A New Future is Possible for New Brunswick…
From the Editor….
Stephanie Kelley
Strange days here in little ol’ New Brunswick. The recent confrontation in Rexton has turned the eyes of the world-wide Frack-Off movement upon us.
We are at a crossroads in time….shall we move into a bold new future where we humans finally take care of each other and our precious one and only planet, or will we continue down the path of fossil fuel death and destruction?
Every day the media reports some new petro-chemical disaster….whether it is a broken pipeline, oil spill, massive flooding, destroyed water supplies…the list goes on and on. But rather than demand change we still allow multi-national oil and gas corporations to call the shots.
When these companies destroy a river, or the Gulf of Mexico, or an entire water source, they merely pay a small fine… a pittance, really, in the grand scheme of things…which is a fraction of the cost of the damage they’ve done or over-all profits they’ve reaped.
And then their obscenely over-paid executives skip off into the sunset, leaving us peons to try to rebuild our lives in the wake of their devastation.
Tony Hayward was the CEO of BP Oil during the Gulf oil spill disaster that claimed 11 lives and has since spewed 20 to 100 million gallons of toxic oil into the Gulf of Mexico. This tragedy is not over by a long shot….it may not be in the news so much any more but this oil spill has utterly destroyed a way of life on the Gulf Coast and an entire eco-system, and its effects on our planet as a whole have yet to be realized. He said this on May 31, 2010:
“We’re sorry for the massive disruption it’s caused their lives. There’s no one who wants this over more than I do. I would like my life back.”
Oh, poor, poor, poor beleaguered Tony….he really wanted to get back to his golf club or yacht or third vacation home in Majorca, I guess.
This is merely one example of the psychopathic attitude of multi-national oil corporations and their executives… they do not give a rat’s patootie about you and me. And if we continue to swallow their mendacious tales of jobs and prosperity and how we need oil, well, we’ll only have ourselves to blame when the world goes up in flames!
But back to New Brunswick. We don’t need to destroy our eco-system to bring prosperity into our province. The current government is slavering at the prospect of the pay-offs the gas companies are offering them to allow fracking….but how does this benefit the actual residents of the province?
The much vaunted promise of jobs is a laugh….these companies will bring in their own workers.
Someone will be pocketing a boat-load of money, but it won’t be us!
And what do we want money for anyway? Money does not actually exist…in our current world, money is issued as credit, backed by debt, loaned at interest, and is a form of social enslavement.
But….the way we’re allowing things to be run, we need money to live, or so we have been led to believe! Bear with me here…what do we really need when we say we want money?
Well, what we really need is food, water, clean air, our health, a home and security. Toys like gas guzzling SUVs and wide screen TVs are merely distractions for us to go into debt in order to obtain.
We can have all of the necessities of life by taking a step back from the fossil fuel fantasy and prospering by exploiting our natural resources by cooperating with the land.
Our young people would not have to leave rural New Brunswick if there was opportunity for them if they stayed….there is a growing world-wide movement to get back to our roots.
Sue Rickards is a visionary activist and educator who lives in New Brunswick. She recently published an op-ed piece in which she proposed a way to Reinvent Rural New Brunswick:
- Create a registry of abandoned farms or privately held land that the owners would allow to be farmed by others.
- Identify Crown Land that could be farmed and offer it to young people.
- Create an incentive program, connecting farmers with land and the resources for starting up a farm which initially serves local markets.
- Set up marketing and support mechanisms for small farmers and social enterprises so they can develop value-added food products and market them widely.
- Set up the infrastructure needed to move produce easily from farmer to consumer.
- Advertise this program nationally and internationally.
Want to reverse out-migration? Want to bring young families to rural communities? Want to improve health and promote prosperity? Want to reduce dependence on multi-national corporations? Want to manufacture products for which there will always be reliable markets?
Bring back the small farm and the generation of farmers who will seize the opportunity to extract health and wealth from the land!
