Mining today

RAYMUND FERNANDEZ

Mining today to build tomorrow seems immediately like sound logic. Building the future will always require the sacrifice of something. But we should qualify the true meanings of the words “sacrifice” and “future” in the light of current politics and the state of the planet. What sacrifices should we allow ourselves? What sort of future are we making sacrifices for?

We need to rethink old mind-sets. The beginning of the 1900s brought to light certain formulas for building the future. Mining coal, fossil fuels, ores and minerals were the fundamental base of a supply chain which ended ultimately with humans enjoying the fruits of the industrial age. Machines, human shelter, clothing, technologies, wealth (generally), come within easy access. The effects of these would have a profound effect we are now only beginning to study and understand. We know these effects were always a mix of good and bad. Consequently, humans are more pragmatic now than they ever were.

Certain things become easier for us to understand. For instance, we know that the fastest way to derive immediate benefits is directly proportional to our willingness to sacrifice anything and everything. The fastest way to feed humanity by way of fish and ocean resources is by making fishing more efficient. That was the old, easy logic. But by now, we know we can overfish. We can fish so efficiently the fish run out of sufficient time to maintain their populations. Eventually, fish resources run out. The answer to this conundrum would seem easy enough — fish less! Unfortunately, that easy answer seems now impossible, given the fact of competition not just at the national but at the global scale. In the old days, it used to be said, nobody owns the oceans. Now, we are seeing the oceans carved up between nations and contested for in unprecedented ways. The global competition for the Spratley Islands is our best example of it.

And then there is the issue of coal. The current US government wants to see its return into the US economy on the logic it will cause short-term, if not immediate, recovery. More jobs would be created. The simplicity of this logic is rooted on a false primary premise. The premise is that global warming is a myth. The problem reminds us of an old psychology experiment where the experimenters put marshmallow in front of a child with the guarantee that if they don’t eat it within fifteen minutes they will receive another one. The conclusion was that the kids who waited for fifteen minutes would have the greater propensity to succeed in real life, whereas those who opted for immediate satisfaction and reward had the lesser propensity. This is not the logic of current politics. In politics, the rewards must come before the next elections. Consequently, whatever the long-term consequences, politicians will always opt for immediate rewards. Even if those consequences will have negative impact on the environment. This is why, we and our planet are more doomed now than ever before.

Take this whole idea of martial law. Suspending the people’s constitutionally guaranteed rights would certainly make them easier to govern.

Suspending their right to complain would immediately enhance the government’s ability to enforce acts. But there is a cost to this besides erasing entirely government accountability. The cost will inevitably have to paid in the future. Proof of that is how we continue to pay even now for Marcos’ decades-long martial law. We pay not only in terms of loan repayments for money lost to corruption but also in terms of the arrested political maturity of our people. Consider the kinds of people we elect into office.

In the sense both of the natural environment and the political life, we see now how we sacrifice even our collective future for immediate benefits and rewards. In way of saying, we are mining our future for today’s immediate benefits. And what we extract now through this sort of mining are mostly resources which are irreplaceable and nonrenewable. With fish, as with coal, as with martial law, we are really sacrificing our collective future for immediate, short-term benefits. And then call that progress.