Does the way we live make us prone to manmade disasters?
A wise man once told me a little parable about the cycles of life and nature. He said his neighbors were having trouble with ants destroying their crops. After a few weeks they found a pesticide that wiped out the ant species. Their crops were healthy for a while, until the arch enemy of the crop ants, the “bear ants” had free reign over the farms. They came in from the surrounding rain forest and began causing more damage than their smaller counterparts. He said his fellow farmers didn’t understand that every action in nature has a reaction.
“What did you do?” I asked. “We’re trying to exterminate the bear ant,” he replied. I thought he was joking, but apparently not. Life these days seems to be that way. We humans, make mistakes, HUGE mistakes, but don’t really learn from them.
We’ve just faced one of the biggest human errors in history. Whoopsies, we accidentally spilled 172 million gallons of oil into the gulf of Mexico. Our bad. Now what? Whoopsies, we accidentally spilled 800,000 gallons of oil into the Kalamazoo River. Eeek, Team Humans is not doing so well this year.
The thing that frightens me most about all of this is that every time we do some damage, however minuscule or catastrophic, we can never fully grasp the effects it will have on us in the immediate future. We are a race of learning through trial and error methods, which isn’t the most sustainable method if you consider the global scale in which we live. We build coal-fired power plant on a coast, and years and years down the road realize that they emit mercury into the sea and air, making it unsafe to consume too much tuna on account of mercury poisoning. Later, some kid who lives far from that plant, grows up eating tuna sandwiches everyday. That kid was me, I loved tuna. Did you know mercury intake causes loss of sight? I am legally blind without contacts. Coincidence? Perhaps.
The point is, it’s not over, and there’s really no telling how long we’ll be dealing with this. This week scientists found oil specs in crab larvae. So what happens when other animals begin eating these larvae? If little droplets of mercury from a coal plant can make a child lose her sight, then what affects will oil specs have? I have no idea. I don’t think anyone will for a while.
Ceresco Dam off the Kalamazoo River
I’m not here to tell you what you should think. I don’t really know if I can say that I think this oil spill was worse than the Exxon Valdez spill. How do you measure something like that exactly? I’m simply saying that it’s time we all stopped believing exactly what we’re told. We need to think critically about our actions. So say that the oil spill isn’t AS BAD as everyone is making it out to be. So what? It’s still a horrific accident that we should learn from. We’re smarter people than to not understand the obvious. And OBVIOUSLY the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline from Canada to the gulf isn’t such a good idea right now. Just saying.
Are manmade disasters inevitable?
If so, what can we do to limit the impact they have on our environment?
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