He works as a process technician on one of Norway’s oil platforms. A young engineer at the cusp of his career in oil extraction. Asked by a journalist what he thinks about his field’s inextricable conflict with a sustainable environment.
”That’s not something I really reflect on”, he answers. ”There’s still plenty of oil [to extract], and I think the world will still be dependent on it and gas [for the next 40 years].”
This is what the rationalization of profiting off of the future in the now sounds like. ”I don’t think about it” and ”they’ll buy it as long as I make it”. These are the arguments of a drug dealer, wilfully ignorant of the continual degradation of the health of its customer base. The human world is hooked on oil and gas like a crack whore. It would take an idiot not to take advantage.
It’s a comfort, isn’t it? Stick your head in the sand and just ignore the world burning around you. Ignorance is bliss, and as long as you don’t think about it, your profiteering won’t harm your retarded sense of morality. The same goes for all those that think that buying ecological tomatoes, or ”conflict free” diamonds can balance out bulldozing their way through suburbia in their gallons-guzzling SUVs. Just put a little lotion on your crumbling moral compass, don’t look at the big picture, and you can go on exactly as you always have except for choosing a pricier brand of coffee.
Because change is scary. Apparently more so than an ecological collapse. Not to mention that sufficient private change to subsidize your carbon footprint enough for sustainability goes counter to having all those things that we were promised. A house, a family, a lucrative career, a fancy car, a chromed espresso maker, a summer vacation home right on the beach, an opportunity to see and experience all that the world has to offer in a cramped three-week industrial summer holiday. How can you take advantage of all those things[tm] that were promised to you by the zeitgeist; by the standards of the previous ecologically oblivious generation? To tell you truthfully, you can’t.
Yet people do their damnedest to try. In a society where privilege has taken the form of entitlement and promise, how is a mere human expected to take a solitary stance against such extravagance? New information keeps mounting that there soon won’t be a barrier reef, a rainforest, or alpine glaciers to see. And humans were never known for their grasp of the big picture. It was always an effort to look beyond one’s own paltry needs and desires. Why make the effort now that shit’s already fucked?
Because if you’ve shat the bed, you don’t keep shitting. You clean it up, if for no other reason than uncommon fucking courtesy. And if that is too much to ask, if you’d rather bury your head in the apocalyptic waste than to take responsibility and remedial action, then you deserve to drown in it. The beshatten bed of your own making.
/Sebastian Lindberg 4/9-2018
WastedWords 