Position Paper

Technology will not come to the rescue to resolve our nation’s pressing needs for energy, clear air, clean water, or a secure food supply. While it is complicated to take inventory of the biosphere, the concept that it is finite is easy to grasp. We reached Peak Oil almost 40 years ago, and our next options for energy source exploitation use nearly as much energy to get to and as much capital for processing as the actual sales themselves. Development in China and India brings onboard nearly 3 billion people aspiring to the lifestyle of middle class America, which already uses up more “Earth” per capita than any other nation.

The dangerous question we are faced with is a nightmare scenario in which everyone keeps wanting more, more material goods, more high-food-chain diets, and more energy-consuming activities? Capitalism tells us that the market will supply satisfaction and meet demands of consumers, but we can no longer assume that they are rational, and they have certainly not been driven to act in the best interests of the global community.

The American “way of life” stems from the reckless natural resource exploitation of colonialism. Before our Independence, we were a cash-cow of raw materials to be sent back to an island Empire long-depleted of timber, furs, and minerals in quantities comparable to that of this “virgin” continent. The Europeans saw the Americas as virginal because they had yet to be exploited for the purposes envisioned by these war-mongering machines of industrialization that sought to conquer the world. Set on instant gratification in all sectors, teeming out of a blind faith in our infant nation, we grew our food so intensively that it kicked up a Dust Bowl of loess. We planned (rather, did not plan) sprawling cities that cover agricultural land and create a labyrinthine suburbia made for private transportation without mass-transit systems in order to satiate the auto industry’s desire for customers. We grew our economy fast and big, a fat piggy bank of waste that took industrial products from cradle-to-grave instead of from cradle-to-cradle, because we foolishly believed that we would never run out of anything. Across the nation – be it in Cancer Alley Louisiana, Allentown Pennsylvania, Detroit, Chicago, or the Appalachian coalfields – our health is for sale to the lowest bidder; if you want to set up the industry, we will make sure that your heaviest pollution is concentrated in areas of economic poverty and deprivation. Recreation, pastimes, the joys of a “developed” (ethically or unethically) culture, these things that we think of when we seek to define ourselves as a group, are largely generated from eco-gluttonous activities… Hotdogs and hamburgers in the summertime, taking cross-country vacations to the beaches or mountains, our constant connection to computers, the internet, television, and phone lines that braid across the amber waves of grain. Purple mountains majesty every day are sliced flat to power our iPods and Xbox 360s. All of these things will be gone in the coming land, water, and energy shortage as the world population strains already fragile per-capita allotments.

To save ourselves – and the world – from the environmental degradation that is every day ebbing closer to an irreversible tipping point, we must stop the use of fossil fuels, which are non-renewable in the scales of our lifetimes, and decrease demand for energy (redefining the quality of life of the middle class) so that combined solar, wind, geothermal, and renewable biomass can have a chance at powering the needs of a world making the demographic shift from “developing” to fully developed. We must have better land planning to fill in gray and brown fields in the urban landscape, the dream of a McMansion and half-acre yard must be abolished in favor of space-efficient apartment-style living as seen in Japan’s major cities.

Arable land must be devoted to supplying food to the population in a way that preserves it’s quality and nutrient value for years to come. People will eat low and local – low on the food chain to maximize solar energy, and locally to minimize energy wasted in transportation and storage. Water must be conserved; never again will we turn a sprinkler on an artificial lawn in the Southwest, never again will we waste 2500 gallons of water to produce a pound of beef. We will retire the notion of greed and reduce our consumption and materialism, using recyclable resources, recycling for textile fibers, composting and sending biomass back to farms, and reducing the demand for petroleum products, also known as plastics.

No longer will we use 25mpg sitting alone in a hunk of metal on an asphalt highway. All transportation will be done to maximize the efficiency of the chosen fuel per rider; when traveling must be done, it will be done en masse. The need for commuting will be eliminated by mixed-use infrastructure that puts people living near their workplaces. Buildings will be constructed with green roofs, grey water recycling, and off-grid energy systems incorporated into their initial designs.

This should go without saying, but reducing the population growth rate is mandatory in allowing for any of these measures to actually make a difference.

If we do not change our lifestyles now, there will be nothing – NO TECHNOLOGY – that can save us from becoming the harbingers of a global doomsday. The climate will continue to change, the planet will continue to warm (despite the fact that we are headed into our next solar Ice Age), oceans will continue to rise, and ecosystem services will continue to be lost by cutting down forests to use as pastureland and choking our rivers with sediments from erosion and pollution. As tipping point after ecological tipping points are breached, there will be no way for this biosphere – developed over millennia into the evolved being that we know it to be – to have a chance to recover.