{"id":614,"date":"2010-06-17T13:19:50","date_gmt":"2010-06-17T13:19:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/apagansblog\/2010\/06\/a-meditation-on-the-ethical-side-of-energy.html"},"modified":"2010-06-17T13:19:50","modified_gmt":"2010-06-17T13:19:50","slug":"a-meditation-on-the-ethical-side-of-energy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/apagansblog\/2010\/06\/a-meditation-on-the-ethical-side-of-energy.html","title":{"rendered":"A Meditation on the Ethical Side of Energy Production"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

The growing
\ncrisis in the Gulf of Mexico, caused by BP, coming on the heels of Massey
\nEnergy’s crimes in America’s coal fields 
\n<\/span>and our rape of Iraq bring us face to face with the question of whether
\nwe have become a pirate culture, existing by taking from the weaker and giving
\nto the stronger, a national elite of hypocrites and moral monsters, the former
\nnever really looking at what they do, the latter not caring.  <\/span>Energy is a word for power, and power’s
\nrelationship to larger contexts of value, or even simple ethics, has always
\nbeen fraught with conflict.  <\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n


\n<\/p>\n

The United
\nStates has always been challenged by the ethical implications of how we obtain
\nenergy, and energy acquisition has always been the seamiest side of this
\ncountry.  <\/span>During the American
\nRevolution a great many of our greatest leaders were from the South,
\nparticularly Virginia.  <\/span>Men like
\nGeorge Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison were also vocal
\nopponents of the slave system, though they could not figure out how to abolish
\nit.  <\/span>Because they did not,
\nultimately it abolished the values to which they dedicated their lives.  <\/span><\/p>\n

Slavery’s moral
\ndegeneracy combined with the high profits it gave slave owners ultimately led
\nthe South to repudiate the principles of the American Revolution.  <\/span>In its place Southern leaders like John
\nC. Calhoun and those that came after him established an aggressively
\nauthoritarian culture that long after the Civil war still refuses to confront
\nits failings and evils.  <\/span>Human
\nrights and Enlightenment reason were abandoned in favor of states rights and
\narbitrary power extending from a demon God all the way down to Whites whipping
\nand later lynching uppity Blacks. We live with its zombie presence to this day,
\na culture of the living dead.<\/p>\n

Slavery provided
\npower through the domination and destruction of people.  <\/span>Later forms of power acquisition came
\nfrom dominating and destroying Nature- taking and giving back nothing in
\nreturn.  <\/span>Whether by taking oil or
\ntaking coal, there was never any sense of reciprocity in modern forms of energy
\nextraction, no sense of sustainability. 
\n<\/span>Just take.  <\/span>While it is
\nuncomfortable to contemplate, I think 
\n<\/span>Evan Eisenberg’s<\/a> term for our kind of civilization: “saprophagy” should be better known.<\/p>\n

A saprophage
\nlives off the dead.  <\/span>Many organisms
\nare saprophages, and we are the better for it, or we would be over our heads in
\nthe corpses of past generations. 
\n<\/span>But saphrophages like many fungi and microbes convert their bodies to forms
\navailable to empower new generations of flourishing.  They are in the service of life. <\/span>They give back, as all life does except certain human forms,
\nparticularly our own.  <\/span>The energy
\nthat powers our culture comes from taking and not giving back.  <\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span>To a degree this mentality is inherent
\nin getting energy from the remains of long dead organisms rather than recently
\ndead ones. But nothing occurs in isolation, and by its initial success in obtaining power and wealth it also bred a broader mentality of taking and giving nothing in
\nreturn.  This mentality is not limited to digging up coal and drilling for oil. Only nuclear energy is somewhat more complicated – and it has
\nextraordinary risks of its own and has not transformed our culture the way
\nthese other forms of energy extraction have. <\/span><\/p>\n

Obtaining riches
\nthrough taking breeds a mentality the opposite of working with the
\nrhythms of Nature, the opposite of activities like sustainable farming,
\nlogging, fishing, or ranching. 
\n<\/span>In these other activities Nature is not simply the resource or an impediment to be overcome
\nin getting the resources.  <\/span>When She
\nis treated that way the damage arrives fairly rapidly, and the exploiters have
\nto leave what could, with brains, have produced for millennia.  <\/span>But for oil, gas, and coal extraction, that is all She
\nis.<\/p>\n

Small wonder
\nthat so many in the energy field appear to have the moral sensibilities of
\npirates, that they seems to think they have a God-given right to great wealth
\nfrom taking these things, regardless of the impact on others. Other communities of people, other ways of life, and animal and plant communities are impediments to their taking, or irrelevant.  Perhaps this is why energy companies like dictatorships.  They ensure the irrelevance of the locals.<\/span><\/p>\n

I think today
\nour obsession with oil and coal is making us as morally corrupt a society as
\nthe ante-bellum South had become a few decades after the American Revolution.
\nWe bomb and kill and support dictatorships across the world in the name of
\nsecuring our energy future. 
\n<\/span>Increasingly we are destroying the earth itself, whether through global
\nwarming, destroying ecosystems, and now through poisoning our own coasts and
\ndestroying the lives of our own people so rich parasites can keep their
\nmillions.<\/p>\n

I wonder what
\nthe long term cultural and psychological effects would be of converting
\nincreasingly to wind, solar, biological and tidal energy generation.  <\/span>These do not involve the simple
\napplication of power.  <\/span>They require
\na mindset utterly alien to the thugs that run companies like BP and Massey
\nEnergy.  <\/span>And used intelligently
\n(and in most cases even when used unintelligently) they can last as close to
\nforever as anything humans are likely to do, making us at last truly native to
\nthis place.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The growing crisis in the Gulf of Mexico, caused by BP, coming on the heels of Massey Energy’s crimes in America’s coal fields  and our rape of Iraq bring us face to face with the question of whether we have become a pirate culture, existing by taking from the weaker and giving to the stronger,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[109,112,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-614","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-nature","category-social-and-political-theory"],"yoast_head":"\nA Meditation on the Ethical Side of Energy Production - A Pagan's Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/apagansblog\/2010\/06\/a-meditation-on-the-ethical-side-of-energy.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"A Meditation on the Ethical Side of Energy Production - 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