Per Cautio

Do you remember the asbestos? We found it. We found out that it was cheap and it couldn’t catch fire and we went right ahead and built our workplaces and our huts and our holiday cabins out of it. We built our homes out of it. We kept our children inside of it. And James Hardie knew it was poison and they told us it was okay.

And now there is a whole town in Western Australia that has been taken off the map because it is so toxic. There are hundreds of people with cancer, hundreds of people claiming compensation they’ll never get in time, hundreds of people still living inside it. There are people using asbestos as a weapon.

And now they want to drill for Coal Seam Gas in our water supply. They want to go down into the ground and cause an earthquake and pump hundreds of toxic chemicals they can’t take back, like napalm, into the ground on which we live. It is a process we know contaminates water. It is a process that may be behind severe contamination of land and water in the United States; it may be the cause of many animal deaths and cancers and toxins.

I’m supposed to be okay with living in a world that lets that happen simply because the alternative to making fast money and power isn’t in the best profitable interests of companies who are exactly like James Hardie? Exactly like the Tobacco companies who told us it was good to smoke cigarettes.

Companies who have and do and always will lie to us.

And I’m just supposed to sit back and go to work and drink my contaminated water and plant seeds in toxic soil and let my horses feed on contaminated grass and raise my children on dirty power and filthy, unliveable land.

Because apparently we don’t have the guts to pursue a solution we know is possible. We don’t even know the full impacts of what Coal Seam Gas will do to us but we know there is a viable, plausible, renewable, healthy, safe solution and we don’t have the guts to make it happen. I’m meant to support the fact that humans, who have come this far in terms of evolution, don’t have the guts to tune into our survival instincts and save ourselves.

We keep waiting for companies to do it for us.

We’d rather sit back and let ourselves be lied to because it’s a whole lot easier than facing the truth. And it will be the death of us.