Plain Radical by Robert Jensen

Author:Robert Jensen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619026797
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Published: 2015-08-31T16:00:00+00:00

Fire

To me, the essence of my home state of North Dakota is hard red spring wheat. Although I didn’t grow up on a farm, during my high school years I got in the non-teenagerly habit of waking up early, somewhere around 6 a.m., which left me with me lots of time on my hands before school. So, I became a regular viewer of the CBS Morning News (anchored by the craggy-faced and gravel-voiced Hughes Rudd, the kind of guy who would never make it in TV today), and the local segment of the show always included the previous day’s closing prices from the Minneapolis grain exchange. For some reason, the one crop name I remember from the announcer’s monotone reading of prices is that variety of wheat. Whatever the ecologically destructive patterns in modern agriculture, I still feel proud of all my state’s hard red spring wheat (not to brag, but North Dakota leads the nation in production of this variety, which is one of the best for baking bread).

But over the past few years that home-state image of waves of grain, amber or red, has been replaced by the eerie photographs from a western North Dakota landscape that is starting to resemble a moonscape, where the oil industry’s hydraulic fracturing is destroying land and people. I know it is not entirely rational, since I never lived in that part of the state and rarely visit, but when I talk about this I always have to hold back tears; there is something viscerally horrifying about seeing any part of the earth destroyed for the sake of a temporary bump in oil production, especially what one considers home.

“Temporary” is the key term. Although many are celebrating how new technologies such as hydrofracturing are opening up new oil and gas reserves to make us more “energy independent,” we are merely increasing the rate of depletion of a finite resource. We live in an oil-based world that is rapidly depleting the cheap and easily accessible oil, which leads to what one leading analysis calls an inescapable conclusion: “[T]he major oil finds of the postwar era—those mammoth discoveries whose prolific output sustained rising global energy needs for nearly half a century—are no longer capable of satisfying the world’s requirements.”23

Rather than come to terms with this, political and economic leaders are selling the line—and perhaps believing it themselves—that new extraction methods have solved our problem24 with the routine use of more dangerous and destructive technologies—hydrofracturing, deep-water drilling for oil, mountain-top removal for coal, and the truly monstrous tar sands extraction, the horror of which Naomi Klein captured in a phrase: “The earth, skinned alive.”25

So, (1) fossil-fuel extraction increasingly requires taking long-term risks with the land and water to obtain a short-term extension of the availability of that dense energy source; and (2) the extraction and burning all this coal, oil, and natural gas accelerates an already dangerous destabilization of the climate system. Those two facts lead many people to conclude that we must dramatically limit

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