What can we learn from Australian plans to dig up the heart of Borneo?
Every news story like the one below is further confirmation of my speculations about what is driving human behavior. Such "inhuman" behavior can only be traced back to inhuman root causes. Such complete dispassion can be found in the laws of physics. Humans and their collective creations - like societies, economic systems and corporations - are thermodynamic engines pure and simple. Finding energy and opportunity to fuel our growth is virtually the only thing that matters, sentimentality be damned.
Just because such collectivities are made up of individual humans we should not make the mistake of thinking they are merely agglomerations of individuals, running on bent and twisted versions of individual human feelings and values. Instead they are emergent organisms in their own right - beholden not to the morals we apply to each other, but instead to the execution of the unrecognized, universal driver that underlies all change in the universe: the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The discovery and dissipation of energy gradients to enable survival and growth applies to all organisms at all levels - from bacteria through plants, animals (including humans), societies and all human social constructs.
The further we travel from the individual into the collective, the less the personal niceties of morality and empathy apply. When we arrive at the level of the energy corporation, the thermodynamic driver of its behavior is laid bare - raw, naked and largely untouchable by our personal grief and outrage.
We may rage against the dying of the light all we wish - that has never prevented night from falling.
Aussies to dig at the heart of Borneo as coal projects threaten nature
Australian companies are pushing ahead with plans to construct open-cut coalmines in a conservation area of Borneo described by the World Wildlife Fund as "one of the planet's richest treasure troves".
Brisbane-based Cokal announced it has secured funding to pursue its Bumi Barito Mineral joint venture, from which it plans to mine 200 million tonnes of coking coal over a 10-year period.
The BBM project, covering 15,000 hectares of forest, is one of five coalmines Cokal hopes to develop in the remote north of Indonesia's Central Kalimantan province, where it has permits covering 62,000 hectares of land, part of which falls within the boundaries of the Heart of Borneo - a 220,000 square kilometre area said to be the largest remaining expanse of trans-boundary tropical forest in Southeast Asia.
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