No clear cut answer
Mountains will be mined for lithium, and the ocean floor will be dredged for cobalt. Should we just go back to horses and wind? How hard could it be? Everyone did it a little over a hundred years ago. Are we happier now? It’s a privileged idea, I know, but most of my ideas are. Should I pretend like I couldn’t survive without a car, TV, laptop, phone, and freezer?
We found a dead elk yesterday, strangled by a bit of wire that it probably picked up trying to get through a fence. Maybe it was trying to get out of someone’s horse corral, or the pasture that I just bought a quarter cow from, in my effort to feel better by eating local. Maggots poured out of the elk’s nose, and its eyes were gone. If I’d found it a few days sooner, maybe it wouldn’t have been fully wasted. Someone had sawed of the antlers. What would that person say about how they got those antlers? Maybe they snared the elk for the trophy, but to me it looked like the elk had struggled with that wire around his neck for a few days, until it had become impossible to take a big enough breath. Maybe he lost his last reserve of oxygen dodging a car on the road, to collapse just above the roadcut, for my wife to notice driving home from work.
I emailed the solar panel company, trying to get them to send someone back out here to look at their new proposed panel mounting location. They said it was too rocky, but the last person they sent out didn’t look at that exact spot as far as I know. Months after assessing our property, they drew a red circle around a clump of trees where they thought the panels would work better than the first spot they looked at. My father-in-law cut the trees down for us, now the company say it’s too rocky. I hope we didn’t clear cut a half-acre just for firewood.