Technological Obsolescence

Technological Obsolescence

A summary arising from an "Elevate" workshop exploring environmental concerns:

Why do you imagine that the privilege of license to extract, refine and sell oil should be a presumed right? Those who made rotary dial phones, typewriters, who mined mercury, who divined animal entrails, food tasters, made sash windows, who lit theatres with magnesium powder and streets with gas lights, who collected the "night soil", pressed vinyl records and hand-cranked cinema projectors, brewed beer in wooden barrels, shaved their faces with obsidian stones, who hand-fired clay bricks and cut stone to build houses and cut trees by hand, who cobbled streets and built stage coaches, who had to find a bush, an outhouse to keep clean, who crouched over fires stirring a soup made from their own garden produce, who believed 64k was big enough for anyone, who hand-made chain mail, who scribed ideas on tablets of clay and bought wine in skins, who lit great fires in the stone castles of Europe, who spent months travelling from China to Italy to trade goods, who ploughed fields with ox-drawn ploughs, who fought the plague with spells and potions, whose idea of weapon of choice comprised a steel blade or an assemblage of bent wood and animal guts, who built hand-set printing presses, who rode furiously between staging posts to make sure you got your letter within three weeks, whose epic hand-written transcriptions bespangled libraries, who built wooden ships and wove great sails, who boiled whale carcasses for lamp oil, who soldered shut steel cans for arctic exploration, who supplied sheep skin and tapestries to close off window openings, whose opium trade was their central economic activity, who collected rainwater to survive and wove cloth by hand, who were forced to attend only live performances because that was all there were, who made pencils made of lead and quill pens of split feathers, and those who once shaped the spectacles of the emperor - all have gone, not because they were inherently bad, but because something better, cleaner, safer, more efficient came along.
And so it will be with oil sands.