Taking Responsibility

Now that it has become absurd to continue to maintain the fiction that climate change in the form of global warming is part of a natural cycle, or that the greenhouse effects of the combustion of fossil fuels have yet to be proven, it is time for industries – all industries – to accept accountability for the footprint they leave on this planet, writes Patrick Guntensperger.

All future generations have the right to expect that the current generation is not prospering by writing environmental checks that will be drawn on our children’s account. Everyone living has the responsibility of leaving the planet in a condition that is acceptable to those who will inherit our environmental assets as well as our planetary liabilities.

Resource-based industries – mining, oil and gas extraction, lumber and fisheries, and any other business that gathers and sells the raw materials that exist on Planet Earth – can be said to have a special set of responsibilities to the planet and the people who occupy it. A not unreasonable point of view is that those industries take commodities that have been given to all the occupants of Earth and sell them at a profit to their fellow occupants. Certainly those other occupants need those resources; certainly they benefit from having them extracted, refined, and made available for use; nevertheless, those resources are a planetary legacy from which a small segment of the planet’s population is reaping enormous profits.

Among the renewable resources industries is the fishing industry. It is only reasonable to expect that those who catch and sell the creatures from our oceans do so in a way that ensures the survival of the species they capture. Simply decimating fish populations, as was done to the codfish of the eastern North American coastal fishing grounds, is not merely short-sighted; it is bad economics and worse business. Worse still, it is immoral. To eliminate a population of animals that were once so plentiful that they could literally be gathered by dipping buckets over the gunwales is a demonstration of greed so monumental it is staggering.

Of course, the fishing habits in this region are nothing to brag about either. Even the small, independent fishermen from outlying islands know that blasting coral reefs with dynamite or pouring cyanide into the waters to fill their boats for the market is wrong. They know that, but they do it anyway because there is a profit to be made, and that comes first.

For those who make their living from theoretically renewable resources, the responsibility attached to their actions is clear: ensure that the resource is actually renewed. Take what can be taken in a sustainable way. Those who make a living by taking a species from the sea must also be stewards, responsible for the sustainability and well-being of that species.

The partially renewable resource industries include the lumber and pulpwood industries. These are described as partially renewable because, while the forests can be replanted and continue to produce timber and pulpwood indefinitely, the virgin, first-growth ecosystem that was destroyed to cut the first shipment is gone forever. The wildlife habitat, the biodiversity, the rare species that once occupied that parcel of land will not regenerate in our lifetime or in hundreds of lifetimes. Nevertheless, the world continues to demand wood and paper products; that demand is not going to go away any time soon, and the industries that supply that demand will be around as long as there are trees.

What is unconscionable, however, is the rape and pillage approach that too many forestry companies take – and companies in Indonesia are the worst offenders in the world. For a company to wipe out a delicate ecosystem by clearcutting millions of hectares of rainforest and then simply move on to the next virgin tract of land, leaving nothing but a moonscape behind, has absolutely no acceptable justification.

There are many ways to make forestry a truly sustainable industry. Selective logging, restricting the cut to the annual growth rate, and above all, reforestation are all straightforward ways of using land that has already been exploited and avoiding moving into the last few stands of untouched forest in the world.

The players in that partially renewable resource industry clearly have a responsibility to minimize the devastation they cause. Equally clearly, they have an obligation to make the land that once contained irreplaceable virgin forest into a sustainable source for harvesting timber in partial compensation for having taken something that they can never give back.

The final category – nonrenewable resource-based industries – has an even more compelling and specialized obligation. Those industries have a moral duty to develop alternatives to replace the resources they are exploiting. International law ought to require that oil, gas, coal, and other non-renewable resource industries spend a significant percentage of their revenue on the research, development, and deployment of alternatives to their products.

To continue to extract a resource that will be totally depleted in the foreseeable future and yet upon which the entire world’s economy depends, without a foolproof backup plan is astonishingly irresponsible. Those alternative sources exist in the form of hydrogen, wave, tidal, geothermal, wind, solar and other absolutely clean energy forms, and simply need a focused effort to be made practical.

To disregard them and continue to increase our use of and dependence upon fossil fuels, which are killing the planet, is a fairly serviceable definition of insanity.

The author is a consultant, lecturer, and political commentator. He writes frequently on social and environmental issues and may be reached at pguntensperger@yahoo.ca

Home