Man, what have you done?
In Fukushima prefecture in Japan where an ongoing nuclear meltdown continues, 100 percent of school kids now test positive for internal radiation exposure. Over 34,000 children have now been outfitted with radiation detectors to monitor the cumulative build-up of radioactive particles in their bodies. I have a school kid here in America and the thought of the entire young population of Livingston facing such a similar crisis is heart-wrenching.
What does internal radiation exposure mean? It means many, many of these children will contract cancers within the next decade. Most will still be children, ready to face a future and a world man has already poisoned.
Are Montanans seriously considering anything other than completely sustainable energy and economic systems for our future? Systems which will not spill 42,000 gallons of oil in the Yellowstone river, or industries which will not leave our towns and wild lands as Superfund sites and our citizens poisoned when the profit disappears?
We need to build safe and reliable forms of energy for our communities and encourage local economies to thrive so they will not be desperate for the wage money and cheap energy offered by companies with no aim other than base profit.
We sit poised in a place where real change can be made before our state is excavated in the coming century of resource scarcity. Montana is a small town. We all care enough about our neighbors to leave them alone, work with them in peace or show up to help them in time of need. We are all pioneers. We are all ingenious western spirits. We share enough in common to work together to find solutions to the problems we face.
Whether the push for eminent domain, the acquisition by the state to private land for whatever means/ends determined by the state, the push to lure industry to the Bakken Shale formation in northeastern Montana or fracking in the Shields Valley with poison to extract natural gas from beneath ranch lands, none of these options offer solutions to Montana’s long-term economic or energy issues.
Natural resource recreation and tourism are proven economic winners in the state of Montana, providing a diverse economy of many varieties of businesses. We no longer need exploitative heavy industry in this state, especially industry which provides little else than financial incentives for politicians and corporations. The wages these industries provide only support a worker with money for a time, not a lifetime, and the industry certainly does little to instill generations of jobs or community health.
Fossil fuels are a finite resource, and while large multi-national corporations struggle over the next century to get every last drop, the worker who labored extracting it will be easily expendable.
The three biggest publicly-held U.S. Oil Companies pocketed $58 billion in profits in 2010. How much of this money was re-invested in communities to diversify their economies should the industry need to move on? How much was invested in the well-being and education of the children who may face health dangers and a variety of risks associated with industrial pollution? In Montana we do not need to face any kind of further tragedy from the breakdown of man’s fallible machines and systems in gathering and supplying human’s boundless needs for energy and profit.
If we need more jobs, we need to first make a concerted effort as a citizenry to make sure we are purchasing as much locally and state- produced goods as possible. We need to encourage sustainability in all businesses by offering our support by choice of purchase, and making the shift to a sustainable economy as accessible as possible to everyone across the state. Sustainability networks are already in place in Montana, from food and energy to conservation of water and preservation of wildlife and wild lands. Everyone should be encouraged to work diligently to create a self- sustaining economy in the state, creating a network which is as inclusive as possible.
Montanans should be able to stand up to the oil and gas industries and say we do not need this exploitation. We choose instead a healthy future based on a community-driven economy, alternative energy production, light industry such as sustainable timber farming and processing, farming, ranching, and tourism to thrive. We do not need any more poison in exchange for our survival.
At the very least, citizens of Montana should demand Superfund and other polluted sites be completely cleaned up before any new industry is allowed to continue extraction or operations. This should extend to the timber companies who left the state for richer ecosystems, leaving behind a wake of devastated and fire-prone forests and ruined watersheds.
In the meantime, what do we do about getting around, heating our homes, making sure our child’s milk is refrigerated? This is where energy solutions will have to be built every day. It only takes one step for another to follow. Whether the first step is growing one’s own food or committing to riding a bike everywhere, greater and greater solutions will appear further down the line. Our children will learn from our effort and will build sustainable communities of their own, if they are not among a generation corporate greed will poison.
The Fukushimia plant is still emitting over 1 billion becquerels (bq) of radiation every day. How much is a bq? It’s approximately equal to 1 kg of low level radioactive waste. As far as the molten cores and the radiated seawater used to cool the burning reactors, there is no comprehensive modern solution for containment. Imagine the recently-burst Silvertip pipeline in the Yellowstone river still open and flowing every day like the Deepwater Horizon gusher in the Gulf of Mexico. Imagine what the river would look like soon enough coated in crude oil sludge.
Who would be able to make a living along such a site? Who would be able to raise children and generations there? Sometimes industrial messes cannot be cleaned up quickly, or efficiently. Some are estimating the clean-up of Fukushima to take 20 years while toxic radiation will continue to emanate from the site. Who would want such a trade-off of jobs in exchange for the possibility a company could destroy the community and the resources it depends on to exist?
Nuclear power can be safe and clean power, but not when operated by a corporate industry needing to show healthy profits. Oil and gas industries are the same, but there is no safe, clean way to obtain and process these fossil fuel resources. The large multi-national resource extraction giants such as Exxon-Mobil and Chevron are interested only in base profits and even if they are not doing it here in America, they are dumping enough toxic sludge in third world countries to contaminate entire villages. In some areas of Ecuador, the contamination is so comprehensive nearly every teenage girl faces a fight with breast cancer.
Is this the kind of industry we want to create our jobs in Montana? Where is the positive outcome? Money? Even the wages earned are too low considering the continuing record-breaking annual profits of the oil and gas companies and the history of pollution and degradation of the environment once extraction is complete. We can do better for our communities and our future.
It is a great tragedy what continues to unfold in Japan in the wave of natural and man-made disaster. The response of the Japanese energy company TEPCO to the citizens is eerily similar to what we see here when industrial disasters unfold. The company may have put on a smile (and maybe shed a tear) with an apology and said they would clean it all up but has cared only about profits, all along. Human life, even that of the many Japanese children who have now been poisoned with death sentences, is an expendable risk to secure profits in long-term budgetary planning in energy production. It is shameful for humanity.
Thinking forward to the 2011 local elections, and the national elections of 2012, citizens should consider representatives who will take the message to their fellow legislators: Montana is moving forward in a sustainable future, not one where economic stability can be bought for a short time with a high price to be repaid in human health and the state’s pristine wilderness resources. We can create an economy based in sterner stuff, integrity, and refuse to be exploited by the oil and gas industry regardless of how desperate we may be for jobs or an improved economy.
These massive tragedies of industrial pollution spread across the world and we will not be immune here in Montana in years to come. We cannot ignore the stories of reality any longer. We must change our ways. We need energy.
We need solutions. Instead of relying on the same pathways of the past where the energy industry giants extract from our land whatever they choose, take their profits and jobs elsewhere and leave a stripped land and community behind, we should look to build a road to a healthy community with secure jobs and economies right here at home, for the sake of the generations to come.
—Reilly Neill
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