The fossil fuel industry has hijacked a perfectly good word to cover their destructions.
Wendy Lynn Lee
wrote for The Wrench, 5 December 2013,
CADAVER COSMETICS: THE AESTHETICS OF “SUSTAINABILITY”,
The following is an excerpt from a forthcoming article, “Sustainable Wasteland,” scheduled to be published in 2014—but more importantly, it inaugurates a new series devoted to dismantling the concept of “sustainability” as the greenwashing masquerade of an industry that would convince us that “reclamation” means planting grass and laying down straw where 100 year old trees used to stand, that painting natural gas pipeline forest green is forest restoration. I have coined the phrase cadaver cosmetics to signal that what underlay the”landscape architecture” of the fracking industry’s notion of “sustainability” is nothing but powder on the face of a corpse that was once an ecosystem.
Some refer to the effort to conceal a bad deal as if it were a good one as “lipstick on a pig.” But in that case, we’re at least invited to imagine a living porcine as opposed to an asphalt parking lot where a living and vibrant habitat for vegetation and wildlife used to be.
Not so with the dispersed industrialization of the natural gas industry. Painting pipeline green, planting shrubbery to conceal frack pads on state forest lands—this all may be the “new” “aesthetic” of sustainability. But fact is, a better image might be lipstick on a dead pig—or even better a dead planet.
And that’s just the introduction. The actual article includes things like this:
The “sustainable remedy” proposed by industry to avoid paying up to 3.5 billion dollars for the actual restoration of the river ecosystem is to offer fisherman a trade of their toxic fish for “clean” fish redeemable at a local grocery. Besides the obvious absurdity of this “solution,” namely that it will achieve nothing with respect to restoring the river,
That is the industry that proposes to drill under our rivers and wetlands, into our aquifer recharge zones, and through our property for their profit in Houston, Texas, and Juno Beach, Florida.
-jsq
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