Samhain Winter Moon
“Man is the unnatural animal, the rebel child of nature, and more and more does he turn himself against the harsh and fitful hand that reared him.”
H.G. Wells
I’ve seen several positive developments in the war against the war on Mother Earth. 11,000+ Minnesotans asked the Public Utility Commission to shut down the Sherco coal-fired electrical generation plants.
Another 12,000 have questioned the optimistic analysis of the Polymet Corporation in their Environmental Impact Statement for a copper-nickel mine on the border of the Boundary Waters Wilderness. They claim to have a technology that will do what no other sulfide mine in the world, ever, has done: control sulfuric acid runoff from mine-tailings. Prove it first makes sense to me. Pay for the probability of failure up front with a bond equal to the amount the state calculates will be necessary to contain the tailings also makes sense to me. Meet these two criteria then we can talk.
There is, too, an article in the Economist that suggests large corporations expect to pay a carbon tax and will do so willingly. This is good news.
Here’s the link to H.G. Wells. If we don’t do these things, and the items mentioned here are minimums and much, much more will be required of us, it is not the earth that will suffer. The natural world changes. That’s what it does. It always changes. If we accelerate change in a particular direction, then it is not the planet but humanity that is at peril. The risk in all these matters is the extinction of the human race.
This may be the apocalypse so often bruited as caused by an angry god. The hand holding the reins for the four horsemen is not divine, it is all too human.
