newspeak

Arctic Resources, Exposed by Warming, Set Off Competition – NYTimes.com.

It is an issue whose value for social thought and action has been difficult to pin down, and thus gets forgotten. It’s hard to pin in part because the melting arctic, and all that it implies regarding resources and their getting, almost implicitly involves military defence and fossil-fuel or other geo-stripping technology. There is in short nothing beautiful to look forward to, where “beautiful” implies something whose value lies independent of the natural resources, the commodities, that lie underneath, underground and soon to be revealed to those with the most money, biggest companies, largest and most powerful navies. 

That I live in Canada is not irrelevant. That Canada’s huge wealth derives mainly from its natural resources and their gross exploitation is important to any future calculus. That there has been an effective deprecation of innovative technologies, especially green ones, is to the point. Canada, after all, has programmatically removed itself from International green treaties, and it is only very locally that one sees the necessary efforts made to keep up with, for instance, trash. But that is by no means enough. (I find this frustrating. Canada could, and should, be the world leader in Green Technology. Argh.)