Watching the oil disaster playing out in an area of the country that feeds millions of people, we ask ourselves, why wasn’t this prevented? We know oil rigs blow up, we know that our dependence on oil creates environmental disasters year after year. How long will it be before our seas be unable to recover from the damage?
Our lakes and streams are our inland sea, the source of immeasurable revenues for us upstate New Yorkers, not to mention the most basic of all: water to drink and the soul-enriching experiences we have in the natural, watery wonderland all around us. But it’s all threatened by hydrofracking.
Drilling in the ocean, injecting chemicals into the earth (hydrofracking) and destroying millions of acres of “oil sands” land are all extreme (read: dangerous to us) forms of getting at more oil. Read this article from Slate.com to learn of the choices we’re facing before the next huge disaster: Fracking, Oil Sands, and Deep-Water Drilling: The dangerous new era of “extreme energy.” by Daniel Gross.
I was inspired this morning to write again on this because, for some reason, all of Syracuse has been unable to come up with a demonstration in favor of our natural environment equivalent to that which little Carpinteria, California (where?) has put together to inform their public about pending offshore drilling. (You’ll see my baby sister and her partner running across the street where Paul starts singing “Oh Darling!”)
I don’t believe we can’t live without oil. It’s becoming clear we can’t live with it. All the money that will be spent cleaning up the current oil disaster (if it can actually be done), all the money spent compensating people whose lives have been ruined, all the creative energy, all the physical labor that will be spent on just this one disaster – had it been spent instead on developing alternatives to oil, we would never have had to deal with this. The same holds true for hydrofracking New York State.
I’m not the only one thinking about this:
ENVIRONMENT: After BP, a closer eye on shale drilling
I hope you are, too!
Recent Comments