| "If you can't raise it, you
have to mine it. "This illustrates the simplicity of sustaining
life. We either raise what we need to live, or we dig for it! So
much of our planet's resources are portrayed as endangered, exploited,
over-used, under-replenished, etc. However, it is a fact that
there is a certain amount of everything: the same amount of water,
in some form (frozen, liquid, vapor), exists as it always has. The
United Nations 'envisions' that each person on Earth should receive four
gallons of water per day for all that person's uses, including laundry,
cooking, drinking, and sanitation. If we begin to use cloth
instead of paper for toilet use, how much of that four gallons will we
need to clean the cloth? A created crisis gets a lot of sympathy
and monetary support from those who are well-meaning but mislead. There
is the same amount of land surface, although, like water, land does
meander. It sinks in one place and rises as a volcano somewhere
else. Following this thought pattern, how can we exhaust our
supplies of anything when it all stays here? Recycling is not just
something humans invented a few decades ago; Earth has been the ultimate
recycler for eons! The
rainforest is the ultimate compost pile!! When we extract a mineral and
use it to make a combined form of product, the byproducts of that
eventually return to the earth to regenerate. For example, look at
gas. It is a gas, a substance that is not solid. When it is
burned, it is still a gas, and will eventually become reusable.
Should we stop mining and oil and gas exploration? Should we stop
living? |
