Today as we cleaned the trash of generations past, a friend and I discussed how we as a society will move to a more honorable, sustainable lifeway. We spent hours cleaning an eye sore of a shed, which had been left behind by the previous “owners” of land, clearing away old windows, wood carved in raccoon scat, and many tools rusted into uselessness. Around us birds sang, the wind blew, and the promise of throwing our bodies into Gitchi Gumee at the end of the day kept us going. We talked all about the future, about heat pumps and masonry stoves and floor joints. And we talked about systems.
I fully recognize my place in the world. How gifted I’ve been, and how dependent upon the fossil fuel economy I have been. All the debris cleared out of that old old shed will go into a dumpster, and to the place we call “away”, a place which doesn’t exist. My ability to create and to learn and to grow is a symptom as well of a system which cannot exist much longer. And yet we as a society do much to prop that system up. We create pipelines and open pit mines and some of us protest against such things. After all, “a body in motion will stay in motion until acted upon by an outside force”. This is Newton’s first law of physics, and applies to human systems too. The fossil fuel economy will remain in motion until there is an outside force to stop it. Many millions of us have become that outside force, acting upon systems to stop them. Today, as I clear away the trash of one system, I wonder if we’ve forgotten some other laws.
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Every protest faces equal and opposite support for projects which exploit environments and people. But what we have not seen is an equal and opposite reaction to the project itself. What would an equal and opposite reaction to an operational pipeline be? What about an open pit mine? I don’t have the answer today, but on first thought I see gardens built, grasslands replanted, housing created. For every pipeline, an equal and opposite reaction to rid ourselves of the very reasons we need them.
Gossamer Naturalist 