At a time when drought and climate change are causing alarmingly low freshwater levels in the West with city floods in the Eastern U.S., in Europe, Australia, essentially around the globe, but most clearly evident here in many of these man-made desert oases (Arizona’s Phoenix and Tuscan, or Nevada’s Las Vegas and Reno, among others), at the same time needing to share what little gentle, soaking rain available with toxic holding ponds; this rain already made toxic with plastic nano-beads, lasting forever as contaminate-pollution adulterating all precipitation that “replenishes(?)” contributing disruption to our entire hydrological cycle and hormonal systems, the Willow project and its greenhouse gases are a carbon and methane global “bomb,” the sanction of which is not only the antithesis of smart water management, in this age of OUR human terraforming laisses faire expansion, but is a condemnation of life’s quality for our pro-generations through the millennia.
With humanity as the preeminent resource allocating agent of Earth, it is our responsibility, nay our sole survival requirement (as Earth’s most accountable voice of its reason …and our d’etre!) to administer equitably these gifts to ourselves’ and all organics as stewards for future generations. Our failure to achieve this universal constant of equilibrium is seen in the species extinction of our food-chain, and in all organic life, but is a universal verity confirmed by the ‘balance of nature’ maxim. Privatizing for personal profit any of these ‘commons’ is tantamount to selling our souls for immediate pleasure, just speeding the enhancement of this “imbalanced” disruption.
It is this teetering balance most often manifesting in all the civil violence often robbing us of our young, fresh minds, with this irresponsible, and often unaccountable, massacre of gun deaths. We also witness this “manifested, disruptive violence” in ocean acidification bleaching coral reefs and beaching great whales. But is testified to, most clearly, in the cavalcading frequency of armed conflict resolutions on our city streets and in the mental ill-health inspired, with gun manufacturer marketing of, battlefield assault weapons to “World of War Craft” aficionados, This, in turn, has given rise to the rash of self-consumed, autocratic despotism, politically reeking discord around the world!
The “short-circuiting” of our splendiferous Earth-system dynamic, “cross-wired” incessantly by our continued insistence on cheap and effortless fossil fuel burning to provide the least costly labor/work upon which capitalism can profit, makes the Willow project even a consideration, knowing full well it will only speed the disruption of our chaotically organized Edenic system here on Earth: The system which begat our very human existence!
• John S. Sonin resides on Douglas. Sonin is a local organizer and longtime letter writer. Columns, My Turns and Letters to the Editor represent the view of the author, not the view of the Juneau Empire. Have something to say? Here’s how to submit a My Turn or letter.
