Search the Community

About three years ago I traveled to Indonesia for my work. I had to go to the Paiton Power Station ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paiton_Power_Station ), the largest power station in Indonesia. When I was down inside of the plant standing right under the coal pulverizers I got a sense of the massive scale at which we are burning this planet up. This place was huge and it is just one of the thousands of coal burning plants in the world. I asked my hosts where the coal was coming from, since Java Island is formed by volcanoes I wondered where the coal was coming from. They said, "Borneo". If you do some research on coal mining in Borneo you'll read a tale of destruction and pollution. I grew up living in the Upper Ohio Valley of West Virginia. My father and neighbors worked in the chemical plants, coal mines, and power plants. I played in the remains of an abandoned coal mine complex as a child. I think about what the land was like before industrialization when the Native Americans were the only humans on the land. I dream about how they could drink and eat fish from the Ohio River. You can't do that now unless you want to chance getting sick. I think we have passed the tipping point. There is no going back to nature. The environment is too polluted and the world is too populated. Only by even further industrialization will humanity survive. As for other species, they will not survive. The planet is already one big city and industrial complex. Any nature that still exists is because we've allowed it to remain, but we will bulldoze it in an instant if it is profitable. We all seem complicit in this so that we can feed ourselves and our families today. We will worry about tomorrow when tomorrow comes. While climate change is on the tip of everyone's lips I think there are more immediate issues. Fresh water scarcity is happening now. Water and air pollution is happening now. The forecast is that more and more people will live in cities, but people (especially children) are already getting sick from breathing the air. This is obviously not sustainable. I think our future is looking very much like the one portrayed in the movie Soylent Green (minus processing people for food). In the movie the world was hot, environmentally devastated, and the rich were protected while the rest lived in squalor. I would really like to hear what other Dao Bums think on this topic - The Anthropocene Age.