A Midwinter’s Day Dream

Weekly Planet by Elizabeth Courtney
This article first appeared in the Sunday, January 9th edition of the Times Argus/Rutland Herald

The holiday season is so predictable that I usually don’t remember one year from the rest. But I will remember this as the year I encountered — like Dickens’ Scrooge — the three ghosts of the seasons past, present and future.

It all started, strangely enough, with a smart phone. Feeling the cold dark isolation of the winter solstice, I broke down and bought myself the latest in intelligent technology.

Home with my new gadget, I was immediately (be)friended by all the young people in my life curious to see this latest creation and eager to show me its many fantastic features, ranging from an onboard GPS system and 50 thousand applications to the Web and voice recognition-created text. Oh, and don’t forget — it also serves as a phone.

My tutorials were exhausting. I soon fell into a troubled slumber. I dreamed that my new smart phone had been stolen by the mad Toad of Toad Hall in Kenneth Grahame’s “The Wind in the Willows.” 

Toad was tearing down the highway in his motorcar while texting and extolling the wonders of the new industrial technology. “With oil, I can go everywhere, live anywhere and have it all, at virtually no cost!” he exclaimed in a drunken frenzy of delight.

I awakened briefly, disturbed that my stolen future was in Toad’s motorcar.

I drifted back to sleep and dreamed again of Toad, a sad and forlorn Toad with my smart phone in his hand. He was standing next to his motorcar, which was out of gas. There was no more gas to be found, anywhere. Toad was being ticketed by a state trooper, with a hefty fine levied to help recoup the true cost of running the motorcar for 150 years. The fine covered all the oil in the world being burned up plus the consequences of the carbon emissions from its combustion. These included a rise of 2 degrees in the Earth’s temperature and the resulting weird weather events — flooding, drought, heat waves and severe storms. Toad’s fine was $400 million. 

Toad cried, “Where will I go, how will I live? I have nothing but a smart phone to my name. I can’t pay the true cost of oil!”

I surfaced from the dream long enough to notice the outdoor temperature had risen to 55 degrees. The three feet of snow that had fallen the day before was all gone. To escape that sad news, I fell asleep again. 

Toad appeared in my dream of the future. He was mining rare earths, the essential elements in the fabrication of high-tech gadgets — neodymium for microphones, europium for LED screens, erbium for fiber optics, cerium for semiconductors and lanthanum for the precious hybrid motorcar. 

Toad knew that without these rare earth elements, there would be no hybrid motorcar.

His digging was wreaking havoc with nearby lakes and streams, putting polluted dust into the air and gobbling up farmlands and forestland. Toad again had my smart phone in hand and was texting while digging as he made deals to purchase the mining rights to more rare earth deposits around the world. 

He shouted, “Who cares that oil is gone? With these rare earth elements I can go everywhere, live anywhere — and I can make a fortune selling them. I must have MORE rare earths!

Like Scrooge, I woke up a changed person, eager to warn my young friends and family of the trauma resulting from a slavish addiction to the inventions of the oil age or the gadgets of a future hinged on another finite natural resource, rare earth elements. 

Firm in my conviction, I reached for my new smart phone and quickly called my daughter, using the voice recognition feature, as I ran to the garage to hop into the hybrid ... Oops!

Elizabeth Courtney is the executive director of the Vermont Natural Resources Council, Vermont’s leading statewide environmental organization. She can be reached at ecourtney@vnrc.org.