Bad News
Bad News
May 2004
While reading the newspapers recently, I was concerned by several environmental articles. The first article describes the recent, rapid expansion of natural gas drilling in the Rocky Mountains. The expansion is in response to a combination of higher energy prices, declining reserves, and a pro-energy White House with “ex” oilmen Bush and Cheney pushing for the increased drilling. Colorado has granted over 2,500 new leases for drilling for 2004, double the number from recent years and more than the record of 2,378 granted in the boom year of 1981. The gas corporations are expanding exploration on land that they have the mineral rights to but do not own. They are building roads, drilling wells, and changing the landscape and underground aquifers without the land owners’ approval. The mineral rights were bought cheap, essentially stolen, long ago by capitalistic speculators. The gas companies are also pushing into public lands, which previously were protected, but now are released for new drilling by the Bush-Cheney White House. (Paulson, 8 Mar. 2004)
The second article deals with the expansion of suburban sprawl into the wide-open areas on the outer edges of western cities. What used to be large ranches of undivided landscapes are now being sold off into subdivisions of multiple plots of 35-acre “ranchettes.” These ranchettes are bought by people who want to get out of the city to live, yet are generally still working there, commuting 20-40 miles. These people are bringing the city to the country. The Wild West is being subdivided, sold, citified, and annexed. In Colorado alone in the year 2000, almost 2.5 million acres of rural lands were developed as ranchettes. By 2030, it is predicted that that number of acres will double. From a wilderness viewpoint, the impact on the landscape is devastating. (Paulson, 29 Mar. 2004)
The third article tells of sudden plans to expand electricity production in the United States by building more coal-fired power plants. At least 94 new plants are being proposed, with a high probability that half of them will get through the licensing process, adding about 10 percent to the nation’s power and generating capacity. This interest in coal follows the tripling in price of natural gas over the past four years. The United States already burns over one billion tons of coal a year. It is estimated that the new plants would generate 120 million cubic feet of filthy exhaust gases every minute they generate consumer electricity. That’s a lot of global warming green house gases going up in smoke, filling the air with carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide and airborne mercury. The mercury is especially a problem because it falls back to earth, poisoning land and water. (Clayton, 26 Feb. 2004)
Another article gives more details about the mercury problem. In 2002, warnings of high levels of mercury contamination in fish were issued for 12 million acres of lakes and 400,000 miles of rivers in the United States. In January 2004, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) warned that 1 in 6 childbearing aged women had mercury levels in their blood high enough to cause risk of fetal developmental problems. Coal powered electrical plants are the main culprit in mercury emissions into the environment. In 2001, according to EPA calculations, 500 power plants released 45 tons of mercury into the air, or 60 percent of the 75 tons of all industrial mercury released. Just a small amount of mercury can be extremely poisonous to life. The Bush administration is in no hurry to regulate mercury emissions in power plants. They have eased requirements in which old coal plants that upgrade their facility need not add new smokestack pollution-reduction equipment. Long ago, Bush backed out of the Kyoto global environmental agreement developed in the Clinton years. Bush’s reason for doing so was that he did not want to do harm to economic growth. (Clayton, 29 Apr. 2004)
In my state, the Wisconsin Energy Corporation is hoping to build a new coal burning boiler plant south of Milwaukee (actually they are calling it an addition to avoid having to use new expensive pollution control technology). Their plans call for pumping 2.2 million gallons of water a day out of Lake Michigan to cool their plant, than discharging most of it back into Lake Michigan 15 degrees warmer. The Wisconsin Energy Corporation’s planners and scientists assure the public that the environmental costs are minimal compared to the economic savings and the benefits of the expanded generation of new energy. (Bergquist, 15 May 2004)
Another problem with burning coal to generate electricity is that it requires the continued strip mining of large areas of nature, digging deeper into untouched wilderness areas. Other countries of the world are also rapidly expanding their use of coal generated electricity, particularly China. The future is looking gloomier by the minute.
The last article documents the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Last year (2003), 9,169 square miles of Amazon rain forest in Brazil was deforested, converted mostly to soybean fields and cattle production. That’s the size of the state of New Hampshire; six million acres of wilderness are gone, never to return. From 1990 to 2003, Brazil lost 41 percent of its forests—90,000 square miles. Again, economic growth equals death to the wilderness. (Downie, 22 Apr. 2004)
Nature is disappearing. Our world is in trouble. How hot does global warming have to get before our politicians act? When will it be too late to act? Is there anything I can do to motivate and inspire the politicians to care about wild places and the future of our planet?
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The military industrial complex of the mid 1900’s created the technological consumer society of the late 1900’s. This man-made machine rapidly expands into the twenty-first century moving further into remaining wilderness areas looking for food. The machine devours and destroys the natural world, replacing it with roads, strip mines, power plants, oil rigs, suburban housing developments, strips malls, soybean fields, and beef factories. The machine manufactures millions of cheap labor jobs for the many, while creating millions of dollars in wealth for the few. The economy booms while the environment goes bust.
We have cut our umbilical cord to mother earth. Believing we are independent, we have forgotten our ties with nature. Our individual lives are now directly dependent and chained to the life and growth of the machine. There’s something wrong with this way of life, something inhuman about this way of living.
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I live in a suburban house on the outskirts of Black River Falls,
Wisconsin. In 1992, I bought an additional piece of meadow property and enlarged my house, adding a two-car garage and art studio. My furnace and water heater are connected to natural gas pipe lines. The power lines connected to my house carry energy generated by the burning of coal. Every week, I eat about half a pound of soybean products and half a pound of beef. What am I willing to do to help save the world? What limits am I willing to set for myself?
I try not to fool myself into believing that the destruction of the environment is someone else’s problem and that somebody else should fix it. Even though the problem is bigger than me, I am part of the problem. Knowing that it is a global problem ultimately requiring global political action, does not give me the right to ignore the problem or the excuse to do nothing to solve it. I can not wait for others to fix my part of the problem. I can not wait for the politicians to change the way we interact with the environment or do business with the economy. Our politicians are like most everyone else I know, who are, just like me, too busy worrying about the economy to care about the environment. I need to be part of the solution.