Some things strip away the camouflage and leave the very ugly truth just staring back, unshamed. Suddenly the hopes are gone that somehow we might struggle through the end of the age of cheap oil even though it represents a monumental challenge. Or rather the conditions of such hopes become much clearer; that all such efforts will be totally in vain if we do nothing to prevent the onslaught facing our remaining indigenous peoples and the land that they protect. They are threatened by the corporations that effectively dictate the currents of our Northern policies, that are now rushing at full tilt into securing the resources a rapaciously expanding economy demands.
What's clear is that those in these corporations that - as the recent article in the Washington Post confirms even Obama’s administration has been to a very large degree in deference to – will stop at nothing to do what must be done to feed the mindset and reality of an industrial dream long since turned sour. And those that stand to suffer most; who are even now in many places fighting for the very right to live, are those who have done the least damage, who are infact light years in everything they do from those patterns of thought and behaviour that are so surely selling us right down the river.
Suddenly it all comes crowding in, the floodgates are unleashed, an awful clarity arrives; the people in Ecuador suffering records rates of cancer thanks to the activities of Texaco, the very water that they drink and wash in poisoned by the run off from substandard oil sumps so that their children suffer horrific lesions, the ground itself so polluted that their poultry and their dogs simply keel over. Waking up to the scale and extent of what is now well underway in Canada is equally horrific; a realisation that what is planned for the tar sands of North Alberta will probably make that region uninhabitable in another fifty years.
Add the ever-spreading travesty within the Gulf of Mexico, think about the lapse in regulations that helped to lead to such a tragedy occurring and there can be no doubt that those who profit from oil also do so from a truly diabolical contribution to our collective fate. And they will not be stopped by governments, by wishful thinking, by their laying down to accept that the show is really over, that they will have to grow up and get used to finite resources on a finite planet. They will not stop by any volition of their own. They will not simply ruin or take the lives of nearly every people living in accord with any kind of ancient harmony. They will not simply remove what hope remains of our ever building something better than our outgrown industrial model as we endeavour to remould our cultures and societies. They stand to remove our last real chances of our ever leaving a biosphere that will not have reached the tipping points, that can still be classed as habitable or which would enable such a thing under something other than the direst circumstances. If we do not act we will only witness so many countries running even further out of water, or which are either fried beneath the anvil of an ever more intolerable sun or have been swallowed beneath the waves that only echo the despondency that stands to let this happen.
Out of our own humanity if nothing else we must all wean ourselves off our extravagance of oil. We must not shy from holding up a mirror to our Western world, to the cars we nearly all see as a right, the planes that are now almost mandatory to many. It is not fashionable. There is a faint embarrassment in crying out too loud, in scaring off all those who would be sympathetic to our cause. But what price does pandering to such sympathy entail? This is no joke or abstract wishing well of good intentions that bears little resemblance to real life. This goes further even than seeking to preserve our here and now, our own green hills and valleys - as intrinsic in their understated way to the big picture as they are. This is the ideal that we must wake up to and the earth herself is attempting to shake us by the throat. But the dream we are caught up in - and it is one that holds us in its very real concerns and even snares – almost seems to know this and raises the pitch of her siren-like voice.
We must find our way beyond it, we must wake up to the other story that we lost so long ago and whose importance now could not be greater. The longer we leave it, the more our denial is written in blood. For the scale of the horror we are all responsible for, look to the jungles of Ecuador, try to imagine the cries of people who have had no part in contributing to this mess, who - from Russia to Papua New Ginea to Nigeria - are now fighting for their lives and that of the land they have lived truly lightly on.
We must wake up. We really know on every level that we are in trouble but seek to block it out, to let our lives hold to their current course because this requires less effort, because we are caught up in the momentum of several centuries of change that let us think we could play God. Our awakening must be as much as anything from the forces of despair and apathy and must bring us into not only a greater perception of the nature of the problem; it must bring us into a greater sense of our own power, of what we can achieve despite all odds. Even the most glorious of summers, even the strongest sense of peace will not lead us clear if we do not confront the paradigm that seeks to keep our future from us and which vast leagues of speculators serve, blindly or recklessly or simply caught by love of money and the power it appears to bring but which ultimately leaves you all the weaker if in it’s acquisition you have lost so much that once was precious.
The scale of the challenge is nothing short of monumental. It is already one of several fields – the often literal coalface in the most unspoiled regions of the world being the most obvious and perhaps the most pressing and extreme. But also we are challenged in what we permit to pass within our nations’ borders - however much such borders must be held in perspective with the growing volkerwanderung we all now face, however much we cling to the comforts of a passing age. We must too challenge everything about our own behaviour, about how we relate to our land and localities. We must above all never think we are incapable or unworthy of the task that has been set us.
Everything we love lies in the balance and this is not the time to sit back, cross our fingers and hope for the best. We must all act to the best of our potential. It is for every one of us to play our part. And to do so we must step away from our screens for a while, think what it is like to lose your land and health and loved ones and remember this is not some tubthumped doomsday that may come if our elected politicians do not save us. It is already the reality for a growing number of First Nation peoples to whom we all owe a massive debt of gratitude, who hold so much knowledge that can inform the nature of the way ahead. We owe it to them to re-evaluate our every shared assumption, our every scrap of received wisdom: our own survival rests upon their fate, as does that which still remains of our morality.
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