With regard to the mining forum last week
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PR spectacles displaying glossy certainties are paramount to professing the gospel of wealth. In order to create the kinds of over-confident narratives about weather and climate prediction, speculation over volatile global economies, and a risk assessment about building infrastructure on a fault line under a glacier, a kind of faith-like scientific approach must be adopted. The dogma elevates jobs and potential profits to the highest good, while reducing the dynamic and specific environment to projections. Whatever models salesmen use to describe living places (the Chilkat River and its tributaries) is inevitably to enslave it, to give up on life by carrying it beyond the scope of change. Plans for “perpetuity” must be made. (Legally defined as 200 years) What data or contrivance can account for “perpetuity”? This is an abuse of the intent of science, and a prime example of industry turning the scientific process into a sales platform. We, the residents, the salmon, our human and nonhuman neighbors are burdened with the consequences of projection failure, natural disaster, or even gradual change. Do we dare imagine two or three generations ahead? This land’s wholeness is borrowed, not ours to ante up.
Ben Aultman-Moore
