Dwain Northey (Gen X)

This may be a multipart examination of humanities rise and fall, I want to be very up front that this is my opinion, just my slightly, or depending on your view, obscenely twisted observations.

There are times when I am not 100% sure that all the advancements MAN has made are all for the best. In reality if you look at earth as a living object our rise and advancements have only resulted in destruction of the environment  in which we live. Point in fact for every monumental construction a dismantling of natural resources occurred. The Great Pyramids are one of the 7 wonders but no one thinks about where all the stone came from to construct them. For a great as those structures are the is a whole in the planet that is for greater than the pyramids themselves.

To this point in our evolution even the revolution of power has been at the expense of natural resources, yes as a (thinking) species we became aware that there were other ways for harnessing power without consuming a resource. Great minds imagined that with the correct gearing wind energy could be exploited to pump water or grind wheat and for centuries it was. Sadly this wasn’t fast enough for the impatient man so utilizing the same action the wind had provided more consistent means of production were invented. These advances made life easier for man, but this was where consumption of resources began. First came the revelation that burning wood created heat, great for cooking and not freezing to death but also that water when boiled created steam that could turn a turbine just like the wind or running water had done.  Hurray for MAN.

Again, this method wasn’t efficient enough for the advancement of civilization, although for millennia it was. Eventually wood was supplemented with oils, early on derived from plants but eventually from petroleum pulled from the earth. The first big energy transition was from wood and charcoal to coal, beginning in the iron industry in the early 1700s. By 1900, coal was the primary industrial fuel, taking over to make up half the world’s fuel use. Thus began our contribution to pollution, and we have only increased the industrialization burring more carbon and pumping it into the atmosphere.

When the first humans burned wood and saw smoke that had no realization that the biproduct of their heat did anything other than warm them. In retrospect it wasn’t harming them, unless it got out of control, because the scale that small groups exploited the resource had minimal impact on the environment in which they lived. That changed as nomadic tribes became larger more stationary settlements, I believe that in the beginning they were very aware that their resources were limited. As time advanced and settlements became cities that recognition, by the masses, because less because of the illusion of abundance. It’s absolutely reasonable to presume that the elders knew that there was a limit to some resources but some, they assumed, where nearly unlimited.

Its now the 21^st century and we have industrialized nearly every land mass on the planet, our numbers have nearly exceeded that of the resources required to sustain us. (That isn’t completely true because there is enough food to feed every mouth but some nations discard more than they consume, but that’s another rant.) Finally we have acknowledged, well most of us, that burning of carbon is creating more issues and count result in our downfall. Climate change has happened in the past but our continual pumping of carbon into the atmosphere is contributing to that change. Many on the side that believes we are responsible for this say we are killing the planet but I don’t believe that. Earth, the Gaia hypothesis says that Earth is a living system, was around before us and will be here after we are gone, we are a virus that is killing itself. I said at the beginning of this rant, “if you look at the earth as a living object”, well I truly believe it is and we are just a blip in her existence, we should preserve and resect her presence and just maybe she will continue to let us continue our existence.