Would You Maintain Your Home Like This?

A mindset I just can't understand is how someone who works hard to obtain the home of their dreams, who meticulously designs, renovates, and furnishes that home, and who is fastidious about its maintenance can accept treating the one planet we all share as a squalid tenement.This person will break out the vacuum in an instant if there's dirt or pet hair on the carpet but cries foul if someone tries to regulate the plastic that pollutes our landscape, prohibits smoking in their house but won't condone limiting coal plant emissions. They would surely excoriate anyone who dumped trash on their floor, dumped poison in their water supply, pulled up the landscaping, destroyed the air conditioner, excavated holes in their flooring, or shook the very foundation of their house, yet decry limits on mountain top removal and open pit mining, clear cut logging, regulation of carbon and greenhouse gas emissions, fracking, the abuse of pesticides and fertilizers, or the facilitating of something as abusive to land, water, and air as open pit tar sands mining.

There may have been a time when we were few enough in number, the world large enough and our tools and debris innocuous enough that we didn't have to consider the consequences of our little endeavors to neighbors in distant parts of our home, our planet, but that time has long passed. Perhaps people with this mindset are still living in some idyllic distant past with open horizons and wide open spaces, when the sum of the world's population was a few million people instead of the seven billion it is today, when fire was something rare and cherished, and when it took the population of a city many years to build a single pyramid. I, for one, do not want to be ruled by a plutocracy or even an inveigled majority who are duped into believing that environmental regulation is an unnecessary evil. Human caused climate change is real, fracking as currently practiced pollutes our land, water, and air, causes earthquakes, and emits more than enough methane to continue adding to human caused climate change. The Keystone pipeline is a bad idea because it facilitates a very ecologically destructive, highly polluting, carbon emitting energy extraction method that will forestall the development of alternative energy sources critical to our future.

Toxic sludge on surface of tailings pond bordering Canadian boreal forest. Source: The Guardian, Jiri Rezac, Greenpeace

Perhaps the individual who rails against environmental regulation is not so scrupulous in the maintenance of their home, maybe they have enough in the bank so that they can rebuild or move on when things get too run down. A house is one thing, but we've only this one planet to leave to our descendants.

http://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/confirmed-fracking-practices-blame-ohio-earthquakes-f8C11073601

http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2014/01/05/22190011-oil-and-gas-drilling-pollutes-well-water-states-confirm?lite

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2014/11/26/spate-texas-earthquakes-connected-nearby-fracking-operations

http://news.yahoo.com/unusual-dallas-earthquakes-linked-fracking-expert-says-181055288.html

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/gallery/2010/sep/07/tarnished-earth-oil-sands

http://insideclimatenews.org/news/20110516/Athabasca-River-Alberta-oil-sands-toxins-cancer

http://www.nrdc.org/energy/keystone-pipeline/

http://www.acsf.cornell.edu/Assets/ACSF/docs/attachments/Howarth-EtAl-2011.pdf

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jan/07/much-worlds-fossil-fuel-reserve-must-stay-buried-prevent-climate-change-study-says?CMP=share_btn_fb

http://www.climatecentral.org/news/huge-methane-leaks-add-doubt-on-natural-gas-as-a-bridge-fuel-17309