This column by Simon Gear first appeared on the Don’t Be a Passenger blog (www.dontbeapassenger.com) in October of 2010
There is very little solace for those who hope that we can appeal to humanity’s higher faculties. Looking back over history, we have made many startling about turns and changes of course, but every single one has been forced upon us by external crises or has been driven forward by profit. Horses weren’t phased out of Edwardian London in a drive for cleaner streets. They were replaced by the more efficient motor car. The spin over the paperless office may be about saving paper (and trees) but the selling point is efficiency and the safety of the digital backup.
And so, I have a sinking feeling that despite all our good intentions and noble speeches, we will land up mining every last available ton of coal and drawing every last barrel of oil. True, the process gets safer and greener all the time but no matter how closely you follow the letter of the law, a green field will never quite recover from once having been an open cast coal mine. Burning fossil fuels will remain an obsession as long as it is economically justifiable. And therein lies the rub. Anything is economically justifiable. It just depends on what time scale and who is doing the justifying.
As our population grows and we take up more of the earth, we get better and better at justifying the damage we do. When we first started mining coal out near Witbank at the turn of the last century, it seemed perfectly reasonable. The land was (by the standards of the time) empty. The rivers were clean and robust and the new country desperately needed whatever energy was available. And crucially, even those enlightened few who could look ahead and see a future of acid mine drainage killing crocodiles in the Olifants River basin, would have been easily swayed by the simple argument that that wasn’t likely to happen for the next 100 years, by which time, surely, someone would have found a solution. And of course, no one would think of mining the areas of real value, the wetlands and the productive farmland.
Then gradually, as we use up more space and burn more coal and poison more waterways, so we come closer and closer to the time when the environmental cost becomes one and the same as the economic cost. And now we find ourselves staring down the barrel of a gun. We’re looking to mine coal in areas that, 50 years ago, we felt safe in ring fencing and identifying as ‘too good to spoil’. Now, in our desperation to justify just about anything, we are looking at the wetlands of Nylsvlei and Chrissiesmeer. The mountains of the Waterberg and the Soutpansberg. The sacred landscape of Mapungubwe.
We seem caught in headlights. Aware that what we do is horrendously damaging but powerless to act on anything but our basest needs. Until, such time, as the earth shrugs and we are reminded that our highest aspirations and our grubbiest selfishness, are in fact one.