Missed Opportunities

The problem, simply put, is people.  The problem is always people, at least where environmental issues are concerned.  One way or another, at the root of the problem you always find a person or a community or an entire culture that’s doing something damaging, whether they know it or not.  And so, it’s easy for an environmentalist to start to think of  humanity itself as the enemy, or at least every member who doesn’t seem to share our concerns.  But this kind of thinking is a slippery slope, and ultimately counterproductive.  While it’s true that people are the ones causing the problems, people can also be the solution.  After all, every environmentalist out there, at some point, made the decision to start changing their own behaviors because of their concerns for the effects they were having.  People don’t often change their ways, and they don’t do it easily.  That’s why it’s our job, as the ones striving to solve these problems, to make it easy for them to go along with what we’re doing, even if they don’t agree with us or even understand what we’re doing.  Unfortunately, environmentalists already have a tough job.  We tackle tasks that seem insurmountable, or that may already be a lost cause.  But it’s our responsibility, as the ones seeking change, to see to it that other people are not treated as the enemy.  We have to take those people who are causing problems, and turn them into part of the solution.  We have to make the transition from the status quo to a green culture easy and painless, if not actually appealing, for those who don’t share our views.  It may be tempting to just dismiss other people as the enemy, and it’s certainly easier.  But that kind of thinking leads to confrontations and animosity.  Treat someone like they’re the enemy, and they’ll respond in kind.  A battle of cultures and values is exactly what we do not want to have to fight.  We’ve got enough trouble as it is.  In the long run (which is, after all, what environmentalism is concerned with), the best, and sometimes only, solutions will involve reaching out to people on the other side of the table and helping them as best we can to make things easy for them, to make sure they don’t suffer as a result of solving these problems.  If we treat people with respect and compassion, rather than making a confrontation out of it, we may well find that some, at least, are more than willing to be flexible in order to help us achieve our goals.

This is a lesson that came to me via direct observation of an environmental battle going on nearby while I was in college.  There was a copper mine in a neighboring community that was nearing the end of its useful days.  It was, in fact, about the only mine left in an area that once had experienced a sort of copper rush akin to the gold rush days.  The owners had proposed a way to extend the life of the mine, however.  They planned to turn the conventional mine into a solution mine, pumping huge quantities of sulfuric acid into the remaining deposits that had too low of a copper concentration to be worth digging out.  The acid would then be pumped back out and the dissolved copper would be reclaimed.  It’s a proven mining technique for certain situations, and it has the added benefit of requiring minimal surface disturbance, as opposed to the ugly scars many other mines leave behind.  However, not everyone thought this was a great idea.

Many people in the surrounding communities had concerns over this new process.  The primary concern was that it wasn’t clear if the acid solution would be contained to the ore deposits, or if some of it would make its way into the water table and eventually contaminate the surrounding lakes and rivers.  This wasn’t just an environmental concern, as fishing and other outdoor recreation was an important part of the local economy.  The quantities of acid that would be involved were large enough that if even a small percentage leaked into the ground water, it could potentially have consequences to the surrounding ecosystems.  The mine, of course, insisted that this wasn’t going to happen, but the issue was never settled to anyone’s satisfaction.  In fact, I doubt that anybody really knew for sure how big of a risk this would be, if any.  That doubt was enough, for me, to oppose the mine, though I was busy with school and college life and never got directly involved.  Many others did, however, both from the college and from the community at large.  People protested, and some went so far as to blockade shipments of acid to the mine once the project actually started.  Eventually the EPA took notice of all the fuss and got their hands in the mix, complicating matters greatly for the mine.

This went on for some time, mostly in the background as far as I was concerned.  Then one day there was a flurry of excited students running around the campus, cheering and talking excitedly.  The owners of the mine had decided that the delays caused by the controversy and by the EPA’s involvement had caused the project to no longer be profitable.  They were closing down the mine for good, and would start reclamation work on the site.   The environmental community declared a victory.  We had won, it seemed.

While I was certainly glad to hear that this questionable mining method had been halted and the surrounding wilderness would be protected from any further pollution from the mine, something about the way people were describing the outcome bothered me.  “We won!” they cried.  If “we” had won, then who had lost?  It came to me very quickly then.  The miners lost, and big time.  I asked around, trying to find out what had been done to secure new jobs for the miners, what had been done to give these people an alternative to what they had come to rely on, and I came up with nothing.  Nobody, including the mine owners as far as I could tell, had been thinking about the miners or their community.  The mine had been one of the few sources of employment in what was otherwise a sparsely populated and economically depressed area.  Every common, average joe who had been counting on the mine to help support themselves and their families had just lost their livelihood.  Businesses in the town itself would likely suffer as well, without money from the miners to help support them.  Environmentalists had won, but other people, specific individuals who themselves had not intended any harm, had lost.

That’s not to say that I changed my mind about the mine.  I still think it should have been closed down.  The risks were unclear, and the potential for harm was significant.  It wasn’t worth jeopardizing the watershed, not without a lot more information and some solid plans for how to deal with any problems, and it just wasn’t feasible for the mine or anybody else to spend money on researching those issues.  However, there was more to that situation than just groundwater pollution from the mine, and we, as environmentalists, failed to address these other problems.  I don’t for one second buy the argument that economics should ever trump environmental concerns, but there’s also no doubting that economic needs are involved with these issues, and it’s something that seems all too easy to forget.  The economic situation of those mining families was put under great stress by our “victory”, and it was therefore our responsibility to make amends.  It was up to us to see to it that they had somewhere else to turn to to support themselves, to help them find a way of making a living that wasn’t at odds with environmentalist values, and we not only failed, we never even considered the problem.  Those people were on their own, in a tough situation, and the people who helped put them there didn’t seem to care one bit.  There probably was no easy way to help those people, but we should have tried.  We should have at least made an effort, we should have shown the community that they weren’t the enemy, that they were victims in this as much as the local environment had been, and that we wanted to help them out as much as we wanted to help preserve the watershed.  It was our responsibility to put forth the effort, regardless of how much good it really did.  We prevented one big mess, only to create many smaller messes, and we called that a victory and then walked away from it.

Aside from the moral, ethical concerns of leaving the miners to find their own way after causing them to lose their jobs, there were likely some more practical repercussions as well.  While it’s entirely unclear how much of a role the environmental activists really had in getting the mine shut down, and how much of it would have happened regardless of what we did, we nonetheless had been a very vocal and visible presence throughout the whole process.  The environmental community had proudly proclaimed themselves to be enemies of the mine, and proceeded to fight their battle.  I doubt that anybody ever thought of the miners as the enemy, since nobody seemed to consider them at all.  The mine itself was the enemy, and the owners by extension.  Looking at it from the other side, though, it seems likely that the miners did see us as the enemy.  We were the visible component of the forces opposing the mine.  The EPA may have ultimately been the real force behind it, but that’s an abstract entity, something distant and diffuse.  The local environmentalists, the hippies, the tree-huggers, and other names I won’t mention here, were the face of the opposition.  We were the ones who could easily be singled out as causing problems for the miners, and from their point of view, we were fighting them personally, attacking their livelihoods.  That wasn’t our intent, but that doesn’t matter.  How many of those people, who before may have been utterly indifferent to environmental causes, came to view environmentalists as the enemy?  How many of them hate us now for what they feel we did to them?  And having established that we were their enemy, how many other environmental issues have they decided to oppose, simply because of their perception of us?  We may have won the fight over the mine, but in the long run, given the animosity it created, it’s possible that we did more harm than good, both in regards to those specific people, and to our own cause.

We missed an opportunity, and a great one at that.  We could have taken these people and, rather than make enemies of them, turned them into allies.  Imagine what the reaction would have been if we, the crazy, long-haired hippies, had shown more concern for the well-being of the miners than the mine owners did.  We could have stepped in and helped them find other work, maybe even better work.  We could have tried to actually create new jobs in the community for them.  We could have raised money to help them relocate if needed.  We could have at least shown that we cared, that we were concerned, and that we bore them no ill will.  If we had done that, if we had gone out of our way to befriend these people, without even trying to convince them of the need for environmental action, they would have come out of that situation with a much different view of us and our movement.  They would have seen us as decent folks, rather than the enemy.  They may have still thought we were crazy, but they wouldn’t hate us.  They may not have agreed with our goals, but they couldn’t oppose our methods.  If we had made ourselves advocates of the miners as well as the environment, we would have had the battle halfway won.  We could have not only put even more pressure on the mining company, we could have also won the support, or at least reduced the opposition, of a group of people who otherwise may never have even considered our point of view.  Maybe, just maybe, one of them would even start to pay more attention to environmentalism, to become concerned in a way that they otherwise wouldn’t have, because they never thought about it, or because they thought they were on the other side of the battle lines.

I never took part in any of the demonstrations.  I never held a protest sign, and I certainly never helped to block the rail lines supplying the mine.  I had too many other things on my mind, and there were plenty of other people willing to do those things.  But I supported the cause, if quietly, and now I feel that I, too, share the blame in the aftermath.  After all, I did as little to help the miners as the ones who were out there, chanting and parading.  It’s likely that many of those people who lost their jobs had seen trouble coming as soon as the conventional production of the mine started to wind down.  It’s possible that they’d been looking for other solutions to their economic needs anyway.  It may not have been quite as dramatic as I’m presenting it.  But that doesn’t really matter.  The opportunity to extend our hand to them was still there, and the responsibility to make sure that they were taken care of still fell on our shoulders.  However, that would have been a lot of work.  It would have, in fact, been much harder than simply protesting the mine and causing trouble for them.  It would have been harder mentally, as well.  Environmentalists are, after all, just people, and people have a tendency, sometimes even a need, to see things in black and white.   Dismissing the mining community, or even hating them, was much easier than trying to see them as fellow humans in need of aid, or as potential friends and allies.  And so we ranted, and raved, and stirred up trouble, and took no responsibility for the results, because it was so much easier that way.  But we shot ourselves in the foot.  We needlessly made enemies for ourselves and our movement, when we’ve already got more obstacles than we know how to deal with.  We came off as thoughtless, angry, and arrogant misanthropes.  We should have been caring, and thoughtful, and eager to help those we were inadvertently affecting.  We took the easy path, but not the best one.

That’s not the way forward for our movement.  That’s a struggle, a battle, and one that we don’t need on top of everything else we face.  In the long run, we probably did more harm than good in working to stop that mine.  The safety of the watershed was ensured, at least for the time being, but how many people came out of that situation with a mind that was closed to our point of view?  How many people went on to oppose everything we stand for?  How many have since voted for politicians who clearly intended to act counter to our goals?  Worst of all, how many people suffered directly because we put them out of work?  That last one could at least be answered definitively, but nobody cared enough to follow up and find out, so I can’t answer even that question.

We need to do better.  We need to BE better.  Better people, better neighbors.  Showing outrage over environmental injustice isn’t enough.  We also need to be concerned with social injustices, and we need to be aware that our actions may create new injustices, which we are then responsible for.  We like to think of ourselves as enlightened, for seeing problems that others don’t acknowledge, but enlightened people don’t scorn other people just for being in a bad situation, for taking what work comes their way, or for just failing to see everything the same way.  Enlightened people embrace all other people, despite their flaws, despite what trouble they may have made for our causes.   Most of us probably didn’t get involved in environmentalism because of our concern for our fellow man, or because we liked helping other people.  I suspect many of us are probably anti-social by nature, introverts and socially awkward.  I certainly am.  Well, tough luck.  It’s impossible to untangle the social issues from the environmental ones, and if we want to face the one, we must be prepared to deal with the other.  We can’t decide that we’re going to help the environment, but not our fellow man, just because that’s easier, because that’s what we’re comfortable with.  When we get involved, at all, in any way, we take on the responsibility to look after those affected by the issues we’re concerned with.  When we fail to do that, we do everyone a disservice.  In the end, it’s also self defeating.  Our biggest challenge, and our clearest path to success, is to win over hearts and minds.  It’s all about people, not only because they are the cause of the problems, but also because they will be the solution.   We need to be ambassadors and diplomats, not just soldiers.  We need to show compassion, respect, and consideration for not just those we oppose directly, but also those whose lives we inadvertently change.  If we can do that, we’ll find that some people, if not most, are willing to return the favor.  We’ll find others willing to take us seriously and treat us with respect, and the path forward will be so much easier.

A Scientific Depression

It’s interesting.  When I was in high school, there were a handful of students who were either bolder than the rest, more focused on their career after graduation than the rest, or possibly just bigger jackasses than the rest.  They would, every so often during any particular class, raise their hands and ask the question, “How will this help me in the real world?”  The answers varied from teacher to teacher, of course, and they were generally pretty valid, if sometimes a bit thin.  Looking back, though, I’m not sure if I can ever remember anybody asking that question in a science class.  Maybe it seemed obvious that what we were learning was useful.  If true, that in itself would say something, I think.  But in a way I wish somebody HAD asked the question.  And I wish the teacher would have responded with, “This stuff is important because soon you’ll be old enough to vote.”

Education in general in the United States seems to be stagnant at best, and science, with its constant change and development, quickly gets left behind in the school systems.  I went to a pretty good public school system, and I’m willing to bet that my experiences there in this regard were similar to that of most people.  We spent most of each year, every year, reviewing the material that we’d learned in years past.  Precious little time was given over to actually learning anything new.  By the time I was in the 5th grade, it seemed I was scarcely learning anything at all.  Instead I was just constantly reinforcing what I already knew.  And science, in particular, was barely taught in any way.  Sure, we had science class, but the content was simplistic even for young children.  Water freezes into ice.  Living things are made of cells.  The Earth orbits the Sun.  That was pretty much the extent of it.  We weren’t taught anything about the scientific method, or fundamental concepts like genetics, evolution theory, quantum theory, or relativity theory until at least the 7th grade, and much of it wasn’t mentioned until high school.  My freshman English teacher was the first one to introduce me, formally, to the concepts of relativity and quantum mechanics.  My ENGLISH teacher had to do this, and after years of education that didn’t include these ideas.  I’m not trying to say that quantum theory is something that’s simple to teach to a 5 year old, and I certainly am no expert in early educational techniques (or physics for that matter).  I can’t pretend to sit here and tell you that I know how to make a young child understand Mendelian genetics or cellular mitosis.

But, folks… quantum theory and relativity theory have been the fundamental, core concepts of physics since the beginning of the 20th century.   It was cutting edge science when my GRANDFATHER was in school.  Surely it deserved at least a mention somewhere along the line in my early education.  At the very least, it would have been nice to not have been taught material that was outdated a century ago.  It was pretty jarring to discover, as a teenager, that everything I’d been taught about atoms, light, and the physical nature of the universe up until that point was just flat out wrong, and furthermore that it had been known to be wrong for a long time. And it’s amazing, simply amazing, that neither genetics nor evolution were mentioned at all, whatsoever, until high school.   Modern genetics has been around since the 1950′s, and Darwin presented his famous theory in the 1850′s.  That means that my early biology training was over a hundred years out of date.  Just… just think about that for a moment.

I know curriculums vary from school to school, and from generation to generation.  Perhaps I just got a raw deal.  Maybe most other students got a better exposure to science.  Maybe it’s gotten a thousand times better since then and I just haven’t noticed.  But based on my observations of the general public, of our overall society, I don’t really think so.  I suspect that most of us, whether we’re 18 or 108, have had a similar experience to what I just described, if not worse.  Sometimes much worse.  We get taught very little science, and much of it out of date, until we hit our teenage years.  Then all of the sudden we’ve got to play catch up, and fast.  NOW we’re suddenly learning new things all the time.  We’ve been marching in place for our entire childhood, academically speaking, and without warning, we’ve got to start running.  Is it any wonder, then, that our nation is so lacking in its understanding of science?  We get so little emphasis on it, and much of that is crammed down our throats in a couple of years.  If you weren’t interested  in science to start with, that sort of treatment is likely to make you resent it.

Why am I bringing all of this up?  Because it matters, because of what I mentioned in the opening paragraph.  We vote.  Science is more and more becoming the object of political debate, and most of the time, I’m amazed that we have to have the debate at all.  So often, the debate focuses not on the ethics of a particular issue or the correct course of action, but whether, in fact, there’s an issue at all.  And time and time again, it strikes me that it comes back to education.  We have arguments over whether or not the climate is changing, and whether or not burning fossil fuels might influence that.  We debate whether or not we should teach evolution theory to our children.  We constantly display a general ignorance in the public of what science actually is, what it can and can not do, and how it’s useful.  If we had only gotten a decent understanding of fundamental science issues at an early age, we wouldn’t have to go through all of this debate.  We’d be able to look at the available science to see what’s actually happening, and then have the important debate: What do we do about it?  Instead, we have a society that’s so scientifically ignorant that we don’t even understand what it is that we have, what we might be losing, and what we stand to gain.

Now, I’m sure that some on the “other” side of the argument would claim that what I’m advocating amounts to indoctrination, that it’s teaching politics to our children.  I’d argue that nothing could be further from the case.  Instead, I suggest that it’s the other way around.  Teaching science from an early age would take the politics out of science all together.  With a stronger scientific background, as a people, we’d be better equipped to make the distinction between the two, to understand where scientific fact and theory ends and where the discussion of ethics or application begins.  There really shouldn’t even be politics in science.  Science should sometimes inform politics, not the other way around.  Even if you HATE science, and wish to end it forever, it STILL makes sense that you’d want to learn all about it.  Know thy enemy, after all.  Yet frequently it’s the folks who most adamantly deny scientific facts and ideas who are the most ignorant on the very topics they are so passionate about.  If those people actually understood what they were shouting about, if they’d gotten a decent science education, perhaps they’d actually be able to bring something to the table.  The heated argument could become an interesting conversation.  Perhaps they’d be bringing up valid points, shining a light on flaws or false assumptions underlying the topic at hand.  In other words, they could actually participate in the scientific process, which, after all, is partly a process of self-correction.  And we’d all be better off for it.

Instead, the current situation is embarrassing.  Here we are, an “enlightened” culture, and at the highest level of government, we still argue over whether or not science is important, or better yet, whether or not science itself is even valid.  We’re not enlightened.  We’re ignorant.  We’re in the dark.  We just take it for granted that the future of our nation is one of continued advancement, of ever expanding technical power and scientific know-how, but in fact, there’s nothing preventing us from a dramatic slide backwards.  An intellectual dark age is possible.  I’m not saying it’s going to happen, or that it’s even likely, but I will suggest that the seeds are there.  Among certain political circles, there’s a strong bias against not just science, but scientists themselves.  In the past decade or so, the words, “academic” and “intellectual” have become disparaging terms.  Being able to think critically has almost become a flaw in some circumstances.  We’re in a political environment where one of the candidates in our most recent presidential election was accused of being eloquent and intellectual.  These were not words of praise, but of scorn.  These were not hallmarks of a good leader, but weaknesses that the candidate was encouraged to downplay.  It’s not too hard to see a future where those attitudes take over, where science and academic pursuits are discouraged, and where we not only stagnate, but slide backwards.  Again, I’m not suggesting that this will happen.  The candidate in question won the election, despite being accused of having intelligence, and even being “pro-science”.  Hopefully this indicates that the anti-science sentiment is a political fad, not an overarching trend.

Even so, we’re still in the dark as a culture, and to resolve that, education has to be the key.  If we continue to neglect science education in our school systems, if we continue to overlook the fundamental theories of biology, physics, and chemistry, then we risk more than simply faltering on scientific issues.  The critical thinking skills and logic that are so important to science education are useful in a wide spectrum of situations, both in and out of politics.   How many wasteful political debates could be avoided if we were simply better equipped to detect false logic, to analyze problems, and to understand data?  How many problems could be dealt with more directly if people didn’t argue over whether or not there even were problems?  Back in high school, when students were asking, “How will this help me in the real world?” the best answer out of any of them came from my sophomore algebra teacher.  He smiled and said something along the lines of, “Even if you never do another algebra problem again in your whole life, the mental processes involved here, the act of learning new ways to think and approach a problem, will aid you no matter what career path you take.”  He was talking about mathematics, but he could have just as well been talking about the scientific method.  If we all could just have a minimal grasp of science, if our society could at least understand what science was and how it worked, maybe we could address our most pressing issues more effectively.  Maybe we could even agree as to what the problems actually are.  Maybe we could avoid slipping into a scientific dark age, and maybe we could learn to apply a little reason and logic to our decisions, rather than blindly following whoever could shout the loudest.  There’s talk that we need another Sputnik to shame us and spur us on in our scientific endeavors.  Maybe we don’t need to have that.  Maybe we just need more people like my algebra teacher.

Thoughts on Infinity

Numbers are a funny thing.  Or, to be more accurate, humans tend to deal with numbers in strange ways.  Most of the time, we don’t have too much trouble with them.  We can generally make change for a twenty dollar bill, or keep score at a basketball game.  These are the sorts of numbers we can handle, and we encounter them every day.  They mean something to us, and we understand what they represent.  Things get tricky, though, when we get into very large numbers, numbers that usually aren’t relevant to our day to day lives.  At some point, it all just sort of blurs together in our minds.  The difference, for many people, between 100 million and 100 billion is relatively small.  Both are larger than anything we can really visualize, far larger than anything we need to understand when buying groceries, for example.  We understand, of course, that one is larger than the other, and we could subtract one from the other if need be, but we still don’t have a good grasp for just how much bigger a billion is than a million.  And most of the time it doesn’t matter, either.  It doesn’t matter if something weighs a million pounds or a billion, we’re still not going to be able to lift it or carry it in the back seat of the car.  We’d be just as happy with winning a billion dollars as we would 100 billion.  At that point, what difference does it make?  Either way, it’s an obscenely large amount of money, more than any individual has any real use for.  In fact, our brains seem to have such a struggle with large numbers that, at some point, we start to get them confused with infinity.  Once something becomes too big for us to really understand, there doesn’t seem to be much difference between extremely large and infinitely large.

This seems to be something inherent in the human brain, at least as far as I can tell, and it’s certainly something we’ve struggled with for a long time.  The first colonists from Europe in North America saw a huge land, covered with seemingly endless forests, and I imagine that many of them considered the land and its resources to be infinite, or so large that it might as well be.  They didn’t even have a good idea of how large the New World really was, so it may have seemed quite reasonable to act as though they could never use it all up.  After all, they were so few, and so small, being but tiny men faced against the vastness of nature.  Why bother with conserving resources when you could never possibly run out of them?  Fast forward just a couple of hundred years, and here we are, constantly arguing amongst ourselves over what to do with the little bit of wild terrain left in the nation.  There are certainly many reasons behind the deforestation of America, but surely a contributing factor was our inability to understand the difference between a very large amount of land and an infinite amount.

While that’s all fine and good, it’s still just idle speculation about a topic that many Americans still aren’t very concerned about.  Let’s consider something that almost everyone can relate to:  oil.  Here we have a finite, non-renewable resource that every single American consumes, often every day, and yet, despite periodic shortages, we still behave as though it’s never going to run out.  When oil is cheap, we go through petroleum products like it really is an endless supply, and when it’s expensive, we consume it more efficiently, but we still consume it.  We never consider, at least not as a society, finding alternatives.  Even though there has been strong evidence for years now that the end of the worlds oil supply could occur within our generation, we still act as though it will never ever run out.  All we ever really consider is the price.  Even then, we’ve never considered other ways we consume petroleum, such as plastics and other synthetic materials.  We’ll bitch about the price of gasoline, then go to the grocery store and buy our food in plastic containers, wrapped in other plastic containers, and take it home in plastic bags, and never consider the irony.

Mind you, when I say we behave as though oil supplies are infinite, I mean that literally.  There are people out there who really, seriously, argue that we will never and can never run out of petroleum.  The arguments run from the plausible but unlikely (petroleum is a renewable resource that is constantly replenished via either biological or geological processes) to the illogical (as we run out of easy sources of oil, we will simply learn to extract it from more and more difficult sources, without ever running out) to the WTF (God will provide us with all the oil we need).  The belief in literally infinite oil blew my mind when I first heard about it, but it’s not that uncommon of a viewpoint.  Many people honestly think we will never run out, or that if we do it will be centuries, perhaps millennia, in the future, and therefore nothing to worry about.

There is some reason to think that a small amount of petroleum production is actually going on underground, but for this particular case, let’s just assume that petroleum is not regenerating, or at least not at any rate that is meaningful to us for the next few centuries.  I say “assume”, mind you, but this is actually the prevailing view.  Given that, even if the entire planet were just a thin shell of rock floating on an enormous sea of light, sweet crude oil, there would still be a finite amount of it.  It’d be a hell of a lot of oil, but the amount would be discrete and limited.  Given enough time, even an entire planet made of nothing but petroleum could eventually be consumed entirely.  It’s a preposterous notion, of course, but the point is that, even if we get that crazy with it, it’s still not an infinite supply and we’d still, at some point, need to take measures to conserve it.  We obviously don’t have that much oil available, and far from it.  Even if it’s regenerating, there’s absolutely no reason to believe that the rate of regeneration is outpacing the rate of consumption, so we’re still running out.  We probably won’t run out of it entirely, but it will eventually become so scarce as to make it unfeasible for general use.  It’s just simple math, folks.  So why can’t we behave accordingly?  Why do we still burn it at the drop of a hat?  Why do we use it to make packaging that’s just going to be discarded?  Why do we not only fail to conserve it, but actively and willfully WASTE it?

Our problem with confusing large numbers with the infinite is not limited to current situations, but also the way we think about the future.  We often think that things can eventually become infinite, not realizing that in actuality there is eventually a limit, no matter how large that number actually is.  Consider another topic you hear about all the time in the news: economic growth.  It’s a positive thing, right?  The more our economy grows, the better off we all are.  That’s how it’s always portrayed.  A growing economy means more jobs, more money, just more, more, and more for everyone.  Nobody ever stops to think this through to its logical conclusion, however.  Economic growth can not be infinite.  The resources, energy, and manpower of any nation, even the entire planet, is limited.  At some point, no matter what you do, you won’t be able to squeeze another drop of productivity out of the economy, and further growth will become literally impossible.  Economic growth isn’t inherently a good thing (or a bad thing either), and beyond a certain point, it’s unsustainable.  Eventually growing more just isn’t worth it.  What we’d really strive for, if we stopped to think about it, is economic STABILITY, preferably at some comfortable level that everyone can live with.  Growth, by definition, is unstable, and the series of booms and crashes that we’ve seen in the last century in the United States is evidence of that.  We’d probably all be better off having a nice, steady economy, without all these spikes and falls, always either wondering when the bubble will burst, or else when things will get back to “normal” again.  But, instead, we think we can just keep growing forever, with no problems, and we make no attempts to reel in the economy when it starts to grow beyond our needs.

Finally, I’m going to point out something that should be blindingly obvious, but which, for some reason, is not.  Human population can not reach infinite size.  We are limited, like every other living thing, by our environment.  We need space, air, food, and water.  Each of those resources is in limited supply.  The world may be a big place, but it’s not THAT big.  How many people can the Earth possibly support?  No matter what your answer is for that, the point is, there IS a number that represents a cap to human population.  At some point there’s a bottleneck in our resources, and growth will not be able to go beyond that point.  No matter how big that population is, even if it’s an obscenely huge number that we’d have to invent a name for, if every day our population grows by a certain percentage, any amount at all really, eventually we’ll reach that maximum size.  At that point, every available speck of land and water on the planet would be devoted to the survival of the human race, and nothing else.  We’d be teetering on the edge, with just barely enough food and water to go around.  Beyond that level, our population could not expand any further.  Not for long, at any rate, without adequate resources.

So, we can’t continue to make as many babies as we want forever.  Eventually, we’re going to have to either control our own population levels, or starvation, thirst, and disease will do it for us.  The hard way.  And yet, despite what, to me, is an obvious conclusion, we continue to not only tolerate unlimited population growth, but actually encourage it.  Every institution we have, from the federal government to the local place of worship, gives reasons and incentives to have babies, and we as a society judge it to be the highest goal for any person.  Even the countries that do impose some form of population control, namely China, aren’t actually halting growth, they’re just slowing down the rate of growth.  I’m not saying that we’ve reached the point where we can’t support any larger population (although some models predict that we’re pretty close).  I’m just pointing out that we are at a pretty large size as it is, and since we don’t know what the limit is, only that there certainly must be a limit, it might be wise to throttle back the baby production, lest we realize suddenly that we’ve already gone too far.  We clearly have limits to our potential population, but our behaviour suggests that we don’t believe that we do.  We keep on expanding at a time when we need to be considering what the costs of expansion really are.

Each of these issues I’ve touched on are complex and would take volumes, literally, to fully explore, but I see a common thread underlying the cause of each one.  We just can’t wrap our minds around hugeness.  In the case of resources, we often have a finite, but very large, supply, and the figures are so large that in our minds they become nearly infinite, unlimited.  In the case of growth, the lack of a clearly defined limit causes us to behave as though there were no limit at all.  It’s the same mentality that makes “all-you-can-eat” promotions popular at restaurants.  All we can eat?  That means an infinite amount of food for a finite price, which surely is a great deal.  Of course, there actually is a limit to how much any person can possibly eat at one sitting, and depending on what that limit is, the price may actually not be worth it.  It’s the same for environmental issues.  There’s a limit to how much oil we can consume, how much land (or water) we can use for food production and living space, and how many people we can squeeze onto this planet.  But without an easy way to know what those limits are, we behave as though there are no limits, as though the potential was infinite.  When you’re handed a large sum of money and you know exactly how much there is, you can form a budget.  You can make informed decisions on how to spend it, and on what.  But if someone gives you a huge amount of money, and you’re not allowed to know how much there is, only that it’s a “large” number, you’ve got a problem.  You can spend it like mad, but you won’t know when you’re out until it’s too late.  A wise person would conserve it, spend it carefully, and never assume that they could never possibly run out.  Fortunately, it’s not a perfect metaphor, because in reality we will have signs that we’re approaching the limits.  There’s two problems, though.  Will we be able to recognize those signs in time to change our behaviour?  And will those signs, in themselves, be events we’d rather avoid?

We live in a finite world, folks.  Even the universe itself has boundaries and limits.  Nothing is infinite.  In the long term, everything is in short supply.  Just because you’re wealthy doesn’t mean you should spend your money like you’ll never run out of it.  If you do, then eventually you’ll be broke.  Just because we live on a rich planet with abundant resources doesn’t mean we can use it thoughtlessly forever.  Eventually, there will be nothing useful left.