The Taking Of Minerals
Our civilization is run through the expenditure of energy. Since energy cannot be made out of nothing, it must be taken from something that already is existing. We often get such energy out of useful minerals in the ground. Things such as oil, zeolite, iron and copper are all taken from out of the ground. Since the size of the Earth is not infinite, though, it’s obvious that all the oil and zeolites we have will soon enough run out, and then we’ll be in real trouble as to the things we should do.
Consider for a second just how much of our daily activities require the utilization of power and the extraction of resources around the world. Not only do the valuable metals we extract from the Earth power our economy to a large extent, but oil is needed for virtually everything we do, silicon is needed for our computers, plastic and tires are created from oil, and of course trees are required to be cut down for wood and paper.
The cost this has on our environment could not be overstated. While it could be argued that plants are renewable resources, the idea that a three hundred year old tree can be cut down and substituted with a small tree, and that this is an adequate replacement, is obviously silly. The amount of harm that forest excavation creates to wildlife and the delicate ecology humans rely on cannot be fully grasped.
For lovers of nature, however, the news is not all bad. Unfortunately, the restoring of the balance of nature may come at the cost of many millions of people. As global warming grows increasingly into a visible reality, we’re starting to see that the toll human civilization has taken on the Earth may be unstoppable. Increasing amounts of natural disasters have been the result of our destructiveness, and as our mode of living does not appear to have altered at all over the past fifty years but only gotten worse, it seems that the response this will create from our natural habitat will be even more significant.
It has been said that if human beings were to be extinct, the Earth would go on, but if all insects were to be extinct, human beings would not be capable of living for very long. It appears that we’ve forgotten our own place in nature, and become distracted by television and the false image of the world it portrays. Perhaps with the destruction of some of our civilization, and the complete loss of fuel to run it with, we’ll be forced to recognize our part in a global ecology.
The idea that human civilization can go forever using non-renewable resources is clearly ludicrous. Unless we begin to make real moves to fundamentally shift the ways we lead our lives, the damage we make to ourselves and the Earth could be irreversible.
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