I am an environmentalist. I am also a realist.
I am not the kind of environmentalist who tools around in an elephant-sized SUV with a “Save The Earth” bumper sticker on the back. Nor am I the kind of environmentalist who attends meetings with other environmentalists where they engage in a group mullygrubbing session about someone cutting trees in a forest somewhere. In fact, I like having a house to live in. If someone hadn’t cut some trees somewhere then there would have been no lumber to build my house.
I am the kind of environmentalist who grew up in the ‘40s and ‘50s on a little one horse farm in the mountains of Western North Carolina. That was a time and place and in circumstances that were such that every day there were constant reminders that we are totally dependent on the planet, the planet’s natural resources and natural processes for our existence.
In our modern mechanized, automated and industrialized nation where we are totally surrounded by technological devices of all kinds it has been easy to lose sight of the fact that the fundamental conditions for our continued existence have not changed since humans have been on the planet. We are still just as dependant on the natural resources and processes of the planet for our existence as were our hunter-gatherer ancestors. The goal is still the same: Acquire the resources from the planet that we need to support our lives, standards of living and lifestyles. Our scientific knowledge and the technological machines and devices that have been developed using our scientific knowledge have enabled us to raise our standards of living and our lifestyles to levels that not even our ancestors of a century and a half ago would have imagined even in their wildest fantasizing about the future.
But we do have a very real problem that we simply must be willing to get face to face with. All of our technological machines and devices do just one thing for us. They enable us to make indirect beneficial use of sources of energy and kinds of energy that we are not biologically able to use directly and beneficially. Our essential needs have not changed one iota. The only thing that has been changed by our modern technologies of all kinds is the means and methods of acquiring the resources that are essential to our existence.
The fundamental natural force that provides the energy that we use to drive, control and direct almost all of our technological devices of all kinds is the exact same fundamental natural force that provides the energy to make the spark that makes the difference between us being alive and being dead. All of our technological devices of all kinds are as totally dependent upon nature, natural resources and natural processes to be able to operate and perform the tasks that they were designed to perform as we are to be able to sustain and maintain life.
Life, standards of living and lifestyles exist and can only exist where energy, water and the other natural resources that are essential to life come together in confluence in a way that life, standards of living and lifestyles can be maintained and sustained. Need I say that if and when the essential natural resources have been used and depleted then both we and our machines will stop working?
And don’t you forget it again!
This has been a message from the conservative environmentalist.