Ethics and Extreme Extraction: Local Reflections on Global Issues
Ethics and Extreme Extraction: Local Reflections on Global Issues
By S. Tom Bond, Retired Chemistry Professor & Resident Farmer, Lewis County, WV
Ethics is an increasing issue in unconventional resource extraction. Taken individually, the issues which have been heard from the beginning have had an ethical component. The complaints include destruction of aquifers, air pollution, reduction of property values, costs deferred to the public including roads, record room crowding, traffic (including emergency vehicles) held up, mud slides and so on.
These have largely been thought of as individual matters and as a loss to individuals. They have been shrugged off by business and government, and largely ignored by the general public which feels little involvement and powerless to stop the well funded extraction companies, supported by endless public relations ploys and advertising.
As understanding diffuses (slowly) to the public at large, and more and more people come to know someone involved, the unifying theme of ethics becomes stronger. People are not without empathy.
Another slowly dawning awareness was discussed by Professor Garrett Hardin in an article published in Science, the Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, all the way back in 1968. This article is well worth the readers time if not familiar with the phrase “tragedy of the commons.” It is the perception that in reality much of the physical world belongs to all of us. All of us in the present, and all who follow. Life is short, and while we live and die in the present, we are bound, for our descendant’s sake, to plan for the extended future as far as we can see it. It is gross incompetence in the use of our minds to ignore that responsibility. It is ethical bankruptcy. It is properly the stuff of ethics and religion. It is a threat to civilization.
Not only has the fossil fuel industry continued trading human lives for profit, but, since it is difficult to convince free people to poison their own water sources or blow up their own backyards, it has increasingly killed democracy in order to keep killing people for profit. is part of of an article titled, ” The Church Should Lead, Not Follow on Climate Justice.” The author spoke at a conference at Harvard Divinity School, “Spiritual and Sustainable: Religion Responds to Climate Change’and in June will join many global thinkers at a process theology conference on climate change in Claremont, California. Although his emphasis is on climate change brought about in considerable part by burning fossil fuels, much of the argument applies to other aspects of extreme extraction.
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