Unearned Power
After chopping down half a continent’s forests, coal must have seemed like manna from heaven, and later oil, gas, and uranium. Bounty of nature.
But you could see why they’d love it. It rewarded people for being smart, for being clever, and most of all for helping others. It enabled people to cross distances faster than ever, to build taller and stronger, to warm the cold, to cool the hot, and so on.
I suspect that even as early as the beginning, say soon after Watt’s steam engine around 1776, some may have already started suspecting that it might have been too good to be true.
At first I doubt anyone couldn’t see any meaningful problems. Sure, there was smoke in the air that was more toxic than smoke from wood and all the mining left holes in the ground, but they kept finding that they could use these sources of energy to solve the problems they created.
Or so it seemed. Some problems persisted and grew. Some problems didn’t shrink but people learned to build taller chimneys and to locate factories farther from where people lived, which enabled them to burn more. They did things like replace horse poop concentrated in cities with car exhaust dispersed throughout the whole biosphere. That is, they moved the symptoms farther away or dispersed them, but grew them bigger. They created more smoke and other pollution, which was more deadly and more enduring, just dispersed, so nowhere acute, though everywhere growing. They dug bigger holes deeper, leaving them emptier, and more of them.
They kept using more of this found, unearned energy to solve bigger problems, creating bigger problems.
People in early steps of this process could be considered ignorant, may have been, and probably were. People in later steps could be considered innocent for thinking that these new problems of pollution and depletion could be solved.
People in recent times, when observation showed the pollution and depletion would accumulate and couldn’t be undone, could only be considered negligent for not owning up to inevitability. People today, including end-users, like the people who buy airplane tickets and plastic, can only not know that they are hurting people, violating their own values, by keeping themselves ignorant, which takes deliberate effort. Their (our) behavior is unconscionable.
We thought the problems were the pollution and depletion. Those problems are serious, but what these processes did to us as individuals and society hurt us more seriously and predictably than environmental degradation. They lead us to war, invasion, despair, hopelessness, and giving in.
It is in everyone’s interests to end nearly all pollution and depletion. Our legitimizing myths tell us doing so is impossible or will worsen our lives.
Ours come from the same process that led Vice President John Calhoun to state on the senate floor in 1837, that slavery was “instead of an evil, a good—a positive good.”
Their legitimizing myths told them that zero slavery was extreme to impossible, or that “Freedom is not possible without slavery,” as stated the Richmond Enquirer in 1856.
Our legitimizing myths tell us that pollution and depletion are are good, that freedom is not possible without them, that ending them is extreme to impossible, and so on.
We clutch our pearls, feigning being aghast: “Really?? My flight pollutes?? I thought for sure that my offset would undo it. My plastic cup will pollute the ocean?? I had no idea!” and other bogus, self-serving attempts to claim innocence.
Their myths were wrong. Ours are wrong. Just as we thrive without slavery, we will thrive without pollution and depletion. We don’t have to speculate the alternative. History tells us: civil war, tyranny, risk of invasion, despair, and hopelessness.
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