Miserable Abundance
We have arrived at an agreement of sorts about scarce resources in our modern world. The agreement is tentative, and the choice is either to accept it or be made to feel unwelcome. In other words, it is the type of agreement that works for humans: appealing to enough people that it can be imposed on the rest by force of social pressure.
The consensus view is thus that we’re so rich (as Americans/Westerners) and abundant as a species that our good fortune probably comes at a hidden expense. We cannot possibly be this well off collectively without there being hidden costs somewhere. The hidden costs are most likely found in nature, the place we have mostly escaped from. This has made us feel very guilty, in an abstract collective way. Our modern comforts require a lot of material belongings, chief among them energy, and therefore our energy needs are leading the way in destroying our home, the only planet earth we have at our disposal.
The onus is logically upon us to do something about our energy needs. We have to cut them, and if that isn’t possible, we have to do something in order to believe we’re cutting them. And because the imperative “Do something!” urges action rather than thought, we’ve embarked on an expensive effort to save the planet from our resource-hogging ways that will require consuming even more resources than ever before, because that is the price we will have to pay to make ourselves feel better about our wealth and abundance.
In order to feel like we’re not just living lives of guilty enjoyment while the planet suffers, we are willing to dig up even more geography in pursuit of ores in increasingly weak seams at ever greater cost. This is what’s required if we want to build enough wind and solar farms across vast acreages of landscape. We need as many megawatts of renewable capacity as we have of reliable conventional power plants online. We will need to double the amount of metals we’ve already mined in order to wire together all these far-flung, intermittent electricity sources.
Previous civilizations also went to great collective effort to appease the gods and higher powers they feared having upset. Whoever built Stonehenge, the Egyptian pyramids and similar monolithic configurations carved and hauled massive stones over spectacular distances considering their technological limitations. We believe they were built to communicate with or please the higher celestial powers. The Egyptians built their pyramids as did the ancient Mesoamericans for no purpose other than to appease and satisfy the gods.
Great cathedrals dressed in precious stones and metals, palatial temples, magnificent altars for sacrifice had the same purpose: Our forebears have gone to great collective effort to forestall any harsh sentences handed down from the higher beings. Today we’re doing something similar with our collective attempts to appease the planet. Yet our efforts only increase our resource use, accelerating the thing we presumably feel collectively guilty about. It would be just as sensible to leave our current electricity and energy infrastructure in place and functioning, but instead to wrap it in gold leaf and adorn it with tasteful artwork made of precious stones. After all, the effort is meant to make ourselves feel better about what we’re doing as we continue to do it at an accelerating pace. Just like our people have always done.
So, should I be feeling guilty about not feeling guilty about all of this? Will I feel better if I feel guilty? And if I do, should I feel bad for feeling better?
Honestly, I feel...confused?
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01818-z
Update on hippos in Colombia. It is reported that there are many more, like twice as many, as the government has been reporting for the last several years.
Unexpected!
*drink*