When oil was easy to find, it required a lot less effort to extract. Punch a hole in the ground, and the oil flowed. As oil has become more difficult to locate, the environmental impact of producing it has increased markedly. We now look for oil deep beneath the sea and we scrape away the boreal forest of Canada to expose buried tar sands.
Even if our oil consumption were to level off tomorrow, our impact on the environment, per barrel of oil produced, is much greater than it was decades ago.
An analogy applies to the ocean’s fisheries. The early literature of commercial fishing describes thick schools of cod off New England. Fishermen could fill their boats in no time. Fish were cheap; the resource was more than enough to satisfy demand. Now, fishing effort is increasing at more than 1% per year, just to maintain the global catch of about 90 million tons. This requires more diesel fuel and disturbs more of the ocean seafloor than many years ago.
Many of my colleagues argue that it’s not the rising human population, but increasing resource consumption that is responsible for environmental degradation. Both are undoubtedly involved. But, I fear that we have overlooked another factor that underlies both viewpoints.
We’ve already extracted the easy resources. Supplying even the same amount of product from what remains will cause an increasing level of environmental impact that we cannot afford.
Not to be pessimistic, but we have a major job ahead of us if we are to leave future generations a world worth living in.
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Web Links
Not All About Consumption
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6125/1286.summary
Photo, taken on June 23, 2007, courtesy of James Cridland via Flickr.
Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio. Support for Earth Wise comes from the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, NY, with partial support from the Field Day Foundation.