Sept. 29 - This One’s for the Tree Huggers

People Huggers are welcome too.

It’s mind-blowing the impact that education can have. In the past few weeks the concept of sustainable living for me has gone from a healthy and wise option to what I perceive to be a necessity. I came into the program largely ignorant of the dire state our world is in – for example, the fact that we have used up all the natural resources needed to sustain the world’s population and are now digging into resources so deeply that the earth won’t be able regenerate them in order to keep us at the living standards we currently enjoy, let alone keep all of us humans alive and the swollen population growing at the same rate. An analogy I liked was the idea of the earth as an apple tree. For a long time, we picked the apples when they were available, and the tree grew more apples – it was more or less mutually beneficial, and certainly not devastating to the tree. Now we’ve begun digging into the trunk, and the tree’s capacity to grow apples is being diminished.

We are using oil faster than it can possibly be found, so unless we “change our ways” we will ultimately hit a huge oil crash; when our stores of oil run out and the oil we’re finding doesn’t even begin to support the life-styles we’ve grown accustomed to. You’ve probably heard this before, but if everyone on the planet consumed at the current rate the U.S. is consuming (food, products, electricity, etc, most of which is greatly affected by oil through transportation or otherwise) we would need 5 and a half earths to keep everyone alive. And that’s just the average. On average, an American citizen is using five and a half the amount of resources that would be allotted to him/her if we were to parcel out everything evenly. That’s pretty impressive.
And that’s just looking at the earth as a bundle of resources for human use. The truth is, humans are just one species on the planet. Our ability to self-reflect and our subsequent position at the top of the food chain (through agricultural, industry, technology, etc) may separate us from other species, but it doesn’t make us indispensable. We could literally wipe ourselves out by over-using what keeps us alive, but the earth will still be around. We don’t need to save the trees. We need to save ourselves (and keeping plenty of trees for the journey wouldn’t hurt…)

I heard that the earth goes through cycles of warmth and cold over massive periods of time (the age of dinosaurs and the ice age, for example). I wondered for a long time (admittedly without really searching for a solution) whether the warming that most scientists agree that we’re experiencing was just another natural cycle, or whether human emissions were significantly affecting our climate. I figured our emissions must have some effect, because it’s undeniable that we’ve been pumping more chemicals into the water and air in the last several decades than we have collectively in human history prior to 1900. Finally I was introduced to the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), which has issued assessment reports in 1990, 1992, 1995, 2001, and the latest, “Climate Change 2007”. The reports indicate that human activity has indeed altered the climate beyond the natural cycles of climate, particularly in the last 50 years or less. (If you want to check out the IPCC, you can go to www.IPCC.ch. It was set up by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program.) So I’m looking into tracking down actual excerpts from this report and into what the implications of human-induced climate change are – I know it goes beyond a few degrees a year – it affects the way crops behave (did you know that agriculture as a business in North America boasts the greatest use of fossil fuel, far outreaching even the total use of fuel in the U.S. military?), the way oceans and weather behaves (lots of prayers/thoughts going out to Texas!) etc. etc… I’m a baby in the world of science, agriculture, environmentalism, fossil fuels, human sustainability… the old adage about learning more and knowing less seems to be holding true… I feel more naïve and uncultured than I did before I ventured out again… I suppose that’s appropriate. May we never cease to encounter people/places/ideas that bring that familiar (albeit uncomfortable) flush of not-knowing-‘enough’.