TO THE EDITOR:
Morgan Zemaitis writes that activists who “say no” to offshore drilling ought to put more effort into proposing solutions to “the problem.” But Zemaitis has “the problem” all wrong.
The ecological crisis is real, it’s enormous, it could influence all of our lives — and it’s the problem that people who care about the earth are trying to solve.
Some people, however, who profess the kinds of opinions Zemaitis does are not worried about the earth so much as they are worried about the continued existence of industry.
Zemaitis writes that we should petition for solar panels and wind turbines. What she doesn’t bring up — possibly a symptom of the same NIMBY-ism that she condemns in her column — are the mines, transportation infrastructure and other ecologically harmful practices that enable those “green energy solutions.”
What will we do if we have to choose between industry and our wild earth? In the midst of the Anthropocene, the sixth mass extinction, and the age of climate change, we have arguably already reached that point.
So who is going to put the earth first? The problem for Zemaitis et al. is “unsustainable industry,” but the problem for the rest of us is industry itself. The activists who are saying “no” to offshore drilling aren’t foregoing solutions; “No” is the solution.
