How Urgent Is Replacing Coal As Fuel? Check Out the 2010 Film “The Last Mountain”
Levelheaded people often refer to themselves as “pragmatists” – those who understand all sides of an issue and work forward to a solution that meets the practical requirements of everyone involved. With respect to energy policy, this usually means regarding the mining and burning of coal (that here in the US generates 48% of our electricity) as a “necessary evil.”
I’m not sure, however, that most people who see the 2010 film “The Last Mountain” leave the theater with that circumspect “we’ll get to it when we can” attitude. I hope readers will click the link above and spend the two minutes required to review the trailer. From there, let your conscience be your guide.
I think the enlightened pragmatist will see the value – indeed the necessity – in preserving intact that expansive, complex and (in the face of our combined technology, ignorance and greed) all too fragile biosphere upon which our species will always be just as dependent as any other.
For all our pretenses and illusions to the contrary, we thrive or suffer in tandem with the web of nature into which we’re both delicately and tragically interwoven. Each severed thread leaves us, and our future, more and more precariously dangling and frayed. We constitute a great weight supported by a once thick and supple rope now picked to shreds by a million small incisions.
When our connection reaches the breaking point, our final fall is likely to begin suddenly, accelerate rapidly and plummet abysmally to a very wretched place indeed. Few of us can remotely imagine the misery before us if we fail to recognize our place as a species and behave accordingly. Shortly, imagination will be rendered quite unnecessary – reality will take its place.
Perhaps there is still a chance, but should one still remain to us, time is now most certainly quite short. Do enough of us have the courage and wisdom to welcome our own evolution, and take the brighter path available to us? We shall soon see. It will require compassion, cooperation and the sharing of skills and resources – we will need to become… civilized.
Wow. That’s poetic!