Fouling our own nest

638:

Last year I saw the film ‘Gasland’. In the United States (and now too here in Australia) they’ve discovered a vast ocean of shale reserves beneath the ground, from which they can extract gas. An energy bonanza … so their dependence on imported energy has been reduced … and it’s home ‘grown’, and it’s cheap …but there’s a catch. They can only extract the gas by (a process known as ‘fracking’) causing mini-earthquakes to explode the shale, deep beneath the earth, to get at the gas. Fine so far? But a side effect of the process is that toxic chemicals (from the ‘fracking’ process) leach into the drinking water aquifers, poisoning the water supply for the people up above. Here’s just another example of a valuable commodity, appearing to be free, in a ‘free-ride’ kind of a way, but coming with hidden costs. On the one hand there’s an abundance of ‘freely available’ energy (Nature is so generous) and on the down side the water gets polluted causing untold health problems.

You can’t blame humans for always exploiting an opportunity. We’ve developed that ability over aeons, to make us The Dominant Species. We’ve always celebrated the fact that we’re so smart, clever enough in fact to exploit and disregard Nature. But we get ‘owt for nowt’. We pay in the end.

 The great lesson for humans, in learning how to use opportunities afforded them by using their big brains, is to know when to stop, when to pull back in gratitude, and then to use some intelligence by not regretting missing out on the ‘full opportunity’. That restraint is at the heart of the trend to ‘go green’, and then, if we are ‘green’ (read sensitive and aware) why not go fully green, by dropping the animal stuff in the diet?

Exploitation is a dumb act. Taking things, taking trees, taking rivers, taking any resource, including animals.

There are still many environmentalists who are meat heads. All I’m saying is that just because animals seem to breed abundantly and seem so available, and seem so indefensible and cheap to ‘run’, is that a reason to continue exploiting them, going hell-for-leather (literally!!)?