Fossil fuels are the primary driver of our current non-sustainability crisis.\u00a0 We take it completely for granted that we can jump in our cars and drive, that grain from Minnesota can be delivered to China for a manageable cost, that our lights will come on when we flip the switch and our furnaces will keep us warm in the winter so long as we send out the monthly bill.\u00a0 We cannot imagine what life would be like without them, so we either assume that we will find a replacement (fusion anyone?) when they run out, or that we are headed for an apocalypse as supplies dwindle.\u00a0 Most of us are in a sort of confused denial; we realize on one hand that what we view as normal is in fact unstable, untested territory for our species, but we also know that we have grown too many and too ingrained in our ways to go back to the way it was before.<\/p>\n
Fossil fuels did not start the industrial revolution, but the industrial revolution transformed oil and coal from geological curiosities into essential building blocks of society, the basis of trade and motivation for war.\u00a0 The industrial revolution arose out of the Renaissance and a blossoming of science.\u00a0 First we harnessed the rivers, grinding grain and sawing lumber with waterwheels, gears, and pulleys.\u00a0 Then we invented the steam engine, freeing us from the limited sites and power of the rivers and allowing us to harness energy in any amount, anywhere, so long as there was something to burn.\u00a0 Then we cut down the forests and ran out of fire.\u00a0 We would have been forced to stop there, to work within the confines of the sun\u2019s energy, had we not discovered coal.\u00a0 The supply, in those first days, seemed limitless.\u00a0 Mines burrowed deep and factories belched smoke, and the rest, quite literally, is history as we know it.<\/p>\n
That story can seem perfectly natural to us, a straight arrow of progress that is bound to lead to something better, something that will allow us to continue with business as usual.\u00a0 There is still a 200-year supply of coal, they say, so why worry if none of us will live that long.\u00a0 Never mind that we are changing the climate and that fossil fuels are becoming harder to extract by the day.\u00a0 Fusion, or something, is bound to take over when oil runs out, in the same way that coal came to the rescue when Britain\u2019s forests were cut down.\u00a0 Never mind that after fifty years of intensive research by some of the world\u2019s smartest minds in billion-dollar facilities, fusion remains a laboratory curiosity with no projected roll-out date.<\/p>\n
Just in case our current situation still seems normal to you, allow me to tell a different story, of a different people in a different land.<\/p>\n
The Tapanui (ta-pa-NOO-ee), as they called themselves, lived in tropical forests.\u00a0 Furry golden bipeds with prehensile tails, they possessed an intelligence surpassing all other creatures of the forest, and they formed gregarious, matriarchal groups.\u00a0 Occasionally groups fought over favored fruit trees and hunting grounds, but usually the matriarchs resolved tensions before it came to blows.\u00a0 Once each month, on the full moon, the matriarchs would gather and the eldest would speak the word of the Great Mother, telling tales of turning cycles, of ancient history, of the other creatures of the forest.\u00a0 She would tell them where to plant the bitter annuna (a-NOO-na) seeds, so that the next generation might feast on the fruit.\u00a0 She would warn them that they must not plant too many, for the other trees were as important to the rest of the forest as the annuna were to the Tapanui.<\/p>\n
The men had rituals too, centered around the mysterious ike\u2019san (EE-kay-sahn), the arrow-rock.\u00a0 Rose-gold with a spectacular iridescence, ike\u2019san was found deep beneath the surface.\u00a0 On the same full moon nights, warriors would dig far beneath the trees, worming downward until, around sunrise, they would reach the solid ike\u2019san and chip off enough for a moon\u2019s hunts.\u00a0 Ike\u2019san was a rock that flowed.\u00a0 It felt solid and punctured throats and hearts as well as any stone, but if you left it on the ground it would spread and flatten, and if you placed it in molds of annuna heartwood, over a moon\u2019s time it would take the shape of the mold, a razor-sharp arrowhead.\u00a0 Ike\u2019san dissolved slowly with exposure to the elements, so every moon the warriors repeated the ritual of digging deep and loading the forms.<\/p>\n
The Tapanui had no knowledge of fire.\u00a0 Despite intense lightning storms, their rainforest never burned.\u00a0 In one sockdolager of a storm the warrior Oribe (O-re-bay) was returning from a hunt when the annuna tree beside him was struck and exploded.\u00a0 Splintered and steaming, it still stood tall against the roiling clouds, a lightning rod for the next bolt.\u00a0 This one set the splinters alight.\u00a0 In awe, Oribe picked up the burning sticks and returned to camp with his ike\u2019san kill.\u00a0 The warriors gathered around the flame, ike\u2019san arrows and spears sparkling like fireflies in the mysterious firelight.\u00a0 Oribe tossed in his arrows to feed the fire, and others followed suit.\u00a0 The ike\u2019san sizzled, sparked, began to release a liquid that flowed out of the fire and formed a cooling pool at their feet.\u00a0 Oribe touched a finger to the viscous liquid and tentatively put it to his lips.\u00a0 It was like nothing he had ever experienced.\u00a0 Sweet, spicy, nourishing, refreshing.\u00a0 The warriors filled a skin with old ike\u2019san arrowheads and placed it over the fire, taking turns drinking the remarkable liquid.\u00a0 The kill was forgotten and abandoned.<\/p>\n
San\u2019mel (SAHN-mel), they called it, rock-honey, melted from ike\u2019san by the Eternal Flame.\u00a0 Oribe and his warriors became high priests of the Eternal Flame, digging nightly for ike\u2019san and stacking branches under cover to keep the fire going.\u00a0 Every day they brought san\u2019mel to the women and to other groups of Tapanui.\u00a0 All rejoiced at this newfound nourishment, save for the matriarchs and especially the eldest, the one who spoke for the Great Mother.\u00a0 Take heed, she said, for you know not what you do.\u00a0 For all time you have been a part of the great cycles, eating of the fruits and animals and the energy of the sun above.\u00a0 Ike\u2019san is a part of the same cycles, but on my timescales, not yours.\u00a0 When san\u2019mel feeds you, you step outside of the cycles.\u00a0 You become unstoppable, disconnected.\u00a0 You forget about the annuna trees, the planting, the rebirth, your fellow creatures.\u00a0 You forget about me.\u00a0 You rejoice now, but both you and I will suffer in time.<\/p>\n
The Great Mother\u2019s warnings had little effect, for all were enrapt with san\u2019mel and the Eternal Flame.\u00a0 Oribe felt his power growing, felt himself channeling the mysterious energy within the fire.\u00a0 We shall leave our forest, he said.\u00a0 We shall cross the deserts and grasslands, the glaciers to the north.\u00a0 Wherever san\u2019mel flows, we shall follow, our power and creativity blossoming across the planet.<\/p>\n
The warrior-priests, the Oribe\u2019en (o-re-BAY-en), began to travel, carrying a torch in one hand and a skin of san\u2019mel in the other.\u00a0 To each group of Tapanui they found, they offered these gifts and preached the doctrine of the Eternal Flame.\u00a0 San\u2019mel is a gift to us from the divine, they said.\u00a0 Not the old Great Mother with her endless cycles and annuna trees, but a new divinity, newly awakened in the fire.\u00a0 He has chosen us to go forth and multiply, to have dominion, to spread san\u2019mel to all portions of the world.\u00a0 Nearly all accepted the gifts, for they had never seen fire or tasted san\u2019mel.\u00a0 A few resisted.\u00a0 At first they were ignored, but as the demand for san\u2019mel increased, the Oribe\u2019en began rounding up all who fought to work as slaves in the ike\u2019san mines, eating nothing but san\u2019mel and toiling in deep darkness to feed the Eternal Flame.<\/p>\n
Within two centuries, the entire planet had been transformed.\u00a0 Tapanui settlements covered the deserts, the plains, the mountains, and the distant islands.\u00a0 All ate a diet of san\u2019mel with little else, though a few experimented with agriculture and hunting for variety and the occasional celebration.\u00a0 Great viaducts and canals were built to carry san\u2019mel from the mines to the coast, where tanker ships set sail for distant ports.\u00a0 The mines themselves became wastelands, piles of discarded rock and miles upon miles of stumps, the trees cut to fuel the Eternal Flame, the great furnaces that converted ike\u2019san to san\u2019mel.<\/p>\n
Science, literature, art, and music flourished, those Tapanui lucky enough to avoid slaving in the mines finding themselves with an abundance of free time and energy.\u00a0 A complex society and economy developed, with san\u2019mel the basis for all trade.\u00a0 Generations rose and fell with the price of san\u2019mel, as the miners dug ever deeper, opening new mines in the high mountains, beneath the glaciers, even tunneling beneath the sea with air piped in from high above. \u00a0The Oribe\u2019en fragmented not long after Oribe\u2019s death, their ranks growing too large and too disseminated to manage the power they wielded.\u00a0 Each sect declared an Oribus, a high priest, and the sects fought over ike\u2019san mines and trade routes, dragging whole societies to war in defense of their access to san\u2019mel, the sacred liquid of life.<\/p>\n
Some three centuries after Oribe discovered fire and san\u2019mel, scientists began to issue warnings.\u00a0 Earthquakes were occurring with greater frequency and intensity near the mines, fracturing the viaducts and creating worldwide san\u2019mel shortages.\u00a0 At the largest mine in the world, a seam opened in the crust.\u00a0 Lava poured out in all directions, obliterating the mine and all Tapanui settlements within fifty miles.\u00a0 At first, these events seemed like mere coincidences, but a pattern was starting to emerge.\u00a0 Ike\u2019san was found in greatest abundance near tectonic plate boundaries, and it flowed over time.\u00a0 What if, they posited, ike\u2019san served as a lubricant, allowing plates to slide past one another without creating stress?\u00a0 What if, when the ike\u2019san was removed, stresses built up over time, leading to earthquakes and cracks in the crust?\u00a0 At first this was dismissed as an unfounded hypothesis, but experiments validated the theory.\u00a0 Strain sensors placed at plate boundaries near ike\u2019san mines reliably recorded more strain and more tremors than identical sensors near intact ike\u2019san deposits.\u00a0 Scientists agreed, and warnings were sent out to the Oribe\u2019en, to the governments, and to all Tapanui on the planet.<\/p>\n
Global summits were called, the crisis discussed in government halls and around dinner tables.\u00a0 Most agreed that something must be done, the remaining ike\u2019san protected, san\u2019mel replaced by something less harmful to the planet.\u00a0 Some yearned to go back to the old ways, to hunt wild game and harvest annuna fruits.\u00a0 A few radicals symbolically turned off the san\u2019mel taps in their treehouses, planted orchards and crops, and declared themselves san\u2019mel-free.\u00a0 The scientists, at the urging of the Oribe\u2019en, sought a technical solution \u2013 a way to make san\u2019mel without mining ike\u2019san.\u00a0 This proved possible in the lab; as they now understood, ike\u2019san was formed by a reaction between biological materials and intense heat at plate boundaries.\u00a0 Unfortunately, this synthetic san\u2019mel required even more fires to produce the heat, and it was limited by the amount of plant material that could be grown in one year.\u00a0 The limitless abundance of the ike\u2019san mines was simply not achievable, and the Tapanui were no experts in agriculture, having come to depend on san\u2019mel for the vast majority of their sustenance.<\/p>\n
As the tremors and lava flows increased, the ike\u2019san mines continued to dig downward and expand to all corners of the planet.\u00a0 Generations of the former tree-dwellers lived and toiled underground, ascending\u00a0 to the surface only on sacred holidays to view the Eternal Flame.\u00a0 A new technology emerged, one that promised to keep the san\u2019mel pipes full for another century.\u00a0 Fire-cracking, the scientists called it.\u00a0 The rocks adjacent to the ike\u2019san contained some amount of san\u2019mel locked inside, and this could be released by fire hot enough to boil the liquid and crack the rock.\u00a0 Some mines hauled the rock into huge piles with fires lit beneath.\u00a0 Others removed whole hillsides and mountaintops, shovelful by shovelful, and lit fires atop the san\u2019mel-rich rock below.\u00a0 Still others took the fire deep into the earth, pumping air deep down and san\u2019mel back up.\u00a0 Fire-cracking was a hellish process for all involved.\u00a0 The fires consumed every tree and shrub within a hundred miles of the mines, and the san\u2019mel ships which formerly returned empty now returned from distant lands with loads of logs to fuel the flames.\u00a0 Forests and mountains became slag piles and eroded clearcuts, miner life expectancy dropped to under thirty years, and Tapanui in cities downwind of the mines experienced sickness and tumors never seen before.\u00a0 Still the san\u2019mel flowed, with promises that it would flow indefinitely.\u00a0 The economy demanded it, and the Tapanui, even those who wished san\u2019mel had never been discovered, could not imagine a life without it.\u00a0 The sacrifices would simply be too great, the waters untested.\u00a0 Could a civilization built on san\u2019mel, dependent on san\u2019mel, survive without it?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This, dear reader, is where we are at in our parallel story right now.\u00a0 Climate change projections grow more extreme each year, with no sense that even the direst models will motivate us to emit less carbon.\u00a0 The fuels themselves are running out:\u00a0 oil now, coal and natural gas a few short generations later.\u00a0 Hydraulic fracturing, an energy-intensive and environmentally-damaging method for forcing the last drops of oil out of solid rock, is touted as a shiny way forward.\u00a0 Never mind that it will buy us at most 50 years of oil at our ever-increasing rates of consumption.<\/p>\n
Energy, agriculture, economy, society, religion.\u00a0 All are intertwined in our crisis of unsustainability.\u00a0 We will examine each of these in turn, but we will start next week by taking a closer look at energy.\u00a0 How much energy do we use?\u00a0 How much energy does the sun provide?\u00a0 Would it even be possible to replace fossil fuels with energy from the sun?\u00a0 If so, how might we get started?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Fossil fuels are the primary driver of our current non-sustainability crisis.\u00a0 We take it completely for granted that we can jump in our cars and drive, that grain from Minnesota can be delivered to China for a manageable cost, that … Continue reading