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| I Am Skooter | |
| So here's us, on the raggedy edge. | |
In May of 1998 the Atlantic Monthy print an article called A Special Moment in History
It beings with a caution to:
BEWARE of people preaching that we live in special times. People have preached that message before, and those who listened sold their furniture and climbed up on rooftops to await ascension
and then goes on:
And yet, for all that, we may live in a special time.
The rest of the article goes on to make several points with society, in general, has yet to fully aware of. The article’s well worth reading, and should lead to some careful reflection on the values of our world.
“…William Catton, who was a sociologist at Washington State University before his retirement, once tried to calculate the amount of energy human beings use each day. In hunter-gatherer times is was about 2,500 calories, all of it food. That is the daily energy intake of a common dolphin. A modern human being uses 31,000 calories a day, most of it in the form of fossil fuel. That is the intake of a pilot whale. And the average American uses six times that—as much as a sperm whale.”
The emphasis is mine.
This is closely followed by another good point, particularly salient to my life.
“…Some scientists in Vancouver tried to calculate one such ‘footprint’ and found that although 1.7 million people lived on a million acres surrounding their city, those people required 21.5 million acres of land to support them—wheat fields in Alberta, oil fields in Saudi Arabia, tomato fields in California. People in Manhattan are as dependent on faraway resources as people on the Mir space station.”
Posted by skooter at 8:05 PM
This entry is filed under Politics, Science.
This entry is tagged: Articles, Energy, Environmentalism, Overpopulation