What is #26: Fossil Fuels
10-sec gratitude routine
What’s of us after we die? Every person aspires and believes in something different, but for sure for sure (unless you’re a megalomaniac millionaire), our body will end up becoming fossil fuel. Or at least that’s what happened to animals and plants from millions of years ago: dinosaurs became mostly crude oil, and plants became mostly gas and coal.
Thousands of years ago, fossil fuels were already used in some parts of the world—check what the Han dynasty was doing with natural gas—, but with the Industrial Revolution, the demand of coal skyrocketed to keep machines running, then with the introduction of the internal combustion machine it was the time for oil, and then came the time for gas, as it burns more cleanly.
Concerning cleanliness, in the early 1800s, cities like Manchester, Liverpool, and Glasgow, had an average life expectancy at birth sometimes as low as 16-25 years, due to pollution, lack of sanitation and dangerous working conditions associated to industrialization. “Live fast, die young” those days did not evoke any image of Amy Winehouse or Janis Joplin.
Horrible! But instead of saying sorry, paying reparations, and changing our line of action, humanity created a bunch of “solutions” so that fossil fuels could continue burning at the same or higher rate without killing the labor force. Let’s remember that when we’re told about techno-fixes.
Anyway, easy access to fossil fuels was done, and people started drilling in all ways to get them. In the case of oil and gas, first a “conventional” hole in the ground, then drilling horizontally, hydraulically, pumping acid into the ground, with ultrasonic waves, from platforms on the deep sea, etc. In the case of coal, with a bunch of surface and underground mining techniques.
The weird thing is, burial sites are meaningful and sacred for most of us, but everyday we drill the burial sites of dinos and dino-plants, make stuff with their remnants—some of them we rub (most beauty creams) and wear against our skin (our polyester clothes)—, and burn the rest to feed our machines and kill other humans. We show no respect, no wonder many of these dino-products make us sick.
So here’s my suggestion, because ranting without acting is just annoying: We’ll dedicate 10 seconds of gratitude to dinos every time we use any of their remnants.
And since dino gratitude will probably take a big part of our day, not to be too grateful, we’ll reduce our use of dino-products until we stop buying them at all, replacing them with 100% renewable products. This includes fuels, beauty and cleaning products, electricity, foods, and clothes.
I’m very sure that regardless of our believes and aspirations, this plan of action will do something good to our soul.
