Denise Stewart: Wanton Ecological Destruction and the Madness of Greed

I don’t usually post about “the war,” but someone needs to say out loud that this is not only slaughter of people, destruction of a region.

It is wanton ecological destruction.

If I went out today and set a forest fire, I would be charged, condemned, and punished, vilified and rightly so.

We all and the law, understand that one reckless human being does not have the right to endanger the living world.

And yet very questionable men in offices, uniforms, and boardrooms can gamble with an entire sea, an entire coastline, an entire region, an entire civilization, an entire population, and call it strategy.

Call it commerce.

Call it geopolitics.

They Dress it up in serious language and act as though it is something other than vandalism on a planetary scale.

A tanker too heavy for the safer route.

Offload half the cargo and lose money.

Turn back into danger and risk catastrophe.

Blow up an oil refinery, make it rain oil.

And somehow this passes for rational decision-making.

This is the madness of greed: the cargo is precious, the insurance is precious, the profits are precious, but the sea is treated as if she is infinite, mute, and there to absorb the consequences of male ambition.

She is not.

The coral, the fish, the birds, the currents, the shorelines, the air , the land, the future, all of it is being forced to pay the price for decisions made by people who will never personally drink the poisoned water, wash oil from feathers, or kneel in the ruin of what they have destroyed.

Word on the curb is, they might build a golf course and a luxury hotel over top of some of the devastation.

And still ordinary people are lectured.

Use less. Buy less. Recycle more.

Sip through your soggy paper straw.

Do your part.

Meanwhile the powerful set the world alight and call it policy.

That is the obscenity of it.

The law understands perfectly well that the natural world must be protected from YOU.

It becomes strangely confused when the potential offender owns a tanker, an oil company, or an army.

If one person torching a forest is a crime, then knowingly risking the poisoning of a sea should be treated as a crime too.

Because this is not collateral damage.

It is not unfortunate fallout.

It is not the cost of doing business.

It is desecration.

And I am tired of watching the Mother be treated like an expendable backdrop for the endless tantrums of empire, greed, and war.

But yes, they got you sucking on your soggy paper straw.

— Denise Stewart