Pipelines

Kinder Morgan

The Ponderer has been pondering the current crisis of North American oil pipeline projects and the chaos that surrounds them. She shared her latest thoughts; sensible ones, which I have responded to from a perspective of perhaps wider context:

The Ponderer:  Maybe the best way to stop the Pipelines is to stop creating a demand for the oil that it's transporting. But we can't do that can we? We have to have our cars and our vehicles and we have to heat our homes among other things. I think very few of us are willing to live without those things. It's easy to be all pro save the environment until it causes us discomfort or inconvenience. Perhaps the pipelines are the safest way to transport the oil, that we tell ourselves we so desperately need. Is there a safer way? Train? Ship? Trucks? I don't think so. Don't get me wrong I am not pro pipeline I just think the solution is a lot more complicated and I think our government made the best decision in a bad situation. And thank you to my friend Barb for giving me a different perspective.

New Day Rising:  Yes, we're very greedy, very spoiled. Life itself is not naturally easy. Life has been a very difficult thing for every species except for a small percentage of humans for a tiny blip of time. Us. But as bizarre and unholy as our circumstance is, it is our normal. It is natural for us to embrace the unnatural normal we are born into.

But it will not be our normal for long and we'd be really smart to get our stubborn heads around that and plan accordingly instead of so fully embracing this brief Disneyland with such entitlement. What we have not yet discovered about ourselves is that we do have the capacity for change and for embracing new normals. Oil will be gone in another tiny blip of time no matter how much extra destruction we wreak to get at it. And if we survive the disaster that is born of denial and inequality and our enmity against the biosphere then we'll do just fine with the next normal, as all the YA dystopia books so brightly suggest, but unfortunately the next normal's forecast grows worse and worse every day that we resist it. Every day that we refuse to cut a deal with mother nature, the less she will have to offer when we finally do, or else on the bleak day that there is no more leveraging available. The life-capacity of the biosphere is shrinking every day. We are trading it away for the gadgets and comforts which can not last, which we pay for with death. And if we never cut that deal then the Earth will have almost nothing left for us.

North Dakota

The new oil pipelines are an investment in the future. They are a commitment to expansion of death; a commitment to cut no deals. They are a migration in the wrong direction. I know its very hard not to be greedy but if I woke up tomorrow and every gas station was dry, I would be immensely delighted. Giving up my car would then be easy because we'd all be in the same situation together and we would survive just fine. We would adjust together. Where as giving up my car on my own tomorrow would seem disastrous because my society would not cooperate with me; would not bend to the changes I would require.

"Oka could happen again..."