The Cost of Information

Tonight the owner of the sale and lease of land being negotiated with the mining corporation will be hosting an informational meeting to discuss local ramifications and who knows what else. Isn't it interesting that the owner - not the mining company - is being so helpful to the corporation? What a sweet gesture of compliance and sharing she has shown to the Company. What a helper! What a community member!

I may be pissed, but it's true; the mining companies don't need to do PR when the locals will take - and generate - all the heat for them.

In 5 years, when the landowner has been screwed by they mining company (a very common thing, evidently), I wonder what kind of regrets won't be discussed in an informational meeting. When the wells dry up, and the air is filled with carcinogenic particulate that gives my children and the children attending school in town asthma and increased risk for lung cancer, what kind of info meeting will she be hosting? When the trucks have wrecked the county roads and cracked the foundations of old farmhouses and killed dogs and cats and many other mammals haplessly crossing roads that used to be deserted, what kind of info meeting will we attend then? When the relatively toxic farming practices used to monocrop GM corn and soy are exchanged for hundreds of known carcinogens leaching into the groundwater after the sand processing plant is finished, and we are all drinking unknown and untested chemicals in our water, what kind of info meeting will be hosted then? And when all the farming families and folks I know don't move because we can't afford to, and we have to work outside in a toxic stew to grow our food, what kind of info meeting will I be attending?

The cost of civilization and colonization is not information. It is destruction and risk and suffering. Only human-scale community will endure because only we can ask the questions that remind everyone else of our shared humanity and the connections to our individual webs of life and living. I'm rooting for life, but in the mean time I'm fighting as best I can against destruction.