Fouling our own nest

Some generations ago, local cattlemen who used the grazing leases along the Thompson and Little Thompson rivers built various holding pastures there to facilitate autumn critter gathering. By the time I became familiar with the area by hunting cattle for more recent owners, the pens were no longer in use. Posts had rotted down, but the barbed wire was still there in the form of rusty coils hidden in the grass, strung randomly, and periodically rearranged by bumbling cows.

With its old-growth pines and green meadows and rippling waters, it was a perfect piece of Montana mountain country to explore on an autumn day, except for being marred by human carelessness. If I inadvertently let my horse step into that wire, there was a good likelihood of blood splatter from either the horse, myself, or both. I’d ride along muttering imprecations against the folks who couldn’t spend a couple of days cleaning up their messes.

This abandoned wire was surely a minor problem in the grand scheme of things. Nevertheless, I think it makes a metaphor for human life on this Earth: We just can’t seem to stop fouling our own nest.

I suppose this particular mess could have been solved if the DNRC had somehow enforced a bunch of regulations about abandoned barbed wire in the backcountry, but common sense says there should be no need for that. The people who abandoned the wire should just do the right thing. Never happened, of course, and never will.

In the midst of continuing grim news about inflation and gas prices, the blame game that passes for leadership in both the private and public sectors is going full tilt. The oil moguls are blaming President Biden for gas prices, saying it’s his environmental-regulatory agenda that causes them so much trouble they have to raise prices. The President, of course, blames the oil industry for price gouging.

Personally, I have no sympathy for the oil industry nor any other industry that leaves a mess. Examples abound wherein industry devastates an area or a resource and then sticks the citizenry for the nasty results. This has been happening since at least as far back as the Romans, who polluted Spanish countryside (and no doubt Spanish lives in the form of slavery) to mine the easy gold that artificially shored up the economy of the Roman Empire 2,000 years ago. That’s probably where was first coined the phrase “But it creates jobs!”

On the other hand, while I agree with the idea of regulation – lots of it – to prevent or at least repair these messes, the reality is that even the most stringent regulations seem puny against the scale of the task. Even worse, more regulation eventually hits a point of diminishing returns, because it’s a futile attempt to change human nature.

One alternative might be good old-fashioned shame heaped on in bucketsful until those Gucci-shod petroleum CEOs finally understand that fouling America’s Gulf Coast, for instance, with the residue of a hundred years of drilling and refining, is a heinous crime and a mortal sin, and the cost of repair or future prevention should hit those tax-dodging jet-setters right square in the personal-rather-than-corporate pocketbook with no way out of it. Ramming another pipeline across U.S .farmland just so Canadians can sell some oil is another example. So is what’s left of the asbestos mess in Libby. Add Butte and Anaconda to the endless list. Shame, shame on those who perpetrate it.

Until industry develops a conscience, stringent regulation is fine with me.

Still, these recent gas prices really bite.

Ron Rude, Plains