Here is a summary of where I am in my thinking at the moment.
The video below then gives one concrete example of it.
1) Fish are not aware of water, because they are in it all the time.
2) We human beings are not aware of (aspects of) our culture, because we are in it all the time. We are not aware that there could be anything different.
3) The short film below shows what happens when corporations are allowed to frack for gas.
3a) It is just one specific example of the wider cultural pattern.
4) The result of that fracking is: profits for the people who own and run the fracking companies; and costs to the people who live nearby, and to the natural environment/ecosystems.
4a) It is just one example of the wider cultural pattern.
5) It is the same cultural pattern that is responsible for: climate change, filling the Pacific Ocean with plastic, the flooding of New Orleans, the Fukushima explosion and the reaction to it, the LIBOR manipulation, the financial crisis, the issuing of money as debt (fiat money), the 1950s claims that “smoking does not give you cancer”, and so on…
5a) Emotionally you might call it a “lack of empathy” on the part of those reaping the profits. And a lack of whatever the opposite of empathy is (backbone? anger? action? self-belief? passion? ardour? rage? zeal?) on the part of those who bear the costs.
6) It has been going on for years. It is culturally embedded. We expect it to happen.
7) In the past it didn’t really matter because a) there were almost ‘infinite’ natural resources that could be ‘plundered’, b) their abundance gave high returns for low effort, c) the numbers of people taking them were small, and d) the costs/impacts on others (people and environment) were small.
8) Now the Earth is full. There are fewer resources to be taken, they are more difficult to get at, there are more people taking them, and the costs of taking them are higher. And more visible.
9) This is what is unsustainable about our culture. Not one particular technology or another, but the invisible elephant in the room: the very essence of the culture itself.
10) What then to do?
11) Item 5a shows the heart of the matter.
Here are some specific details on how all of this plays out in the field of fracking: