Whose Nature Is It Anyway?
This week we have a thoughtful (and beautifully written) reflection by Luis Pacheco on the great controversy of our industry: the struggle to find a balance between development and conservation. MinAmbiente Ricardo Lozano’s set phrase – produce while conserving and conserve while producing – sounds great but reality is far more complex as Luis shows us here.
Pacheco hopefully needs no introduction to those who have been around the Colombian oil and gas industry for any length of time. Now an independent consultant and a nonresident fellow at the Baker Institute Center for Energy Studies at Rice University, he is a frequent contributor to industry events. His clear, eloquent and often ironic summaries of complex and controversial topics are always a highlight.
Whose Nature Is It Anyway?
Luis A. Pacheco
Eight o’clock in the morning. Las Mercedes, a busy neighbourhood in the capital. Coromoto, a 19-year-old Pemon1 girl, dirt in her face, barefooted, dressed in rags, and already a mother of three, begins her daily routine of begging. In her left hand, she holds a half-cut milk carton for panhandling, and on her right arm, she cradles her new born child. At the end of her shift, she will probably have to give her man, or her handler, a good portion of the coins she managed to extract from the few motorists.
In the Amazon region of southern Venezuela, Christian missionaries carry out their lifelong battle to try to preserve the way of life of the original inhabitants, minus their gods. In this milieu, illness, heat, humidity and predators, keep the number of humans down and the environment almost intact. The jungle keeps reclaiming back what man takes in the form of conucos2; a world that is as close to untouched nature as one can imagine.
However, this is no paradise. Aboriginal tribes are vulnerable to changes in the environment and are particularly exposed to illnesses brought by non-indians and to which they have no immune system defence. Because many of these tribes do not have proper medical care, the life span of the Amazonian tribe people is considerably shorter
than those living in the countries surrounding them. Many die of malaria, malnutrition and parasites.3
The “garimpeiros” - illegal miners - prospect for gold, bringing not only environmental destruction but also diseases lethal to the ancient dwellers of the rainforest. The army, deployed to help guard against the illegal mining and protect the border, has become the indians worse predator and the smugglers best protector.
At the Orinoco Delta, where this majestic river merges with the Atlantic Ocean, the sun is beginning to break the monotonous darkness of the early dawn. In the distance, you can hear the loud noise made by the helicopter of the national oil company, its gleaming fuselage hovering along the surf, carrying the sleepy workers towards the oil-drilling rig that floats 50 miles offshore. The modern explorers for hydrocarbons seek new fortunes in the waters that once were sailed by Columbus.
Back in capital, the head of the oil company, riding in the back seat of her armoured company car, reads the briefing that her aid has prepared for her. The news of another dry well in the Delta project, in particular during financial results season, has spoilt her day. To make things more complicated, she will have to deal today with the head of an environmental ONG that head office asked her to meet and placate.
Orlando, Florida, at the Disney’s Animal Kingdom theme park, a group of school kids from Minneapolis gather around the Gigantic Tree of Life. The guide explains: “At an impressive 145 feet tall and 50 feet wide at its base, the Tree of Life is home to over 300 meticulously detailed animal carvings throughout its massive trunk, gnarling roots and outstretched branches—invoking the diversity, beauty and interconnected nature of earth’s many creatures.”4 The trip to Disney will be as close to nature as these kids will ever get, no mosquitoes, no malaria, as virtual as a computer video game; and in their minds may be as expendable. Around the corner, Florida Power and Light, puts another boiler online, as the heat of the summer gets in full swing, people turn their air conditioning to the max. Somewhere in the high seas, another giant oil tanker makes its way from the south.
In Vienna, the oil ministers are pounding at the meeting table as they try the impossible, to keep the world thirsty for oil at high prices, while back home, impoverished citizens keep adding grains to a sand pile that will eventually collapse.
In Washington, in the congressional hearing on the White House's candidate to head the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), the well-worn arguments are replayed: the environmentalists charge the government of the largest enforcement rollback in agency history, while the business community's lobbyists argue that the agency's meddling and enforcement tactics smack of Big Brother.
On any given day, scenes much like the ones above, happen all over the world. Earth is a rotating paradox. On the one hand, full of the success of the best of human endeavour, and on the other, suffering from the consequences of the inability of the human species to care for an important portion of its members. And even though we have come a long way in terms of progress, large portion of society tend to believe that we are worse off.5
As time goes by, and the argument about man’s relation with nature becomes a central one to the type of development society aspires, the discussions become more passionate and the arguments ever more refined and elaborated. Intelligent people, otherwise well mannered, become enraged at the mere mention of the next person’s differing opinion, and the objectivity one tends to associate with scientific method becomes religious fanaticism.
The conservation activists will have us believe that, if we allow the modern economy to continue exploiting the resources of the planet in what they qualify as wasteful exploitation, our world will become a gigantic landfill under an unstoppable global climate change. They argue, mustering a growing body of evidence, that spoiling the environment we are supposed to safeguard for future generations, systematically tinkering with the genetic code as we are beginning to do, and such other interference in God's original plan, is a sure path to extinction.
The other side of the argument, as most libertarian economists, captains of industry and idealistic scientists will tell you, is that there is no incontrovertible scientific evidence to support such assertions. That, one way or other, the human species has always been modifying the environment, for the better, they will add. Furthermore, they claim that even if we accept that to protect nature in the broader context is a good idea, we do not know enough about the cost-benefits involved to make educated choices, let alone the right decisions. They argue that in the end, technology, given the right incentives, will always come up with solutions to the problems, or at least good compromises.
When one enters into this fray, it will appear that the Manichean nature of the arguments forces one into one of two possible roles. On the one side, that of a short-sighted capitalist scoundrel, or on the other, that of a sandal-wearing idealist; stereotypes that, although a useful shorthand, are but a barrier to meaningful dialogue. The mixture of politics, economics and plain prejudice involved in the discussion of the significant issues, makes it an ideal breeding ground for blind fanaticism, and we already know where that has led the human species in the past.
It is easy to be controversial when referring to our relationship with the world in which we live, but is it the best way to finding the synthesis necessary to go to the next stage? Will the future generations look upon us as the founding fathers of their present or will they
look at our current debate the way we look at theologians from the Middle Age discussing the sex of angels?
To begin to prepare the ground for the harvesting of the necessary answers to these complex issues, one needs to start challenging some or all of the prejudices – call it knowledge if you will - that we have about the subject.
Throughout the centuries, western society has developed an anthropocentric view of the universe. We believe that we are either the pinnacle of the evolutionary ladder or God’s final masterpiece - depending on one's religious persuasion. Because of this, we think that either we are entitled to use and abuse the resources of planet Earth, or that we have the divine task of preserving God’s paradise as it was bequeathed to us. Those positions have no way to meet, no way to establish a dialogue.
What if we look at the human species as just another part of nature itself and not its centre or its steward? James Lovelock, the author of the Gaia Theory, proclaims that the planet behaves as a single, self-regulating living system in such a way as to maintain the conditions that are suitable for life. In Lovelock's view, humanity is peripheral, though dangerous, to the life systems of the planet. Our anthropocentric concern is to preserve the earth as we want it. Lovelock believes that ideas of stewardship are absurd and dangerous "hubris": "We'll never know enough…The answer is hands off".6
An extension of this systemic view is that since humans are part of the whole, so are our actions. Those who would go forward and cut down the rainforest to manufacture furniture are part of the system. Those who dedicate their lives to defending the forest are also a part of the same system. Who is to say which behaviour is the anomalous one? Even the act of arguing may be supposed to be part of the system.
But, does it matter? Evolutionary biologists estimate that during life’s history some few billion different species have evolved at one time or another. Only a few tens of millions exist today. Extinction is so natural an event that as David M. Raup once wrote, “to a first approximation, everything is extinct”7. This fatalistic view of the world contends that “great earthquakes, forest fires and mass extinctions are all merely the expected large fluctuations that arise universally in nonequilibrium systems. To avoid them, one would have to alter the laws of nature”.
By some evolutionary quirk or divine intervention, we became sentient beings. Even if we are just cogs in some celestial machine, we cannot avoid thinking that we have the means to choose our present and by implication our species’ future. We have come to this point in our history by a random, or inevitable, combination of blunders and successes. We
aspire to continue moving forward; to do that, we count on the fact that our ideas, our one definitive competitive advantage and our worse enemy, will take us through.
Our capacity to build upon, modify and transform ideas, have taken us out of the caverns and into space. The force of those ideas has made the human species grow and thrive, though with worrying inequalities. The ideas that give us hope of curing cancer also scare us to death because of the likelihood of creating a genetic elite. The possibility of giving everybody on the planet access to electricity creates the potential of modifying the climate. Each idea poses a reward and a cost, and it is our fate to keep on choosing.
But to survive and to thrive should not be a privilege of the privileged. The human species, it is believed, originated in Africa and spread to all corners of the world. We are, regardless of the economic development, part of the same gene pool, and we all have the same drive, and some will argue the same right to transcend.
Hence, we reach a crucial question: are the environmentalists morally right in arguing that the rest of the world has to put on hold its long-delayed development because what is left untouched of nature would otherwise be lost to humanity or because we need to be conscious of the rights of the future generations?
If the answer to the question is yes and we all have a God-given right to a better life, while preserving a semblance of paradise, who can then rise to the task of apportioning the world, without resorting to brute force? What are we to say to the millions of people for whom Nature is the squalor in which they live and die? Do we shrug at them, while we argue on the effect caused by modern society on the environment in the suburbs of our biggest cities?
More than one billion people have not reached the bottom rung of the energy ladder yet, while more than three billion people are just meeting minimum energy requirements8. This energy gap is an irresistible force for change. Like in Nature, this sort of inequality will find a way of sorting itself out. It is up to society to choose whether the result is a useful and constructive equilibrium or a destructive chaos.
As the head of the oil company rides back to her offices, after a meeting where the head of the NGO complained that not enough was being done to protect the environment around her company´s exploration project, she feels uneasy. She is annoyed at the thought that the well-heeled environmentalist does not seem to know or understand that it is oil that pays for his budget and the projects he is promoting for the protection of the rainforest and the Delta.
She shrugs away these thoughts from her mind and asks her driver to hurry as they speed by the corner where a young Pemon girl, with a new-born in her arms, is begging for money.
Coromoto will spend the night under a bridge somewhere, together with others from her tribe who have made the long trip northwards in search of a better life or tricked by a human trafficker. Does she dream of being back in the jungle where she was born? Does she miss the loud silence of the green monster at night? Has she traded the heritage of her race for a life she is not equipped to face? Will she even go back if she could?
