S Sorrensen
Rock Valley. Tuesday, 4.10pm
You cannot trust a corporation.
I motor past the Rock Valley post office in my Superoo – a Subaru with super powers. (It flies.) It’s a very small post office. Behind it, the fertile flanks of Leycester Creek are sprouting silky oaks, flooded gum, hoop pines and a few cattle.
I pull the Superoo to the side of the road, stopping near a silky oak I have known for decades. Hello Silky.
It’s flush with first flowers. A white sedan whizzes by, so close to the Superoo, it rocks. (Invisibility can be a problematic super power for a car.)
Rock Valley, a few kilometres north of Lismore, is where Metgasco (a corporation) is planning to conduct seismic testing next month, part of its eternal quest for carbon-based profit. This is understandable; it’s what corporations do. That’s how we made them.
Some time ago, when the world was wild and limitless, humans created corporations, to harvest the infinite resources. But that was many financial years ago. Then humans, drunk on the wine of wealth, gave corporations rights that once only belonged to people. Big mistake. Now the creation controls the creators.
Metgasco wants to drill for gas in Rock Valley (or anywhere else for that matter). Humans who live in Rock Valley and the areas around it, do not want that. Polluted air, water and soil is not compatible with human life, or any life for that matter. Corporations may be carbon-based, but are not a life form.
If you’re human, you don’t want this activity, because you have a heart. A heart that beats to the natural rhythms, a heart that swells to the first flowers of spring, a heart that aches when children suffer.
Humans know now the world has its limits. They don’t want to destroy it just so shareholders can make a buck and buy a bank.
You cannot trust a corporation. They don’t stop to breathe in the blossom-scented air. They don’t smell the rain on hot bitumen. They breathe and smell only money. They have bottom lines, not babies; profit projections not planetary responsibilities. But I can forgive them. Because that’s what corporations do.
You can’t trust most politicians, because they have sold their human soul to corporations. They believe in the corporate delusion that business is government and rich people can get to heaven. Ha!
Money corrupts, absolutely.
The first drops from a gypsy storm rolling in from Mackellar Range fall on my head and iPad.
Some local councillors understand that the common wealth is for sharing not for looting; that the planet is for nurturing not pillaging; that water is more precious than dividend (despite the mayor’s perplexing decision on water fluoridation).
But Thomas George (state) and Kevin Hogan (federal) have absolutely failed in their responsibilities to humanity. I cannot forgive them. They know better.
The rain is falling harder now. I close my iPad after taking a photo. It doesn’t react well to water. But humans do. So I stand in the rain, near my favourite Rock Valley silky oak. A heavy mist descends and blankets the road. (Luckily, my Superoo has x-ray vision.)
A silence, as eerily quiet as George’s and Hogan’s protestations on our behalf, fills this ancient valley.
I have no faith that the same governments that took us to war in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Syria; the same blokes who push the first peoples from their land for miners, who put children in jail, who reduce governance to a rubber stamp for global business deals, have any idea how to live on a planet.
Only people understand.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
