I don’t want any of the caribou habitat disrupted, I don’t want nesting birds
\nunnested. Like all right-thinking people I despise multinational oil companies
\nand their stooges in the halls of power. <\/p>\n
I’m properly awed by the majesty of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, so
\nwhy can’t I stop thinking that oil drilling should be allowed there? <\/p>\n
I know, I’ve been bending too close to my computer screen. Causes madness,
\neverybody knows that.<\/p>\n
But here’s the thing: Lately I my brain’s been polluted with the realization that the United States
\nof America has been exporting its environmental degradation to places like Mexico,
\nChina and Southeast Asia for the past 20 years. I’m not a paragon of rectitude
\nbut this strikes me as reprehensible. <\/p>\n
Lots of Americans have whined about the loss of jobs in manufacturing and heavy
\nindustry, but in the long run, having these jobs move overseas has been great
\nfor the United States. Heavy industries wreck everything they touch. Vast stretches
\nof China are being poisoned to build factories to fill our shopping malls. <\/p>\n
So here we are switching to a Wal-Mart nation. Sure, the wages and benefits
\nsuck, but how hard on the environment can it be to throw up a box and pave a
\nparking lot, compared to the mess you get building and running a factory to
\nstock all those shelves? Which is worse: low service-sector wages and getting
\nto see your grandkids grow up, or starvation wages in overseas manufacturing
\nand dying of cancer at 47? <\/p>\n
It’s bad enough that the United States produces a quarter of the world’s greenhouse
\ngases. We’re burning through the world’s resources like drunken sailors.
\nA few sober folks are saying "hey, we gotta save some of this planet
\nfor our grandkids," but even they seem oblivious to how protecting "our"
\nresources affects the resources of other countries.<\/p>\n
OK, so the Arctic Refuge is a fragile ecosystem. It has lots of water but very
\nlittle warmth or sunlight. Well, what about the Arabian desert? It’s just the
\nopposite: lots of sun, lots of warmth, very little water. Amazing that anything grows there, but it will, if left alone. Which is the better
\nplace to put in a drilling rig? Easy: Saudi Arabia, because it has lots more oil and is conveniently situated 12,000 miles
\naway. <\/p>\n
I realize the world would be better off if we kicked this narcotic called petroleum.
\nThing is, demand for petroleum is going nowhere but up for the foreseeable future.
\nDrilling for oil is going to happen somewhere and it’s going to threaten somebody’s<\/i>
\ncaribou and nesting birds. Are we really the kind of people who believe "I
\ndon’t care whose house gets messed up so long as ain’t mine<\/i>"?<\/p>\n
It’s true that if we all bought bicycles and traded in our SUVs for Toyota
\nCorollas with stickshifts that get 40 mpg on the highway, we could conserve
\nmore petroleum than could be drilled from the Arctic refuge. Even if that land
\nisn’t drilled for the U.S. market, however, it will be drilled for somebody’s market
\neventfully. <\/p>\n
We can’t control how other countries protect their ecosystems. But we can
\nsave a place in our brain for the answer to this question: if we "protect"
\nsomething here, will it just lead to something getting trashed somewhere else?
\nIf the answer is yes, then we need to put on our thinking caps, get busy with
\nour Yankee ingenuity and solve our environmental problems here instead of shipping
\nthem overseas. <\/p>\n
I admit the idea of drilling for oil in a pristine wilderness conflicts with
\none my most deep-seated convictions — that the best thing humans can do for
\nthe wilderness is stay the hell out of it. The second-best thing would be throwing
\nout all our fossil-fueled devices and living off the grid like the Amish. OK,
\nyou go first. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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…<\/p>\n