Hate The Sin Help The Sinner
WoOooOOw a religious reference as a title he’s gonna try and force religion down our throats.
If that’s your initial thought to the title, rest assured, this post will stay clear of religion and all that jazz.
As humans, we’ve found ways to make money that just absolutely devastate our planet. From mining and using coal to burning forest land to make space for more cows or to grow palm trees to make palm oil, we suck (Sorry David Attenborough).
However, the world has caught onto these antics, and more and more voices are demanding a change. And there have been wins. Like back in January, the Biden administration blocked any more work being done on the Keystone XL pipeline which many people considered an absolute victory. I was one of them.
But not everyone had the same thought process.
For many people, that permit was insurance that they could work for the next few months or years. That permit was the reason food was going to get put on the table for their family and pay the bills on time each month. In a single move, at least a thousand (this is a difficult number to estimate tbh) people lost their near future work.
And that bodes the question, is it worth it?
The straight answer, that thinks incredibly long term, is yes, it is worth it. I think most people would agree with me when I say that I would want this planet to be around and habitable for generations and generations to come. I want my great-great-grandchildren to be able to watch the salmon run every year in the spring and summer. I want them to be able to go to orchards and pick fresh, luscious fruit. The people that lost this work on the Keystone XL permit were mostly there as temporary workers, they can find new jobs. Or even if not, that sacrifice is worth the survival of our home planet.
Are we really okay with that though?
Saving the Earth is incredibly important right now I know. Estimates are showing that by 2050 or 2060 so many natural wonders of this world will just be dead due to climate change. So it is of utmost priority to work to change that trajectory we’re on. But to me, I’d like to see that change without leaving anyone behind.
In this single case of the Keystone XL Pipeline, it was a thousand plus workers, and in the grande scheme of over 7 billion people, that’s not too many. But I mentioned earlier coal miners, cow farmers, palm farmers, and probably so many other people and occupations who are working jobs that are detrimental to the health of this planet. And as incredible as it could be from an ecological perspective to see all of those things just stop, we switch over to better methods, and we let the Earth take a breather and recuperate, what will the cost be? How many people would lose their livelihoods because of that? How many people wouldn’t get to have themselves or their families see the brighter days ahead?
I don’t really want to think about that.
Because these aren’t just numbers or models we’re dealing with in our minds or on machines. It’s real people. It’s real people who have real lives who have real relationships with other real people. It’s potentially the people close to you or close to someone close to you. What if I told you one of those people left behind was one of your loved ones? What if it was multiple people or multiple groups of people? That’s the genuine crisis people face when we just cancel jobs and projects like this.
It’s not hopeless though. It’s not like because of this we just have to have the coal miners keep mining coal and cow farmers keep raising and breeding cattle. It’s absolutely not that way. But for the people in power and those who want change, we have to offer an alternative for those we’ll leave behind. Maybe it’s easy switches like hey instead of building this oil pipeline come help us build wind farms or solar panels, and maybe it’s more difficult. No matter the difficulty though, these people deserve another option besides doom and gloom. We can totally hate on the system that encourages bad practices such as these and we can demand change, but just remember to also help those who are relying on this current system to live so they can see the brighter days ahead with us.
