Gaia (jē'ə) or (Guy-Uh) part 2

My father is as wise as he is weathered, but he doesn’t always see things clearly. After my younger sister expressed to him her interest in saving the environment he replied with the following:

“Stop trying to save the planet. There’s already enough people trying to do that.”

Gaia, our earth, our home, cannot sustain if this is our attitude towards it. It’s a huge task to take on, saving the earth. It is a task that has been set up by our own doings. Until recently Gaia used to regulate herself just fine throughout her 4.5 billion year existence. Our 100,000 + year residence on this planet has only recently began to become a threat towards its wellbeing. The age of industry that we currently live in has only been .1% of our time here as a species, but Gaia sees it as even less than that.


Global Warning

We’re all familiar to some extent with how the planet has been affected lately. How could we not be? It’s everywhere in the news.

• The ice caps are melting
• Carbon dioxide is filling the air
• Deforestation is becoming excessive
• The planet is heating up too rapidly
• Every corporation is going green

The last topic is the most recent to come into the limelight. Everybody is going green! It’s the new and hip thing to do (only because there’s money in it). So is the nature of human beings, to be driven by incentive. We are all naively convinced however that this green movement can make a difference from the minimal scale it is being launched. While we might have stopped using materials that create waste we still continue to build while simultaneously destroying ecosystems. Once an ecosystem is destroyed others begin to suffer the same fate. We’ve all seen a diagram of a food chain. Just imagine it as a tournament bracket where all the teams at the bottom start to get eliminated as you move up the chain.

Although weve been subliminally programmed to think otherwise, this planet is not just for us. Some say it’s a miracle that life even exists on this “rock.” But the theory of Gaia goes beyond acknowledging the earth as just a rock with life forms on it. Imagine viewing the earth as a whole, complete with its own self-regulating system for topography and climate, a unique inner geology, and ability to sustain a surface biology. That is Gaia in a nutshell. She is different from her terrestrial cousins, Mars, Venus, and Mercury. They all have no lives.


Green

If there’s a strong lobby for it in Congress, it can’t be good. Here are the measures currently being pushed for in environmental legislation:

• The building of more wind farms
• Bio fuels as a renewable source of energy
• Sustainable development
• Painting the White House green

The last one wouldn’t surprise me, but it’s indeed false. The rest are still fair game.

Wind power sounds good to most of us. It appears clean, simple, and can be put both onshore and offshore. What were not told however is how inefficient and cost defective it truly is. Whether it is generated on land or at sea wind energy is two and a half to three times more expensive per kilowatt hour than gas or nuclear energy. Also, with the NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) attitude of people it is difficult to determine where these wind farms might be placed. Some people think they look hideous. But besides their high cost in maintenance and their appearance I see them as a small supplementary solution to alternative sources of energy. Great Plains anybody?

When used at a reasonable rate the burning of bio fuels poses little to no threat to Gaia. However, the great amount of farming it would take to rely on bio fuels as a renewable energy source is where the real danger comes into play. Gaia did not intend to have all of its hair trimmed so we could give it tattoos on every square mile of its surface. This is exactly what we’re doing. We’re defacing the surface to sustain our high demand for food. There’s 6 billion people too many on this planet and the number will continue to grow. How are all these people going to eat if some of the land used to farm is now going to our gas tank?

As I mentioned before any new development is a problem because of the danger it poses to ecosystems. Irregardless of how “sustainable” the development is in the end a new building is being erected where once stood the habitat of one of Gaia’s children. Sustainable development entails the use of environmentally friendly materials to build (first of all it’s not very friendly to the environment to deface it). I believe that true sustainable development will come when the machines that we use to build are sustainable (i.e. tractors, cranes, trucks, etc.) Companies that now pride themselves on recycling only engage it in it because they’ve realized its cost savings. Also, because sustainable development is the latest craze a booming market has sprouted from it. There are new jobs to be filled, new things to be built and renovated, and more money to be made. I can see why the slogan “Going Green” is so appropriate.

*****

When I used to think of nuclear energy two words used to come to mind: Armageddon and meltdown. After looking into it further I’ve discovered how vital nuclear energy could be towards prolonging humanity. I will discuss this further next time.

To be continued…

~Anthans