Inviting Disaster

When I was writing my gas prices post a few days ago I realized something, which is that, instead of being alarmed, I have always found a strange sort of comfort in reading articles about how the petroleum supply is limited and will run out in not too many more years.

According to the very interesting film, "Koyaanisqatsi," the Hopi have a prophecy that says that he who digs precious things out of the land invites disaster.

Those articles and that prophecy appeal to my sense of logic, as does the concept of chickens coming home to roost.

The original inhabitants of the Americas probably regretted all the gold that they had dug from the ground, after the Spaniards came over and ruthlessly slaughtered them in the urge to take all they could find of the yellow metal, and that's not all the grief that has been brought to many through time by the hunger for gold.

I think sometimes of the gaps that have been left in the earth's crust by oil pumping, and I wonder if that's going to cause problems later on. I think of all the oil that has been lost by damaged and sinking tankers and all the fuel that is wasted by constant preparations for war and in warfare itself and by such heavy use of airliners in which the majority of riders are probably on non-essential missions. I think of the damage done to the earth's atmosphere by all the burning of this oil and the coal. I think of all the lives that have been made hard and short since antiquity by mining for lead, diamonds, gold, silver, coal, and all the other substances of that kind.

Civilization is a shaky proposition, and a lot of that must be because it and its future depend so heavily on violating the planet.