For those of you who have not read my book, Nature & Culture--A Personal Dilemma, I post some of its statements about where I fit into the questions that I regularly post on my Facebook page. My Place in the World Ecosystem As an individual, I have maintained my place within the great flow-through of material and energy resources in American society. As an average American, I consume about 40,000 tons of new mineral supplies each year. Using Howard and Elizabeth Odum’s figures, a person in the United States in the 1970’s was supported by the energy of 250,000 calories coal equivalent each day. That amount must have increased in the last three decades. As an average American, I consumed 22.7 barrels of oil and emitted 5 metric tons of energy-related CO2 in 2010. According to the Mineral Information Institute’s calculations, on average, directly and indirectly, every American consumes enough fossil fuels to generate the equivalent of 300 people working around the clock every day of the year. And if everyone on the planet lived as I do, the world would have to have 4.3 times the biocapacity it has in 2007 to keep up with demands of our global ecological footprint. And the footprint would be even larger—8 times the biocapacity of the Earth—if everyone lived like an average American. Thus it is obvious that as an American, I greatly exceed my share of fossil fuels, other minerals, CO2 emissions, and the carrying capacity of the Earth. In my over eight decades on Earth, I have participated increasingly in interconnected global ecosystems. The networks of goods and services that reach me are ever more complex. I am ignorant of all but the last one or two stages of the intricate pathways and transformations of the goods and services that I consume. And I certainly have no good idea of the tranformities that have been made since the resources I consume were extracted from nature. In a similar manner, I am largely unaware of the pathways that my ‘waste’ products take beyond the local dump, sewage plant, or exhaust pipe. Greatly altered ecosystems radiate from me and every other modern person in complex ways of which we are ignorant or, at the very least, ignore. In other words I live, like most Americans, in a highly artificial world of altered ecosystems that are changing at a rate greater than ever before in the history of human kind. I now live in a world of greater cultural making with both more goods and Bads than did any of my ancestors. The accumulated contents of my house, the artificial landscapes within which I have spent most of my life, the water I drink and the air I breath are all part of humanly disturbed ecosystems just as are the waste products of my modern life style. The greatest impact I have had on natural ecosystems has probably been indirectly through the support that I have received as a student and as a teacher. But also important is the energy that went into maintaining my health—including one major surgery and several minor procedures—and my retirement, which is based on a pension and monetary investments in major corporations, financial institutions, and other organizations. And I am overwhelmed to think that about 300 fossil fuel slaves have supported me every day at least for most of my life especially when compared to the slave-free lives of my ancestors. I find it almost impossible to reconcile the objective facts of the energy and minerals that I have consumed as a modern American with the objective facts of the immense alterations of the natural ecosystems that have resulted from that consumption. I have enjoyed the fossil fuel slaves who have afforded me health, education, food from all over the world, and ease of movement in my daily life as well as with seven trips to Europe, three to Africa, eighteen to Latin America, twenty to the eastern North America, eleven to the American southwest, and many more to California and within the Pacific Northwest. Certainly my travels mean that I have given far more than my share of CO2 to the atmosphere and climate change. I have supported through my taxes (and military service) the non-productive costs in energy and matter of the Korean War, the Viet-Nam War, the Afghanistan War, two wars in Iraq, as well as participation in other military actions. I have tried to balance my direct and indirect attacks on the Earth’s natural ecosystems, not by radically changing my participation as a fossil fuel slave holder but as a teacher of geography and environmental studies. Throughout my career, I taught geography that emphasized the ways natural and cultural systems operated at the scale of whole human beings. My environmental perspective has been from the perspective of a global ecology that includes both humans and nature. Reflecting on over three decades of teaching and two in retirement, I feel that I took far more from natural ecosystems than I gave. I only hope that some of my students still think about the ways humans have altered the Earth both for good and bad and are aware of their ways of participation in global ecology. My efforts at changing negative impacts on local natural ecosystems have been intense at times, but with little positive effect. I have felt very frustrated by the overwhelming resistance to channeling the politics of growth away from short term concerns of a money economy to long term concerns about maintaining or creating sustainable natural systems in my neighborhood, university, city, and state. I have found that in any contested political issue involving land use, short-term economic concerns almost always outweigh those about natural ecosystems. If these attitudes are so strongly embedded at the local level, I find it difficult to see them change regionally and nationally. And when millions of people on Earth simply search for enough food to eat and places to shelter, it is understandable that they are little concerned with preserving natural ecosystems. I am part of modern, American ways of consuming. But I also see nature in terms of ecosystems that interconnect throughout land, sea, air, biota, and human cultures. I deeply feel that my consumptive behavior contrasts greatly with my ideas about the ecosystems in which I am embedded. Thus I find myself in a classic double-bind in which most of my behaviors directly contradict the beliefs I have about how humans must live to sustain life on the planet. I and many of my friends continue in our modern lives even as we are aware of the great environmental disruptions we cause. We cannot escape from the society and culture in which we are embedded. We have lived ‘high on the hog’ even as we are aware that such ways of living exploit the natural world that must support humanity in perpetuity. Although it is unlikely that people of my generation will have to adjust to the impending ecological crises, the generations that follow most certainly will.
Posted on: Fri, 23 Jan 2015 01:11:12 +0000
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