"It is a curious situation that the sea,..."

"...from which life first arose, should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself."
~ Rachel Carson, October 1960, Preface to the revised edition of "The Sea Around Us"

These words, written before the publication of Carson's "Silent Spring" and the birth of the "environmental movement," are 50 years old. Her concern at the time was the disposal of nuclear waste in the oceans. But the words also apply to the effects of our dependence on petroleum, or the impact of the human population on fish populations, or the accumulation of toxins from industrial sources, or the acidification of the oceans.

It isn't just the sea, it's also the land and the atmosphere. The soil, air, ocean sediments and the individual bodies of every living thing contain the evidence of an unsustainable lifestyle. A shifting baseline allows each generation the illusion of only a small environmental impact from what they do. That lifestyle and the cumulative degradation of the ecosystem are built on cheap energy.

But everything is self-limiting. Populations built on fragile systems for increasing carrying capacity crash when those systems break down. The more complicated the system, the more elements to fail and the more difficult to predict failure. With globalization, a healthy global economy and cheap energy cannot coexist. A human culture built on fossil fuels and a healthy global ecosystem cannot coexist. A human culture built on fossil fuels cannot live in peace with itself or the environment. We are self-limiting.

Setting aside all of the mythological oil deposits that would liberate us if we could only get conspirators out of the way, the world is running out of cheap oil. The easy "conventional" oil is getting scarce, so we're going to go farther and dig deeper and exploit oil formations such as shale oil and tar sands and deep offshore formations that weren't worth the trouble before. We'll be increasingly willing to risk ecological disasters. Those new sources won't drive the price of oil down--they're too expensive to exploit. They'll only keep oil in the tanks for a few more decades.

Concern for the environment is a luxury of the affluent. The poor can't afford to worry about where their energy comes from or whether or not the fish on their plate is from a population on the edge of extinction. The affluence that allows the most concern and rhetoric about "saving the planet" is the very thing destroying it. And the struggle to maintain affluence as energy becomes more expensive will destroy it faster. Ironically, the environmental degradation driven by cheap oil will now be accelerated by expensive oil.

Look no further than the Gulf of Mexico: a catastrophic injury to an ecosystem already pushed to its limits. We have the ecosystem weakened and vulnerable, and now we're plunging the sword deep into its heart.

But, as Carson writes, the oceans (the planet) will survive.

go on and the world will return to it's own way and it will be like we were never here.

Obviously they could do it better at this point.

Through those 50 years other technologies have come along and been pushed aside while the minders of the markets managed to block options in the name of achieving their Midas moment.

Their gold is now set to leave all else in ruins, even if temporary.

Good to be reading your work, it's been awhile.

K and R

I'm not really in the mainstream.

Paraphrasing...

"Save the Earth??? The Earth ain't goin nowhere... WE ARE!!! The Earth will be fine, we're just a surface nusiance. The Earth will shake us off like a bad case of fleas."

:shrug:

Video Here (8:03 min): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c&feature=related
:wow:

We need to try and move such idea into the mainstream. DU needs your voice!