Fouling our own nest

Wednesday 26th January 2011
I’ve just seen the film ‘Gasland’. In the United States they’ve discovered a vast ocean of shale reserves beneath the ground, from which they can extract gas. An energy bonanza. Their dependence on imported energy is drastically reduced, but there’s a catch. They can only extract the gas by a process known as ‘fracking’ - by causing mini-earthquakes to explode the shale (deep beneath the earth) to get the gas. Fine so far. But a side effect of the process is that toxic chemicals (from the ‘fracking’ process) have leaked into the aquifer under a very large area of the United States, poisoning the water supplies to millions of Americans. Here’s just another example of a valuable commodity, which appeared to be free but came with hidden costs.
On the one hand we get an abundance of ‘freely available’ energy (Nature is so generous) but the down side is polluted water, causing untold health problems.
Humans always exploit an opportunity. We love the way we’re clever enough to exploit nature’s abundance. But you get ‘owt for nowt’, there’s always a catch not always immediately obvious. It’s the same when we use animals – the creatures seem to breed abundantly, they seem so available, so indefensible, so cheap to ‘run’. How can we be blamed for making money out of them. In fact in the rural areas there’s not much else one can make money from. So animals are put to use … and the rest of the story we know.
The payback has shown up in health problems. The animals are not healthy so the humans who eat them and their by products are not healthy. It’s a very ugly situation on farms, which are economically backed into a corner over animal welfare issues, and on top of that are huge environmental problems associated with modern day farming practices. What seemed so ‘free’ before now seems so expensive, in hidden costs.
It’s the same with petrol or gas being so useful yet so polluting or with trees being so useful but so catastrophic for the environment. We humans won’t learn from one bad experience so the lessons has to be taught over and over, in many different ways, until we do learn. We just can’t help ourselves - we always have to foul our own nest.