Digging for dollars: When natural resource extraction removes wealth from the local economy rather than building it.
We're trying out a new audio overview of our long-form essays this week in THE BEE using Google's "Deep Dive" podcast.
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Nova Scotia stands at a crossroads, staring down the barrel of yet another short-sighted resource extraction dream. Uranium mining—like so many other ill-fated ventures before it—tempts with the promise of economic transformation, but history and logic tell a different story. The reality? Commodities are a fool’s game, a boom-and-bust cycle that shackles a region to global market whims rather than empowering it with self-sufficiency, resilience, and lasting prosperity.
To dig into the ground, extract what is valuable, and sell it off until nothing remains is not a strategy of builders, nor of those truly invested in the shape of things to come. It is the act of men who assume their fortune justifies the correctness of their actions. But prosperity built on depletion is not prosperity at all—it is a brief, hollow moment of affluence bought at the expense of those yet to be born.
ORIGINAL POST:
Digging Ourselves Into a Hole: The Predictable Scam of Rural Resource Hype
Yes!!! For sure. We should always be open to talking about our opportunities, new ideas and technologies, new ways of looking at things, and changing our minds when the facts change.
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