I don’t want any of the caribou habitat disrupted, I don’t want nesting birds
unnested. Like all right-thinking people I despise multinational oil companies
and their stooges in the halls of power.

I’m properly awed by the majesty of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, so
why can’t I stop thinking that oil drilling should be allowed there?

I know, I’ve been bending too close to my computer screen. Causes madness,
everybody knows that.

But here’s the thing: Lately I my brain’s been polluted with the realization that the United States
of America has been exporting its environmental degradation to places like Mexico,
China and Southeast Asia for the past 20 years. I’m not a paragon of rectitude
but this strikes me as reprehensible.

Lots of Americans have whined about the loss of jobs in manufacturing and heavy
industry, but in the long run, having these jobs move overseas has been great
for the United States. Heavy industries wreck everything they touch. Vast stretches
of China are being poisoned to build factories to fill our shopping malls.

So here we are switching to a Wal-Mart nation. Sure, the wages and benefits
suck, but how hard on the environment can it be to throw up a box and pave a
parking lot, compared to the mess you get building and running a factory to
stock all those shelves? Which is worse: low service-sector wages and getting
to see your grandkids grow up, or starvation wages in overseas manufacturing
and dying of cancer at 47?

It’s bad enough that the United States produces a quarter of the world’s greenhouse
gases. We’re burning through the world’s resources like drunken sailors.
A few sober folks are saying "hey, we gotta save some of this planet
for our grandkids," but even they seem oblivious to how protecting "our"
resources affects the resources of other countries.

OK, so the Arctic Refuge is a fragile ecosystem. It has lots of water but very
little warmth or sunlight. Well, what about the Arabian desert? It’s just the
opposite: lots of sun, lots of warmth, very little water. Amazing that anything grows there, but it will, if left alone. Which is the better
place to put in a drilling rig? Easy: Saudi Arabia, because it has lots more oil and is conveniently situated 12,000 miles
away.

I realize the world would be better off if we kicked this narcotic called petroleum.
Thing is, demand for petroleum is going nowhere but up for the foreseeable future.
Drilling for oil is going to happen somewhere and it’s going to threaten somebody’s
caribou and nesting birds. Are we really the kind of people who believe "I
don’t care whose house gets messed up so long as ain’t mine"?

It’s true that if we all bought bicycles and traded in our SUVs for Toyota
Corollas with stickshifts that get 40 mpg on the highway, we could conserve
more petroleum than could be drilled from the Arctic refuge. Even if that land
isn’t drilled for the U.S. market, however, it will be drilled for somebody’s market
eventfully.

We can’t control how other countries protect their ecosystems. But we can
save a place in our brain for the answer to this question: if we "protect"
something here, will it just lead to something getting trashed somewhere else?
If the answer is yes, then we need to put on our thinking caps, get busy with
our Yankee ingenuity and solve our environmental problems here instead of shipping
them overseas.

I admit the idea of drilling for oil in a pristine wilderness conflicts with
one my most deep-seated convictions — that the best thing humans can do for
the wilderness is stay the hell out of it. The second-best thing would be throwing
out all our fossil-fueled devices and living off the grid like the Amish. OK,
you go first.