A Public Comment On Building Another Oil Pipeline

Things seem to be starting to move very fast these last few months. It could be I'm just starting to get dizzy from all the new signs of how high the stakes are right now, but I doubt it. Just a little more time could tell if this is a sustained acceleration that could take us to a very different vantage point. I think we may know by the end of this coming summer or fall in North America.

What I think might be speeding towards us is the moment we find out if we really have it in us as humans to do it. To rouse ourselves and reach out and grasp the emergency brake and pull, hard. All the way to stop.

First we'll have to want to.

A friend and I have a running difference of opinion on whether it will be conscious fear or deep compassion that turns the key. There is a third possibility. Appreciation. I think appreciation might be it. And the connection between appreciation and compassion.

As an early motivation fear might get us moving, it could be one reason things are speeding up now. But if when we do act decisively our main driver is fear, we'll likely make a mess of it judging from our track record. Fear will make it impossible to agree on how, when and in what direction to pull. Or to pull together. In the midst of that scramble chances are high we'll just rip the damned handle off the break and that will be the end of it.

Fear and panic stimulate re-actions, not creative action. Fear can bring out our cleverness trying to defuse the danger, but to what end? Doing what we really need to do will implicitly be an act of creation. We will be burying parts of ourselves, but also giving birth. As humans we have a lot to make up for, a lot to atone for, a lot to repair. We can't take back the huge mistakes at this point. Most of what we have already destroyed will never come back or be remade, certainly not by us. Mistakes of this magnitude, innocent or intentional, count. And we'll have to live with that, once we realize it.

We will have to give birth to a new kind of human to balance the beauty we have removed from the world. An immaculate conception fired by appreciation. When you look at the sun shining very deeply in the morning or the evening from a patch of healthy green and you take a deeper breath - what do you feel?

When you look at just one photograph, any one, of tar sands scorched earth open pit carbon extraction or, if you've never seen the tars sands scars and how they span the horizons in areas of Canada, then look at any mountain top removal or strip mine in West Virginia or oil fracking pads dissecting the land in Wyoming as far as the eye can see – what do you feel? Do you need a bureaucratic impact assessment review process to confirm or negate what you are seeing?

It could be that the epic mistake that made all the other epic mistakes possible was the shrinking of the size and depth and scope of what humans are and are capable of - down to a size from which something like the Keystone XL Pipeline could ever be justified or rationalized or defended on any grounds whatsoever. Any one of the peoples of the distant past or living now whom westerners of the last seven generations have called less advanced or primitive or savage would know in an instant with unshakable certainty what they are looking at.

Death.

How advanced is an economic system that knowingly destroys its own foundations?

An economic system that depends on growth which depends on death is insane. Criminally insane. This vast extension of the destructive reach of our shrunken minds and withered hearts in such a short span of time was made possible by the distorted power of fossil fuels. Carbon is a critical all pervasive integral element to the functioning of earth and everyone and every thing on it. We are experiencing now first hand that it does not function with integrity, however, if present in our atmosphere in concentrations higher than those which have given us a stable climate for 10,000 years. It then also follows that something else will become unbalanced by the removal of all this carbon from underground, where it has been stable within the whole of earth's systems.

We are clinging to this shrunken idea of what a human is despite our advances in the sciences which allow us to see into and understand the exquisite balances which sustain life and earth's life support systems. I don't know how we stumbled into this tragic script but it now appears that appreciation for life sufficient to save it – an appreciation of life sufficient to birth a new kind of human to defend life and live it as a co-creator of integrity, stability and beauty will have to come out of our grief over what we are losing forever. Including our innocence.

The cancellation of this monstrously deluded pipeline project seems so difficult to achieve because it is an unimaginably momentous decision. It is one of a handful of chances we will have to decisively reach for the emergency break. And it will take good decisions on most of those to get it done. But these are the last set of chances, they are different. They are so far-reaching that if we fail to grasp one we may automatically default on a couple more.

And then how many more will we get?

Let's ask ourselves and each other, constantly, what is there to appreciate about life? The bright depths of appreciation for life can marshal active compassion in defense of those in our extended family whose lives and life supports are being destroyed. And compassion for ourselves, so we can keep going, and get it done.

Chris Riger, 4/19/13

To register your own official public comment on building a new oil pipeline go to this link! For an upcoming local event regarding this issue please also see the related blog post on MV Patch, "Earth Day Eve Event: Climate Crisis Documentary"