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I grew up in a large city in southern California. The lush forests that many others have taken advantage during their life were only viewable through my television screen. The lights which illuminated the streets at night and kept our house warm in the arid landscape were a product of environmental exploitation. A majority of which came from the burning of coal. The cars which littered the freeways also required energy. The lights and increasingly complex network of electronic devices within the vehicle received energy from large batteries, while the propulsion of the vehicle relied on another fossil fuel, gasoline. While observation of the two compounds may lead one to believe they are completely different, they share an important characteristic, which is as their name implies, very old and currently an unrenewable source of energy. This fact alone should be enough to move utilitarians away from their use. If it's not enough then surely the fact that it is damaging our environment would be enough right? Unfortunately the debate of the utlization of our planets resource is not this simple.
As I stated earlier many people on our planet manipulate the environment in hopes of living a comfortable life. As our understanding of how to harness energy and even more importantly, transforming and allocating that energy to a location which can be utilized, is for lack of a better word, limited. As a result we currently require a substantial amount of fossil fuel to meet our energy demands. Unfortunately acquiring these resources will inevitably be damaging to the environment. Even in what some may refer to as clean energy sources such as the turbines in dams, damage to a natural ecosystem cannot be avoided. John Miur did not believe that construction of the Hetch Hetchy Dam was justified regardless of the energy implications. There will always be two sides to this debate, one that attempt to preserve what's left of our natural habitats with others who wish to exploit them. Luckily there are always more than two sides to an issue.
"God Almighty has located the resources of his country in such a form to utlize them as that His children will not use them in disproportion," said Martin Dies. Whether or not god was the one who put them there is a topic of another debate, however I do agree that to ignore that which is right in front of us, would be us not living up to our full potential. With that said I also believe that there needs to be processes which prevent irrepairable damage on the thing which we all ultimately rely on, planet earth. The extent of which our planet can withstand should most definitely not be assesed by politicians in my opinion. I believe that experts on the subject should be charged with how much should be used and in which form. As a result i'm a proponent of the sustainable-ecosystem approach. According to Conserving Natural Resources by Bertie Josephson Weddell writes, "this approach focuses on conserving the processes that sustain health ecosystems." As I am not an expert on this subject my main focus is the larger picture.
Placing the judgement of how resource allocation into the conservationist's hand will undoubtedly cause conflict for the economists. However as a member of academia I can't help but feel a predispostition towards the concept of leaving the matter up to the discretion of the experts (call me crazy haha). I once read an article where a renowned astrophycists (his name presently escapes me) took a inventory of the economic importance of the environment. While some values such as oxygen may have been assigned an arbitrary value, the figures were in the trillions. From the food that we eat to lumber we extract, the environment is our ultimate source of survival. To fully account for the ways in which our environment assist us would ultimately be a practice in futility.