dougs digs

once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right

3.17.2005

You're Breaking Your Mother(Earth)'s Heart


Jeremiah 12:4
How long will the ground be dry and the pasturelands parched?
The birds and animals are dead and gone.
And all of this happened because the people are so sinful.
They even brag, "God can't see the sins we commit."

"As one of his last acts in office" Republican President Dwight Eisenhower set aside the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, "the only place in the nation where the full spectrum of arctic and sub-arctic ecosystems is protected in an unbroken continuum." The 19 million-acre refuge is a land so pristine that it has been described as "a domain for any restless soul who yearns to discover the startling beauties of creation … where life exists without molestation by man." The name given to the area by the Gwich'in tribe, the indigenous people of the region, "translates to The Sacred Place Where Life Begins."

But big oil has been greedily devouring the lands surrounding this virgin wilderness area, turning them into an industrial site riddled with scores of contaminated waste sites and daily pollution spills. And now, after using backdoor tactics disapproved of by the overwhelming majority of Americans, right wingers in the Senate and White House have set the stage for big oil to drill through the very "biological heart of this untamed wilderness," with the hope of drilling in other environmentally sensitive areas.

Drilling in the Arctic refuge "serves neither short-term demand … nor long-term national policy." After the decade or longer it will take to begin oil production on the land, the United States Geological Service estimates the amount technically recoverable and economically profitable to recover "represents less than a year's U.S. supply." At the height of production, "the refuge would produce a paltry 1 or 2 percent of Americans' daily consumption." Tire changes and updated fuel efficiency standards could individually save more oil than is likely to be found in the refuge.
|| doug, 13:13

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