The environmental impact of a rush to claim land can be devastating. When people swarm to satisfy their desire for riches–and land gets in the way–the land usually suffers. The California Gold Rush in the mid-1800′s is a good case in point. Journalist Chris Bowman describes the scene:
“Opportunists swarming the Sierra Nevada like grasshoppers, rearranging its rivers and streams, choking them with mining debris, polluting them with everlasting mercury, scalping hillsides, denuding forests, overfishing, overhunting, overrunning meadows with livestock, introducing diseases, displacing native plants, ousting thousands of environmentally conscious American Indians and forever shattering the primeval stillness of the mountains.”
What would happen if there was a Moon Rush? Would we have learned that it does not pay to be careless about the environment? While it’s unlikely that we will displace native moon men and Martians by claiming land on distant worlds, what will be displaced or ruined forever by such a rush? What non-native objects, including bacteria and diseases, will be introduced? Can they be avoided? Can there be such a thing as an orderly rush? If moon development proceeds with unregulated use, we have learned nothing from the Gold Rush about our own destructive swarm behavior.
What Do You Think?
As you think about the coming Moon Rush, what do you think will happen? Will staking claims on the moon, or Mars, be left entirely to the most aggressive early birds or will there be policies in place for regulated use? Who will police space? The time to start thinking about these questions is now. Let it not be said by future generations that our space opportunists, like the Gold Rush miners of the previous millenium, were ecological invaders whose exploits still haunt the environment.
–Jan Nowak, CFA
