Economy versus ecology
Doctor Montevecchi, or Bill, as he is widely known, has recently voiced his concern over the pollution of Grand Banks waters by oil-drillers. His concern is perfectly valid, although not shared by every Newfoundlander. The fact that Husky Energy resumed pumping oil to its FPSO during a vicious storm should
alarm anybody who cares about the natural environment and the creatures that, for better or worse, share it with us.
Montevecchi is no stranger to the unequal struggle between capitalism and biology. Extracting mineral wealth from the bowels of Mother Earth has always posed more danger to the natural world than to the industrialists. Montevecchi reminds us that to the natural resources exploiter, “time is money,” and to shut down an oilwell merely for the sake of birds, fish and sea-mammals seems counter-productive.
If money is more important than the health of the planet, all of us who depend on the planet for our survival (and even capitalists are dependent on it!) must suffer for the wealth of the “one-percenters,” that tiny group of humans who control the majority of the world’s economy. Economy and ecology, since the Industrial Revolution have never lived together in harmony. Governments, chronically short of money to support their grandiose projects, give power to the industrialists, depending as they do on tax-revenues from natural resource production. This seems to be a given, not easily changed.
Neither the industrialists nor the government have much interest in anything other than finance. We are governed by accountants, and accountants know no greater good than money. Fish are not money to the accountant, not in the oil industry; seabirds do not directly benefit the ‘bottom line’; sea-mammals are not a very efficient source of revenue. Oil, on the other hand, produces vast financial benefit to both government and capitalists. Montevecchi poses the conundrum with his characteristic clarity: “Time is Money,” and nothing else matters to those who are in a position to regulate offshore drilling.
By some convoluted reasoning process, the government has managed to convince itself that oil is more valuable than living things. But even government officials, in spite of it all, are themselves living things, and depend like the rest of us on the natural processes of life. Sometimes they act, and talk, as if they didn’t need oxygen, clean water, and the other things that we mere mortals depend on. But when the planet dies, they will share the common fate, and what’s more, they’ll know that they could have helped to prevent it. That sounds a bit melodramatic, doesn’t it, but it’s not so very far from reality.
Ed Healy Marystown