I may be wrong but . . . .

One problem with being a worrier about the way the world is going is that when your predictions become reality it’s hard to know what to say without sounding holier-than-thou.

I don’t like being told “I told you so” by anyone else, so I prefer not to say it to others when what is obvious to me, but is negative lefty thinking to others, turns out to actually happen. And generally you can hardly be pleased to be right, because what you’re right about too often results in a mess that you really, really don’t want.

But every now and then things happen that cause you to sit up, put two and two together and say: We are going in the wrong direction! It’s obvious. Why could you not see that this was going to be the result? I did tell you so.

Two recent events have made it abundantly clear that unsustainable activities eventually have downstream costs which even the cheerleaders of relentless economic growth acknowledge are horrendous.

Now I didn’t predict the eruption of that volcano in Iceland, and the ensuing disruption to air traffic. And I didn’t predict the accident at the oil rig off the US coast. So I won’t say ‘I told you so’ about these specific events (though some people actually could).

But what I have thought, spoken and written about for many years, and am being proven correct often enough, has been that the more we allow ourselves as residents of this planet to become dependent upon economic growth and the unsustainable tools of growth, the more likely a disaster results when mother nature or human error throws us a curve ball and these tools let us down.

The volcano event has shown how dependent most of us are, mainly indirectly, on scheduled air services. When they’re interrupted for days or weeks, products cannot get to market, people get stranded, people run out of funds to live, business contracts are threatened or breached. And the thing is …. we can’t do anything about it. Good old Mother Nature reminds us that she’s in charge. No amount of management skill, market-driven competition, economic growth or new technology has any real effect.

I’m not saying that good public management skills, sound trading markets or new technologies are poor goals. I’m just saying that we all need a level of self-sufficiency in our places of living, our communities, and our lives such that our existence is not threatened by distant acts of nature. Disrupted, maybe; but not seriously threatened. Making us ever more dependent on remote technologies and activities is just not the way to go.

(I wrote about this in this article on the Haiti earthquake.)

And then we come to the oil rig situation – an even more salutary event with far longer-term implications and an even more obvious lesson for us. Here I’m going to borrow ideas and a few sentences from an opinion article I read in the Christchurch Press (May 3), written by The Times’s Simon Barnes. It was his piece that prompted me to think: I should be writing in the same vein, because I sure think the same.

As we watch on TV the desperation of the Americans who live and earn their livelihood by the coastline that will now inevitably be ruined for decades by the incoming oil slick, it is impossible to see any good side to this. There is no grey area, no “Yes, but ….”, and certainly no bright side. We’ve got it wrong, and we’re going to pay for it.

Those Americans whose jobs will be ruined by the destruction of the seafood stocks will be directly affected. The rest of us will be affected by the resulting costs and how they ripple through our economies.

And although the operator/owner of the exploded oil rig, BP, and its technology suppliers are directly to blame, we’re all indirectly responsible. Everyone who whinges every time the price of petrol goes up, and who demands the right to use a petrol-powered vehicle to go wherever they please, has played a part in this and every costly mistake made within the petroleum industry (including the tanker whose short-cut caused damage to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef last month). The oil suppliers are merely responding to demands from addicted consumers for petrol at the cheapest possible cost – which inevitably means ‘cut corners if you have to, I want my petrol now!’

As Simon Barnes put it: “These spills concentrate the mind, at least for a while. They tell us that our addiction for oil is madness, that our short-term thinking is madness, that our reckless approach to containment – oil at any price – is madness. Treasure this spill; it is a rare occasion on which we can see this essential truth of the way we run our lives with absolute clarity.

“We crave oil like a junkie craves his fix, and like the junkie, we will put up with anything to get it. But even for an addict, there come moments of searing clarity. A sudden revelation that this is actually a stupid way to live life. Well, the spill tells us that this is a stupid way to run our planet.”

Sorry for copying that bit, Simon. But it’s exactly what I’ve thought about the attitude of too many people who lack any longer-term respect for our environment, and he’s said it in far better words than I could have used.

And so I say, with feeling, “I also told you so!”