Depressing
posted in Letting Off Steam |I guess if one thinks too much then life can be a bit depressing. I was just looking around me at the different things that we take for granted in this modern world. The building materials we use, the cars, our food, clothes, personal effects and etc. Nearly all has been made from our natural environment using methods that harm that same environment.
Take cement for example, one of the most widely used building materials in the world. First, raw minerals are gathered from the landscape in the form of Limestone, sand, different aggragates, ash and others. They are combined and heated in a process that uses incredible amounts of energy normally derived from burning Coal and now commonly from burning waste. The amount of CO2 emmitted from this process is phenomenal. The cement must then be processed and transported, again using incredible amounts of energy from unsustainable sources. When it finally reaches the building site, it is mixed and pumped to the desired position and the chemical process of drying and setting has its own hazards.
Even products that claim to be made by natural processes or using eco friendly materials etc. are highly dependant on non-environmentally friendly forms of energy. When you plug in the blender to make a protien shake or turn on the toaster oven to heat up a all natural breadroll, you are depending on the burning of coal, smashing of atoms or some other equally unsustainable form of power generation to satisfy your hunger.
So what can we do as consumers to limit or stop the destruction of non-renewable resources? The answer is alot, but almost nothing we do is going to stop it completely. Even a windmill, although running pretty clean and efficiently, requires huge amounts of energy to produce and consistent repair and maintenance using these resources that don’t come back.
Best case scenario would be to return to our hunter gatherer roots, take only what we need, cook over open fires and basically reduce the population to a manageable number… Maybe Nuclear war wasn’t such a bad idea after all.