push a political agenda. As inviting as Sam’s isolated life in the wilderness sounds, I know I must join in the fight to ensure that by the time my daughter wishes to enjoy the wild, there will still be wild left. The best way I can do this is through the law. In Shakespeare’s play, King Henry VI, good lawyers ensure that both the rule of law and level heads prevail. Similarly, the only recourse I had against Ukrainian police was our lawyers. If I hadn’t mentioned the name of our attorneys, “Garant,” I’m sure that we would have had to give up much more than two Coca-Colas to get them to leave us alone. My hope is that a law degree will enable me to employ my strong work ethic, my commitment to excellence, and my drive to succeed as tools in the effort to curb the unjust methods of those on both extremes of the environmental spectrum. I can fight for justice by aspiring to be a wise advocate with a love of both fairness and the environment.
No comments:
Post a Comment