David Lagerman asks Are we ready and willing to change?

One of our big problems with environmental or sustainability matters is that the issues seem so distant. The damage to our neighborhood or the world merely creeps up on us; the big threats – climate disruption, resource depletion – all seem abstract.

Behold: Here’s the oil disaster unfolding in the Gulf, and it goes on and on, with relentless consequences we can see, at least on television, every day.

I have been asked what I am thinking about all this. Well, I am thinking that the various elements here – the physical events, the corporate and government responses, the pain experienced by those now being personally affected – are emblematic of the place we occupy in the sweep of history.

In the days when we would watch the launch of big boosters into space, rockets that carried our guys to the moon, the launch director would remark about a minute into the launch that the vehicle was now “experiencing maximum dynamic pressure.” That’s where our society and in some respects the world, now is. It’s a choke point in history; it is indeed, for us, maximum dynamic pressure.

There is plenty of blame to go around concerning this Gulf oil eruption event. BP was clearly cutting corners to save costs. They ignored evidence that the big rubber “annular” on the blowout preventer was damaged, decreed that the best practices in closing out the well could be bypassed. The federal government body overseeing all this has long ago been “captured” by the people they regulate and was letting the industry do pretty much as they pleased out there.

But where does the buck stop? Is there a “root blame” to be leveled in this matter? There is, and the buck stops with us, you and me. We and the generation before us, (at least) our mothers and fathers, were all “born on third base, and grew up thinking we’d hit a triple.” We are the beneficiaries of a one-time gift from our planet: all the fossil energy stored in the rocks. It’s an accident of Earth’s geological history, and events could easily have gone in other directions so that there never would have been that great leg up, that gift. Had that been the case, there would be vastly fewer of us, and we would now only slowly be developing ways to live more decently.

One specific example: I read recently somewhere that if not for the production of nitrate fertilizer (an industrial process using a lot of energy,) there would be 40 percent fewer people here now than there actually are.

We used to be solar creatures, with most work done by our own muscle power or those of draft animals, all fueled by foods grown in the sun. Our foods are still grown in the sun, but the energy to plow, seed, harvest, transport, process, package, distribute, is all fossil energy. So now, we, each of us, are virtually made of oil.

The easy oil, the cheap oil, the safe oil, is mostly gone. We Earthlings are now dependent on the expensive, the dangerous oil to continue to live decently, or even to live at all.

There are many of us, and we dominate the planet. So much so that geologists are debating designating our present times as a new formal epoch: the Anthropocene. The Holocene epoch is over, in other words.

We have changed things so much that it even registers on the geologic time scale.

Maybe not for long.

In the absence of major changes in our collective behavior, our influence on the biosphere is going to decline, along with an inevitable crash in our own numbers.

Can we head this off? Probably not. The hour is late. But is it possible to blunt the effects? Personally conserve and use less energy and material, certainly.

But that’s not enough.

We need to demand policy changes, beginning with a price on carbon emissions. The right price signals would go far toward encouraging the technical and business decisions that would move us away from our dependence on oil and coal, and towards a renewable energy society.

We need, not something, but everything: wind, solar, and biofuels. The present growing of corn for energy is apparently a dead end, but we need a crash program to develop affordable enzymes to bring about mass production of cellulosic ethanol from crop waste and switchgrass. Right here in Sheboygan County we could have a local energy economy that would handle most of our core needs, if not our excesses.

All that is needed is vision, research and development – and policy. Is the Gulf oil event a “wakeup call”? Probably. But it will pass.

The present confluence of ominous trends will not pass.