Humans require resources in order to maintain our existence, namely water, air, and a consumable energy source. Without these, we die. In addition, because of our size and fragility relative to other creatures in nature, and in some cases, nature itself, we need resources to maintain shelter from threats. These shelters includes the physical (housing) and the virtual (healthcare). Lastly, we need resources to transport other resources to us, or us to them, and to maintain the quality of the resources we have.
Everything in our economy supports (or should support) the allocation of resources in a manner consistent with the values of the population. We need this allocation because almost all of our resources have limits. By definition, an economy manages resources of a community with a view towards maintaining members of the community so they can add value back to that community, i.e. maintain a quality of life. The toughest questions within that management center around how much of an obligation any community owes toward other groups of people, and how much of an obligation any community owes towards the future generations of its own members. A community that manages resources only for itself and only for the present will have a very different approach to its economy than a community that seeks to live in cooperation with others and wishes future generations to have access to a similar level of resources to support a similar quality of life.
As I just mentioned, almost all resources have limits. Sunlight and ingenuity stand as the only two limitless resources. Although the sun does not shine all day for everyone, it remains an infinitely continuing resource from our frame of reference; the minute it goes, we go. We cannot measure human ingenuity in a quantifiable manner, so to say it has no limit has somewhat of a ring of semantics, but in the resource discussion, this refers to our ability to make choices, adapt, and replace failing or disappearing resources with others that can maintain our quality of life with the same level of efficacy. For example, an area flush with apple trees that experiences a fire that decimates the tree population can shift to the growing of a lower-level crop to survive.
Within this framework of limited resources, I want to examine the effectiveness of our ability to manage resources, and the impact of our present course of management. Over the coming weeks, I will look at several of the necessary resources to our lives, our current management, and the impact of maintaining that method over the coming years. The analysis will have three main assumptions:
1. The American way of life should stand as a goal for the quality of life that any population on the planet should hope to attain.
2. We want future generations to have, at minimum, the same quality of life that we currently enjoy.
3. People will act in a rational manner that promotes equity of opportunity, as long as that action does not threaten their immediate survival.
Assumptions 2. and 3. address the questions of obligation raised in the discussion of economy, and assume that as long as our immediate existence remains in tact, we will hold ourselves to make sure that other communities and our future generations have access to the resources they need. Assumption 1. will cause consternation for some, and I do not throw it out there as a stumbling block to the discussion, but just as the starting point for the frame of reference. Advocates on all sides of the environmental debate spend energy fighting over what to do or not do, but I think they agree that we currently have, in general, a high quality of life in this country. Going into this analysis, I accept that one of three possibilities may result:
* We can support a high quality of life for all people in this country and the rest of the world on the resources currently available to us and in the way we currently manage them,
* We can support a high quality of life for all people on the resources currently available but we need to adapt the way we currently manage them, or
* We cannot support a high quality of life for all people on the resources currently available to us and we have to adapt our expectations or our behaviors to ensure continued survival.
In the weeks ahead, we will start the discussion with the basic resources of water, food, and air as (excluding a major scientific breakthrough) these currently stand as irreplaceable resources to our existence. After this, I will look at stored chemical energy and other physical resources. Although possible, an exhaustive discussion of every resource would overstate the point, so I will focus on a total of eight reasonably ubiquitous resources: water, food, air, fossil fuels (stored chemical energy), structural metals (copper, aluminum, iron, steel), technology metals (eg. platinum, gallium, cadmium), silicon, and wood.
First up...next week - Water.
No comments:
Post a Comment