The Fuel Nightmare Continues

It’s as if the uni­verse is try­ing to tell us some­thing, isn’t it?

First, a dis­as­trous month that saw at least 15 sep­a­rate oil spills world­wide, near­ly all of them in North Amer­i­ca. That month also saw an oil barge catch fire after a col­li­sion, and the pub­li­ca­tion of a study impli­cat­ing frack­ing as a cause of earth­quakes.

Now at least 600 gal­lons have spilled from an Enbridge oil pump­ing sta­tion near Viking, Minnesota.Two fuel barges car­ry­ing a nat­ur­al gas deriv­a­tive have explod­ed and are still burn­ing on the Alaba­ma Riv­er. And new reports strong­ly sug­gest that tar sands from Exxon’s Pega­sus Pipeline in Mayflower, Arkansas have seeped into Lake Con­way and are head­ing toward the Arkansas Riv­er.

Dis­as­ters like these bring the real costs of fos­sil fuels into sharp focus, because we can imag­ine our­selves affect­ed by them. But the truth is, dis­as­ters like these are part of every­day life for the peo­ple and oth­er beings liv­ing in areas where fos­sil fuels are extracted—or any oth­er indus­tri­al mate­ri­als, from cop­per for solar pan­els to coltan for cell phones.

If you wouldn’t want oil spilling into your back yard, if you wouldn’t want a strip mine rip­ping open a hole behind your house and poi­son­ing your water, then it’s time to admit that the eco­nom­ic sys­tem found­ed on con­sum­ing these mate­ri­als has got to go. We’ll nev­er have jus­tice or sus­tain­abil­i­ty if we base one group’s “high stan­dard of liv­ing” on the dis­lo­ca­tion and destruc­tion of oth­ers.