Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
the more time we have for leisure pursuits. (Whether people choose to take advantage of that is another
issue.)
Furthermore, because fossil fuel energy is so dense and requires very little land and no live plants, it
gives us both the wealth and the physical ability to preserve pretty much any piece of nature we want. And
even in cases where one person's irreplaceable beauty is another person's needed energy source, we are
talking about an installation that, if need be, has a finite lifetime and then can be transformed into a lush
forest. Which is not to say that oil rigs are ugly—I think we should consider industrial civilization beauti-
ful, too.
Look at the parts of the world where the “rain forest” (jungle) gets mowed down in seemingly short-
sighted ways. Are they rich places? No, they are poor places with primitive agriculture and industry.
The now-developed world was once like that in preindustrial times. While we are taught to think that
the country was once lush landscape, in fact, before coal, oil, and natural energy, our country and others
survived by developing the landscape. As geographer Pierre Desrochers writes:
Carbon fuels made this expansion of the forest cover possible in various ways. With the development
of more sophisticated combustion technologies, coal, heavy oil and natural gas proved vastly superior
alternatives tofirewoodandcharcoal. Throughtheirroleaslong-distance landandmaritime transporta-
tion fuels, coal and later petroleum-based fuels (diesel and marine bunker fuel) encouraged agricultural
specialization in the most productive zones of the planet, in the process making much marginal agricul-
tural land superfluous.
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If you love enjoying nature, you should love fossil fuels.
The same basic logic applies to more abstract concerns about “biodiversity” and species extinction.
There are huge debates in the ecology literature about what is happening or not happening to what species,
and I have not studied them enough to take sides, but I can say that from an energy perspective, to the
extent it makes sense to preserve a given species or biological arrangement—and such decisions should
be made according to a human standard of value, not a nonhuman one—cheap, plentiful, reliable energy
gives us the means to do so just as we can preserve a desirable forest or park. It is only when we are truly
living off the rest of nature that we must gobble up whatever we can.
Whether to actively preserve a species or not should be made with reference to a human standard of
value. Much of the ecology field holds to the nonimpact standard, which treats another species' extinction
as intrinsically wrong. But human beings are right to favor some species over others. For example, pigs,
cattle, and chickens are in no danger of extinction because their human-centered benefits are immediately
visible, so we make them some of the most abundant life-forms on Earth. On the other hand, wolves and
bears and disease-carrying insects have been threats that we destroyed in many regions. There is no inher-
ent reason to think that the extinction of any given plant or animal is bad for humans. We should focus
on maximizing our benefits. That can be the removal of a direct threat, such as making bears nonexistent
where our kids go to school, or the preservation of species that we want to survive, such as the panda, even
if we do not strictly need it for our own survival.
THE BIG PICTURE
