… Dredged, Fracked and Fully Cracked

I live on the tropical coast of North Queensland in Australia.  It is a truly spectacular part of our world.  I work in the field of natural and cultural resource management for an Aboriginal corporation with a wide variety of regional partners.  I do my best by the people and the environment I work and interact with.  Everyday I am grateful for this sweet and full life.  At times, however, I’m also painfully aware of the processes at work on our natural world.  I am intimate with imbalances caused by human activities, well acquainted with our confusion and ongoing struggle to control, reverse and contain our own impacts.

I live by the sea and its closeness is a comfort.  Although cyclones come and may destroy the place where I live, like others have in the past, I cannot leave her side and wouldn’t even if it could guarantee my safety.  Guaranteed safety is an oxymoron, a bit like sustainable development.  I marvel at the advancements and innovations of humankind and am awestruck by our arrogance at the same time.

 

In this day and age of everything being turned upside down and no longer as it always appeared, it seems we’re slipping into a strange anti-gravitational state.  When things we once knew would stay rooted, immoveable and could be assumed always to remain, are suddenly shifting before us. Intensive media and electronic information production is coupled with human population growth fuelling rapid cultural and environmental changes. We are under collective pressure to keep pace with technology, information and our own development as human numbers increase at a pace never experienced in our history.

How do we know what is ‘good’ for us, our health, our children, our environment, our future on this planet?  Our way of understanding our world, our relationship to it and our place in it is up for grabs.  In privileged, lucky places in the world, where we live inside the bubble of the fortunate few, we enjoy a great range of choices.  We can choose to accept and believe a reality that media and branding presents or we can choose to look through the marketing of values and beliefs and examine them as our own and for ourselves.

 

Somewhere among the many diverse sources of electronic information available, I read the phrase ‘with every dollar we spend we decide what kind of world we want to live in’.  We are now living in a world where personal power seems entirely economically based and without money there is no power.

The phrase ‘money is the root of all evil’ also comes to mind.  Many examples of this truth are recognisable in our modern society.  We have experienced economic collapse and disparity the world over.  Even so, we continue to prop up and resuscitate old economic systems although their constructs are clearly antiquated and no longer support a prosperous or healthy future.

The growing trend of ethically driven investments made in the conservation of human and natural capital is somewhat of a relief and an indication that reason may prevail.  Some of this trend is more rhetoric and marketing than reality, but it is exciting to see that it has become an actual marketing tool.

Is it simply fear of change that keeps us from evolving our economic systems to support life on the earth? Or is it the threat to those who currently hold disproportionate amounts of power?  Either way, as long as wealth and acquisition are valued above the survival of all life, including human, we will continue to pave the way to our own destruction the world over.

We have and need a human spiritual connection to life, land and sea no matter which religious beliefs, cultural values or worldviews we hold.  Perhaps we’ve lost track of that fact in our race for ‘civilisation’ and technological advancement.

Science and technology improve our understanding of our world but are also used to assist in our continued and expedited destruction of it. While science has brought us unquestionable advantages, it has also been corrupted and used to manipulate information for purposes driven by political will and greed.

Science, a vast knowledge system and a powerful tool, has been used to justify decades of policy decisions that impact natural environments based on human need.  We have become seamless at environmental assessment and development approval processes based on dangerous assumptions. Acceptable benchmarks, baseline data and standards used to guide recommendations are, at times, outdated, conservative under-estimations made in favour of profit.  Accepted models are flawed and incomplete.

We count, qualify, quantify and make sense of our environment through a range of scientific disciplines and combine them when it suits us. We practice scientific method based on the study of our environment as a subject, somehow separate from us, and available solely to meet our needs, at our disposal. Somehow, psychologically, we have extracted ourselves from the causal web of life. We have studied natural cycles and ourselves through an industrial strength myopic lens.  This lens has and continues to allow us to deny certain realities.

When we use terms such as ‘ecosystem services’, we commodify natural assets, assign them a price in order that we can better understand, value or factor them in. Completely missing from this interpretation is the fundamental truth that our natural world is the basis of our economy, not the reverse.

When we refer to building ‘resilient’ ecosystems, we fail to acknowledge that the reason there is a need for resilience is to survive the impacts and degradation caused by our human activities.

Economic models and business plans do not integrate with or leave room for implementation of natural and cultural resource ‘management’ or ‘recovery’ plans. We know and should recognise that our human actions impact everything in our world. We know and should recognise that we have a place in the world and a relationship to it, as does all life on earth.  We are part of all natural cycles and processes.  What ‘proof’ or ‘evidence’ of this do we now lack?

At times it appears as though environmental science has been stunted through over manipulation, that it has outlived its usefulness, been rendered redundant.  For example, climate science can no longer be manipulated to the point of making fossil fuel economies defensible and so it is simply abandoned by policy makers and corporate interests in our ‘democratic’ and ‘developed’ nations.

We treat our economic and environmental systems as separate moral vicinities, the drivers of one reliant for success on the demise of the other.  Only when we combine our values on one spectrum will we be able overcome our obscured vision and preserve our highly endangered future. Dichotomy is the stuff of life, but where will we find moral finance for a bankrupt humanity?  How will our children even know what integrity means?  There is a deep rift between people and our environment.  Both are suffering.  There is an obvious disconnect between our reason and our process.

Our human temporal niche is expanding, getting hotter and colder, whether we adapt in time or not. The composition of matter is changing before us. Extreme temperatures are melting, buckling, flash freezing and swamping our landscape.  Old ice is disappearing at the poles, ocean and air currents are shifting, the atmosphere changing.  Our air, water and bodies have grown more acidic, supplemented by an array of toxins and processed compounds.

As we use up the earth’s resources to satisfy our unending longing for goods that we market to ourselves and future generations, we also create unusable and dangerous inorganic matter.  We find ourselves living in it and feeding on it.

The imminent collapse of our oceans, the tar sands, Keystone XL and Northern Gateway pipeline projects are just a few ‘developed nation’ examples of truly disastrous decisions being made the world over.  These decisions are too numerous to count and are driven by a perverse economy completely out of balance and without conscience.

 

 

Here in North Queensland, there is a current plan to dredge an area within the Great Barrier Reef to expand an existing coal port.  This will accommodate larger diesel driven ships to carry larger loads of coal to China. The coal will be burned into our already carbon dioxide rich atmosphere and used to power a massive supply chain. A machine which produces ever more efficiently for a hungry consumptive market.  The dredge spoil will be dumped in the marine park against all existing environmental regulations for such activities.

Corporate-interest driven governments have made the necessary changes to State and Federal legislation. Attempts to justify dredging activity through scientific modelling continue, but there is far too much at stake here.  The Great Barrier Reef is already under intense pressure from impacts of land-based activities and changes to ocean ecology.  It is extremely vulnerable.

While I am honoured and grateful to be living beside an ailing friend, I am deeply saddened by the prospect of loss, and the lack of consideration granted to this incredible natural wonder by those who do not acknowledge our interdependent health and existence.  My belief is that our relationship with our environment is constant, interactive and dynamic.  I believe it requires awareness, respect and responsibility on an individual and collective basis.  This is equally true of our human relationships.

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Mining and fracking may be out of sight for many, but when close enough, you can smell the dust.  You can hear the rumble and roar of big trucks hauling heavy loads over long stretches of roads and tracks, over rivers, creeks, floodplains, stone hills, through forest, woodland and scrub.  Wildlife beware! There are holes being drilled deep into the earth to be filled with explosives and deadly chemicals to aid extraction of what is sought and claimed.  Water is being pumped out of the ground and rivers, used irresponsibly, poisoned and displaced.

When the flow of rivers is interrupted the blood of the land no longer travels through its veins to maintain life.  Ground, hillside and valley are emptied and the elemental flows of rain, sun and wind are altered.  Forests are clear-cut.  Soil horizons are disturbed. Micro and macro ecologies are altered.

Throughout human histories there have been many moments, I suppose, when it seemed to be the end of all Time.  Mother Nature has brought humanity to our knees in ways that only a mother can.  She has shaken, spat fire and ash, collapsed, crushed and washed away.  She is on her own journey and we are on it with her.  She is telling her own story and we need to listen carefully to her tell it.

For some of our last great natural assets, a time of ‘last stands’ has arrived.  If they die, we die with them.  True, Life will always continue with or without us. And that’s our choice to make.

By Karman Lippitt  

Cardwell, Queensland, Australia

March 2014  ©