“Practically every environmental problem we have can be traced to our addiction to fossil fuels, primarily oil.” -Dennis Weaver
Oil is the foundation upon which the industrial civilization is built and around which it operates. So oil has to share some responsibility for all the environmental catastrophes occurring today.
There is a sanctity about earth. Even lifelong urban dwellers are revolted by lakes of oil, stacks of crunched automobiles, unclean air, stinking sewage systems, dying forests, ugly garbage dumps, and unswimmable lakes and rivers.
But what’s the cause of this? A polluted environment grows out of polluted consciousness. It’s like Gandhi said-there’s enough on earth for everyone’s need but not for everyone’s greed.
We have witnessed the air pollution in Mexico, the deadly aftermath of the Chernobyl accident in the Soviet Union, the destruction of the rainforests in Brazil, Swedish lakes dead from acid rain, and the horror of the chemical disaster in Bhopal, India. Wherever we look, we see a planet in trouble, a planet in need of spiritual healing. It’s not difficult to identify greed as a root cause of pollution as we briefly survey the state of the world’s ecological predicament.
Mountains of rubbish have become symbolic of people who have more than they need. This is especially true in the industrialized nations, where the typical resident uses 10 times more steel, 12 times more fuel, and 15 times more paper than a typical resident of the developing nations.