The Opportunity to Die

Supposedly, the Samurai of ancient Japan had a motto: shinu kikai o motomo: "looking for the opportunity to die."

This can be seen as a denial of life, a perverted morality that sees life as subservient to duty.

Or it can be seen as an empowering acceptance of death and our own mortality.

If you accept that you will die, you look at life in a different way. Priorities are reordered. What would you do today if you knew you were going to die tomorrow?

Our culture cannot last. It is headed for a collapse. Whether this collapse brings out the most vicious human behavior and greed, or whether we (normal humans, not the sociopaths in power) take some control of the ship as it goes down, whichever happens, our way of life is unsustainable. Right now, I am typing these thoughts on a computer in a heated house. The electric power that I am using to do these things most likely came from burning coal, coal that came at least partly from a blasted mountain in Wise County, Virginia, or near Kayford Mountain, or Zeb mountain, or some other Appalachian mountain.

Aside from the biodiversity that is being destroyed by Mountain Top Removal coal mining, and aside from the global warming created by coal combustion, we are destroying the headwater streams that feed our major rivers and provide drinking water for our cities.

A stream at the base of an active MTR site in Wise County, Virginia

Global warming is real, and very dangerous, but the proposed remedies for climate change are possibly worse than the problem.

Natural gas is one such solution - supposedly a cleaner burning fuel source with less greenhouse gas emissions than coal.

As I write, test drills are extracting natural gas from the Chattanooga shale under the mountains where I live. This will be done by what the gas drillers call "Horizontal Drilling", or "Hydraulic Fracturing". It's better known as "hydrofracking". Fracking requires millions of gallons of water for each operation. One well can be fracked between 20 - 300 or more times. The water is mixed with an unknown blend of chemicals. The chemical recipes are proprietary and exempt from environmental regulations by a Bush-era bit of legal wizardry, but they are known to contain neurotoxins and carcinogens.

The industry claims that hydrofracking is safe and that regulations would only get in the way and drive up prices.

The system, as currently set up, offers no built-in regulatory mechanism. Profits and massive, ongoing economic growth are the only drivers. Environmental protection and public health are not desired ends, but barriers to profit.

Basically we are exchanging forests, biodiversity, the global climate system, and clean drinking water for economic growth and a few more hours of cheap energy - and this is the logical result of the system we have set up for ourselves.

We are destroying the basic survival system of our planet.

What do we do in the limited time we have left?