One thing that never gets considered is that it took multiple millions of years for the earth’s oil to decompose. What is a derivative of the sun (aside from everything that exists, since everything exists as a result of the beings that feed directly from the sun) is the plants and animal and other living matter that stored the suns energy in those years, and then decomposed over millions of years to form what we have found as oil. I’ll say that again – millions of years. Let’s just say that there was some brilliant invention that came out tomorrow, that took away our need to use 90% of the oil we are currently using. Our use of fossil fuels would radically decrease, but not cease of course. Obviously, that would be a great thing and many people would cheer and hurrah. But then, let us think about the millions of years it took these fossil fuels to form. There is still no way we could wait that long to meet the demands our growing society has on these fuels. We would then have to take into account actually manufacturing these fossil fuels ourselves – which we don’t. We simply look to extracting them from the earth and refining them, but that is not the true cost. I don’t know what the true cost actually is, but we could figure it out, by creating a plant that could manufacture fossil fuels ad infinitem. I know for certain, that if we look at the extraction costs and the refining costs, if we were manufacturing oil, we would paying at least 10 times the cost, because the technology needed would be mind-boggling in size and sophistication. They don’t exist. We are about to hit a brick wall, unless we seriously reduce or eliminate our dependence on fossil fuels.
- Edible plants.
- We largely ignore that there is generally an abundance of edible plants surrounding us, unless we live in the center of a city. Often we kill a lot of the healthiest plants – weeds like dandelion.
- Water
- We often try to get water that rains from the sky off the land as soon as possible with drains and things, and once it gets out into the ocean, it is then salt water, which takes a long time to become drinkable for living things again.
- Agriculture
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- Until very recently in the timeline of the human species, we were hunter-gatherers. Somewhere around 10,000 years ago people started wondering how to grow the food they needed so that they wouldn’t have to search for it. It gained momentum in the Middle East and began what we know as agriculture.
- There was a major leap forward in agriculture in the early 20th century, when it was discover that nitrogen was a good fertilizer for growing plants, and so we began to use it on a larger scale. What we didn’t think about then and still don’t, is the earth required for plants to grow in this fashion. Everything is finite, so when we make something more productive, we are taking from something else, so now we are in a situation where we have depleted the soil that underlies the growth of all plants on earth of its minerals. Being ‘genius’ species, we keep trying to find ways to get around that, but the reality is is that we cannot find a way around this, not through genetically modifying crops, using weed-killers, making nitrogen out of fossil fuels or any other means.
- Pests, or mere insects, have been a big problem in agriculture. When things are grown unnaturally, the ecological balance is thrown off, creating viruses and allowing opportunistic species to thrive unless fought against, as we do. We could be seen as opportunistic pests ourselves when it comes to our effect on the earth itself, and though that may seem like an emotional statement, it is the truth with regard to the definition of a pest. Pests in terms of insects are becoming resistant to the pesticides currently used on produce, creating the need for increasingly harmful, polluting and toxic pesticides.
- The weeds that we are trying to kill are now becoming resistant to the weed-killer we put on them, and we are now speaking of putting something called Agent Orange on them. Agent Orange was a diabolical herbicide used during the Vietnam War that killed many people, and now it will be used in place of RoundUp.
- The situation we have at hand here is that we are currently growing more crops in an unnatural fashion, than the earth can support.
We’ve created this concerning chicken-and-egg situation where we’ve done all these things and now rely on these situations to support the increasing population of the human species, and we’re heading to a point where the things that allowed us to reach 7 billion people in the first place are beginning to falter – the end of fossil fuels, problems in agriculture, climate-change related droughts… We are only beginning to pay the true cost of living. It is incumbent that we that are living in these times do everything we can to recreate a natural, non-toxic, and tuned in existence for our children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and so on down the line. They need a decent life as we have been able to have, and to stray from the idea of the depletion of earthly resources that we have acted on. It can’t continue anyway, so it is up to us to help our descendants transition as easily as possible.