Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 1
Energy, Environment and the Future
of Mankind
Yuan Tseh Lee
Abstract
Charles Darwin who was born 200 years ago did remind us that “It is
not the strongest of the species that will survive, or the most intelligent; it is the
one most adaptable to change.” If the environment changes faster than the time
required for a given species to evolve, the likely result will be extinction. With the
fast changing climate and rapidly deteriorating ecosystem today, human species,
with a life cycle of 30-40 years, are not likely to evolve and adapt as quickly. Unless
humans manage to slow down the change of environment, the fate of extinction
might be inevitable.
Keywords
Energy crisis
·
Environmental degradation
·
Energy efficiency
·
Future
of mankind
1
Recent Development of Human Society on Earth
After the appearance of our ancestor on the heavily forested planet a couple of mil-
lion years ago, the development of the human society as a whole, was in harmony
with nature. Mankind was indeed a part of nature, reliant on the sun for the creation
of most of what was needed to survive. Since the population of mankind was small,
for a long period of time their limited activities seemed to have affected neither the
biosphere nor their living environment to any great extent.
The development of mankind took a new turn after the industrial revolution,
which began about 250 years ago. As mankind learned to transform energy from
one form to another—from chemical, thermal, electrical to mechanical—and in-
vented various machines that could perform work thousands of times more power-
fully, more precisely and more reliably than could be possibly done with human
and animal labor, the productivity of mankind increased immensely and an unprec-
edented improvement of living standards was achieved. The success of mankind
on the surface of the earth had been quite remarkable. But, during this process,
mankind became addicted to the use of a large amount of energy, and since the
energy from biomass created by sunshine no longer satisfied our need, we began to
