Posts Tagged progress

I had some good conversations with friends this weekend, in which we discussed the outrage and horror that people are feeling over the Deepwater Horizon disaster. I’m horrified too, at the scope of the environmental disaster, but I find it hard to muster up too much outrage.

It’d be one thing if I believed that this was an aberration—that something had gone wrong in the system to allow this to happen—but as near as I can tell, the system was working exactly as intended. The oil rig was cutting every corner they reasonably could to boost the profits on the oil. The Minerals Management Service was pretending to regulate the oil companies, while actually letting them do whatever the hell they wanted. The politicians were maintaining plausible deniability on the lack of oversight, while accepting massive donations from oil companies so as to grease the wheels that make the whole thing possible. And Joe Public was shouting, “Drill Here! Drill Now!” and complaining to said politicians when gas got near $3 a gallon. We were all doing our part to ensure that, eventually, a disaster like this would happen. And “eventually” isn’t even the right word, because this is far from the first time a disaster like this has happened. It’s just the first time it happened close to Americans’ home. When thousands of leaks from decrepit pipelines pollute land and water in the Niger Delta, it doesn’t merit a mention, but when it threatens our economy, suddenly, people get mad.

To understand situations like this, I think it’s helpful to examine the role that our culture plays in our relationship to the earth and the resources we extract from it. When I say culture, I don’t mean art, music, or snooty restaurants. I mean the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves. For example, here are some of the things are said by many (all?) modern cultures:

Progress and success is defined as growth and expansion. Growth and expansion are associated with life and vitality. Lack of growth and expansion is a failure, and is associated with death. Things that support growth and expansion are good and things that hinder growth and expansion are bad.

The culture in which you exist (civilization) is the only way that you can have food, shelter, safety, comfort, and entertainment. People who lived outside of your culture lived an a brutish, dangerous, scary, barbaric world that you wouldn’t want anything to do with.

When I think about the the framework of choices and values that made the Deepwater Horizon disaster inevitable, it seems obvious that there’s a link back to the expansionist drive that is one of our cultural myths. If lack of growth and expansion equates to cultural, national, and ultimately individual death, then it makes sense that corners would be cut in order to acquire the ever-scarcer petroleum that fuels, literally, our growth and expansion. No matter what the damage done by a leak, it’s better than dying!

It’s really hard to challenge these cultural myths, because we have had them whispered into our minds every day of our life, and also because the very existence of the culture that provides us with the necessities of life depends on belief in the myths. But the veracity of the myths is easy to challenge. For example, it should be obvious from examination of nature that few, if any, species expand and grow for any length of time without a corresponding contraction. Species that expand and grow excessively, such as the rabbits that were introduced to Australia, create enormous problems, both for themselves and for the other species that have to share an ecosystem with them. So, the idea that contraction equates to death and expansion equates to success is easily falsified. And yet you show me one public company who wants to announce that its profits have dropped. You show me one government official who will cheerfully report that the GDP is down, not up. You show me one financial analyst who’s happy that the stock market is down. Nope. Up, up, up. All the time. Forever. Or it’s bad news. That’s the power of the cultural myth of the expansionist drive. Even though it’s demonstrably false, or at least incomplete.

Where should we direct our horror and outrage at the disaster that’s occurring in the Gulf right now? BP? Minerals Management Service? Politicians? All of these and more share some part of the blame. But focusing solely on those actors is just playing whack-a-mole. Deepwater Horizon is the most prominent (to people in the USA anyway) example of the inevitable outcome of the collection of stories that our culture tells us about our relationship to the environment and the resources it contains. The really scary thing is that every other system that’s operating within that culture is operating under the same premises. While some rigs are certainly safer than Deepwater was, at the end of the day, all rigs and pipelines and other facilities operate within the cultural myth that supporting the continued expansion of civilization is, literally, life-or-death. They have historically also cut corners and taken risks, with resulting environmental damage (thankfully, only to brown-skinned people who don’t really matter because they are far away and also poor). They will continue to do so as long as our shared culture contains the myth of the expansionist drive.

The correct place to direct your outrage, therefore, is not just at the individual actors who created this particular situation, but at your culture, itself, for lying to you and everyone else about the value and necessity of expansion. Without a cultural shift away from this message, we will continue to manufacture these disasters until we have done so much damage to our landbase and extracted so many resources that continued expansion is simply impossible. And, as horrific as these disasters are, you should save your outrage for truly aberrant situations. In this culture, horrific environmental damage is an accepted and inevitable outcome of extracting resources from the earth so as to sustain “progress,” growth, and expansion.