On an hot summer evening at the Portland Convention Center, concerned citizens turned out to protest Ambre Energy - an Australian company trying to get licenses to transport coal from Montana and Wyoming to South Korean and China. I was part of this protest and we stood in the sun, wearing red t-shirts and chanting "No Coal!" .
Ambre Energy is proposing the use of trains and barges, but the protesters were standing against AE's use of uncovered trains to transit coal through the Columbia River Gorge. There are a host of environmental risks to this method of transport but from the anemic turnout of protesters, it seems unlikely that Ambre Energy will be nothing more than challenged.
The lack of protester turnout could be because of apathy, or maybe it's because as Carl Marx said, "Money is the pimp, between man's needs and the object, between his life and his means of life"." Perhaps more people want the coal to flow, because they want to maintain the capitalist cannibalism that has our world trapped in a death spiral. So then we have here an example of class struggle where the developing world is moving forward at a pace that nearly outstrips the west and in a few years they will undoubtedly surpass our productive capacity, and of course our rapacious greed as well. The developing world looks at the industrialized colonial powers of old that used many of them up on their way to riches and now they want theirs. .
Then there is how Weber might see it. If "we are animals oriented toward meaning, and meaning as we've seen is subjective and not objective " as Kenneth Allan says of Weber's Theory of rationalization; then the only value seen in the developing world is material well being. The real problem I see is that there are people of conscience who will be affected by this quest for wealth, but as of yet not enough awareness of the magnitude of what will soon be happening. Our idea of wealth is value laden toward getting what we need now.
