While hunting, Jed strikes oil on his worthless swamp land. Assuming he has a permit for the firearm, was hunting in season and there are no issues with Fish and Game, before the oil company can purchase the land and cut Jed a check, the EPA must first examine the property damage caused by the spill. Penniless, Jed can't possibly afford the legal battle and isn't allowed to sell the oil to pay the outrageous fines. Attorneys for an oil company interesting in the property agree to represent him in what turns out to be a 15-year court battle. Forced to cap the well until the case is resolved, Jed battles a steady stream of lawsuits from environmental groups, one of which discovers a rare strain of mosquito larva roughly 500 feet from the first proposed derrick site. The property is zoned as a "protected watershed and sensitive wildlife habitat" and the case is dismissed before it reaches the Supreme Court.
Sunday, May 1, 2011
The Jed Clampett Time Travel Theory
Here's what would happen today if a poor mountaineer who could barely keep his family fed struck oil, courtesy of Place it on Lucky Dan:
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That's exactly what should happen. Humans were not made to rule the Earth, but contrary, evolved from it. It is our mother - would you pollute your mother?
ReplyDeleteI love The Energy Guru's comment above.
ReplyDeleteTo his mind (and he's not alone), human beings are interlopers on Mother Gaea, a pestilence that only despoils her natural perfection. The oil on Jed's land (if I can be so presumptuous as to claim that anyone can own even part of Mother Gaea) must remain untouched, lest it discomfit a rare mosquito larva. Jed's life, as well as that of his entire family, must necessarily be nasty, poor, brutish, and short, so that Mother Gaea can remain unpolluted by the hand of man, and mosquito larvae can flourish.
The Energy Guru, and other like him, are a species of self-loathing humans, whose true desire is that humanity disappear from the face of the Earth. They even have a movement, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement: http://www.vhemt.org/
You go first Energy Guru - the rest of us will be right behind you.