So I’ve been doing some thinking lately.
A lot of you have probably been checking in here from time to time, “mostly just skimming” (for which I wouldn’t fault you), looking for information on that whole oil thing that’s been in the news for a few months and seems to have suddenly disappeared (fear not, there will be more to say about that soon), or perhaps even digging through some of the archives to find some other, perhaps new, special areas of interest. I welcome those who have joined me at the table for a few servings of brain food, particularly those who have contributed their own thoughts to the discussion. At this point, after five months of WastedEnergy, I find it necessary to pause and reflect for a moment on some of the larger context of energy discussions within our society and in my own life personally.
I recently attended a college reunion where I was asked by a good friend, whom I had not seen in some time, just what it was that I hoped to accomplish by writing and talking about energy so extensively (she kindly left out the phrase “until everyone around you is annoyed and bleeding from their ears”). It was this inquiry that got my thought process moving in a bit more philosophical direction, as the question was one I had not really pondered, at least not so directly. Perhaps I had assumed, even erroneously, that the purpose was obvious, as the connections between energy and everything else might be plainly visible enough that no explanation or context was necessary. Upon further reflection, I realized that my purpose really was not so obvious after all, that the bigger picture was still fuzzy enough to obscure some of the connections we know are there but leave us still looking at something fragmented so long as they are invisible. So I will now address this, the nexus question, directly, the question of just what it is I am doing here and why I am doing it.
The Meaning of Greening: What I’m Seeing and Why I Think It’s Important
The question of why I or anyone else should choose energy as a starting point for discussion and a focal point for analysis is impossible to separate from the question of ecology, or the study of the objects and creatures that make up our homeworld and their interactions. Ecology is the science of interconnectedness in living systems, but beyond that it is a philosophy and a way of looking at the world. At its heart, this site is part of my effort to get everyday citizens to become more engaged and knowledgeable about the structures that lie at the center of our role in the universe, to think critically about the ways we use, think about, and discuss our world and its resources, to more clearly see humanity’s place within a matrix of ecological systems transversing space and time. This philosophy, which undergirds the “green” movement and all actions taken toward a goal of ”sustainability,” is widely misunderstood as advancing an altruistic rather than a self-interested mindset, which helps explain why so many environmental slogans fail to motivate or inspire us to meaningful action, sacrifice, or self-discipline. In fact, what the philosophy of ecology asks us to do is not to abandon our self-interest, but rather to expand the notion so that it includes not merely material gain for the body but also concern for our species, our future, the fate of life on our planet, the ability to live and breathe as nature has designed us all to do. It asks us to awaken into our true ecological “self” and to open our eyes to the connections between all living things and our agency to influence those connections, for better or worse.
The matter of energy arises naturally within ecology, as all living systems and all species require not just energy but an extensive surplus of net energy in order to survive, thrive, and pass on their genetic information to future generations. And a quick examination of humanity’s emergence and growth as a species reveals a series of radical transformations based on our ability to cleverly harness and manipulate different sources of surplus energy. These transformations range from the mastery of the primordial energy of fire, to the use of stone tools and organization of humans into hunting bands to harvest the food energy embodied in large mammals that nearly wiped out the world’s macrofauna, to the manipulation of photosynthetic productivity through organized agricultural systems, to the advancement of systems designed to take advantage of the Earth’s vast underground reserves of solar energy stored in the chemical bonds of ancient plant remnants that launched the industrial revolution. But humanity’s latest and most radical energy revolution yet did not truly come of age until the past century, when the vast physical networks of electrification, transportation, and information spanning continents began to appear and cement in place the seemingly instantaneous distribution of goods worldwide, both a harmonization and a homogenization of worldwide cultures and technologies, and even a certain singularity of consciousness. In other words, the built infrastructure we love to depend on and ignore most is exactly what has given us everything about the world we know today, to the extent that most of us no longer even have most of the skills that got humanity here in the first place and would have difficulty surviving were we no longer able to depend on our cellular telephones, let alone highways and electrical grids.
And therein lies the central problem of modern ecology and the the biggest question mark regarding humanity’s evolution and ultimately our fate in the cosmos: the centrality of the finite stores of excess energy to the modern human’s way of life. Without the unique properties we have come to know from fossil fuels, the convenience of abstracted energy disappears: energy becomes a part of your life once again when you must find and kill your next meal yourself rather than counting on these vast networks to take care of the problem. And we are now in the process of watching this convenience begin to disappear, thanks to both scarcity and catastrophic-scale ecological damage. The fact that members of our society can bear witness to the largest single ecological disaster in history and still insist on the necessity of drilling for oil in deep waters illustrates that transforming from a society based on drawing down and making available anywhere at all times the dense stored energy of stock-based resources to one based upon sustainable harvesting of flow-limited renewable resources is more than a matter of technology; it is a biophysical revolution of the first order, as radical as the emergence of the Earth’s first photosynthetic organisms. The challenge of confronting the limitations of fossil fuel is easily the greatest of our generation and may even turn out to be the most dramatic and sudden transformation of humanity the world has yet seen.
In light of the centrality of energy within the ecological-biophysical view of the world discussed above, the public’s inattention to energy discussions, demand for a context (“OK, but how is this relevant to me?”), and abstraction-level knowledge or even sheer ignorance of energy systems within broader human society actually reveals a crisis in our way of thinking about energy. The psychological crisis of a disconnect from the energy sources in nature that power our lives is so great that it that it threatens our very survival if we are unable to adapt quickly and effectively. It is this very urgency that demands my attention to studying the question of energy and to becoming as effective a communicator and student-teacher of an energy-ecology focused worldview as I can.
So I am trying to get people to understand, not just intellectually or in the abstract, but in a real, physical, visceral sense, the magnitude of the challenge that lies before us. I like to point out and talk about things like power plants, transmission lines, and garbage precisely because they are designed to be out-of-sight, out-of-mind, support infrastructure in the background, something that can be safely ignored and left in the hands of the experts. In fact, nothing could be more critical to the life we have bought for ourselves, while we actually just discovered that the supposed experts have been out to lunch for quite a few decades now and never really made much of a plan before they left the buiding. So it’s up to us now, and as a result, we need to get used to a few new ideas and shatter a few old misconceptions that have been popularized from way back in the days of energy ignorance and the paleo-economics that said free markets would always be able to provide you with energy and so there would be no need for you to think about it. So if I have to break things down and explain in some digestible way what WastedEnergy is all about, here are three take home points from my energy discussions that I’d want all my readers to understand at this point, encapsulated in three common myths about energy and the way we live today.
Myth Busting: Lets Blow Stuff Up
Myth #1: Energy is just one aspect of our society among many, and other areas are more or at least equally important.
Truth: As any physicist can tell you, energy is not just another part of our world, nor even just a part of everything; it is, in fact, all of everything. Classical economics, a religion based on worship of the twin idols of Reason and Abstraction and on Mankind’s mastery of both, has long treated energy as just one more sector of the economy with solvable problems to be delegated to yet another group of specialists, in this case engineers, even though anyone smarter than a fifth grader plainly knows many of the forms of energy we use today without which not a single industry or economic sector could survive. Sure, most economists will admit when pressed that no organizational unit of society at any scale could survive without an “energy sector,” unlike, say, a cotton sector or an electronics manufacturing sector, but they still persist in compartmentalizing it into something that can be abstracted and substituted away. Equating energy upon which everything relies with substitutable commodities or economic sectors is fallacious, but we persist in driving blind into the future because we believe it is possible to draw such analogies.
Myth #2: The crisis of unsustainability is mainly about technology, so I don’t really need to know the details.
Truth: Although it makes the point harder to sell, the truth is that sustainability in the way we produce and use energy, both the kind that powers our society and the kind that forms the matter of our world of resources and the physical environment, requires us to undertake not only a transformation of our infrastructure but of our psychology as well, demanding a more active whole-world ecological engagement of the mind, to trigger an event that might be described as humanity’s collective act of attaining a something like a kind of enlightenment. It definitely requires a whole heck of a lot more than a few wind turbines and hybrid cars. It requires more than energy-efficient appliances and “buying local.” Hard as it might be to believe, it even requires a lot more than a few recycling bins at the mall and at the airport (and not just because there probably won’t be a mall, and there definitely won’t be an airport).
Sustainability is more a question of physics than anything else and requires a quite fundamental transformation of how we look at and think about every object in the universe. It requires challenging the primacy of a Western mindset that has conquered the planet, and which tells us that economic value, or immediate utilitarian value to the highest bidder, is the only value that can or should be assigned to all objects, resources, and ideas. It requires adopting an ecological mindset that sees not just present value in resources but also the timeless and intrinsic value and power of all objects and living systems in the universe. The role that cheap energy has played in irreversibly reshaping our society is illustrated by the emergence of mass production after the Industrial Revolution, and the reassertion of something else that has crept back out from under its shadows in the post-industrial age: a hand-made economy, the primacy of creativity and re-emergence of ancient crafts not just for their aesthetic value but also from the standpoint of production value and utility under a new biophysical economic paradigm. In other words, the devil is not just in the details, it is in knowing the details.
Myth #3: Our economic and political systems are resilient in the face of energy shortages and scarcity. If we can survive and recover from a financial crash, then the economic system as we know it can suffer through an energy crash and still emerge relatively unscarred.
Truth: ???
To revisit the question posed earlier: what exactly am I doing here, and why the sudden outpouring of writings on this subject over the past few months? Sure, you might find a few interesting and hopefully even thought-provoking items here, but what exactly is the end goal?
Well, my next waypoint on this journey through cyberspace and elsewhere (not endpoints, for ours is a universe that contains none) is a fork in the road, and which path you might take next depends on where you stand (for this same fork diverges from many points in our world today). Some of us may even stand in two places at once. In any event, if you are one who considers yourself well-versed on energy issues, then I hope my writing serves as an awakening to the urgency of the discussion and a call to action and to spread the word further. Alternatively, if you are one of the many at a point where you recognize the problem of energy as an interesting curiosity but little more, perhaps a problem to be solved by other people…I can ask you only to open your eyes to the connections that lie in plain sight before you!
Duuuuude….everything in the universe is connected, and it’s all energy, man!
