Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist Read Online Free PDF Page A

the keynote speaker to a ceremony marking the designation of 550,000 acres of the Sacramento Valley’s rice fields as a Shorebird Site of International Significance. [2] Many of the species that winter there pass from the Northern to the Southern Hemisphere annually. On that day I felt vindicated in my optimistic outlook for the future of human civilization and the global environment. The evolution of rice farming practices in the Sacramento Valley provides the definition of sustainability.
    Renewable, Clean, Sustainable, and Green

    We throw these four words around as if they were synonymous when they actually have distinct meanings.
    Renewable is used to describe resources and energy supplies that have relatively short cycles of natural replenishment. Nearly all renewable resources are based on the sun’s energy. These include biomass, hydroelectric energy, geothermal heat pumps, wind and solar energy, and the wood used for fuel, construction, and paper products. Trees, and the wood they produce, are the most abundant renewable material and energy resource. All our agricultural food crops as well as wild fish, game, and plants are renewable and based on solar energy.
    The term clean , as in clean technology , is relatively new and simply refers to technology that does not pollute the environment. By this standard wind, solar, nuclear, and hydroelectric energy are all clean. But it is important to look at the full life cycle. All technologies have impacts on the environment. Bauxite ore must be mined to make aluminum for solar panels, cement must be produced for hydroelectric dams and nuclear plants, and factories must be built to produce liquid biofuels. So clean is a relative term meaning cleaner, much cleaner, we hope, than previous or alternative technologies.
    Just because a resource is renewable doesn’t mean it is clean. When wood is burned in an open fire it produces a lot of soot and volatile, toxic gases. Indoor smoke from fires for cooking and heating kills 1.5 million people annually, according to the World Health Organization. [3] Therefore renewable fuels such as wood, straw, and dung are the leading cause of death from air pollution.
    Sustainability, originally called sustainable development, is a concept, not something fixed or absolute. Some have described it as a journey rather than a destination, as there is no final perfect state of sustainability. As we and our environment evolve we must adjust to changing circumstances. While it’s nice to think there is some ideal state we could attain, sustainability is actually a perpetual work in progress.
    Sustainability is a relative concept, depending on the time scale we consider. On one hand nothing is infinitely sustainable, even the sun will burn out (and evidently take the earth with it) billions of years from now. For practical purposes it makes sense to define sustainable in terms of human generations. It means getting away from just thinking about tomorrow or a few years from now and thinking 100, 200, even 500 years into the future.
    And just because a resource is renewable doesn’t mean it is sustainable. The vast herds of buffalo that roamed the plains were renewable but they were harvested at an unsustainable rate and nearly exterminated. More recently the Atlantic salmon and Atlantic cod have been severely overfished and have yet to recover. And sustainability is not only an environmental concept; it also includes economic and social factors. Solar voltaic panels use solar radiation, which in itself is highly sustainable. But at a cost of more than 50 cents per kilowatt-hour, 10 or more times the cost of conventional electricity sources, it is unlikely solar panels are economically sustainable, especially in developing countries.
    In the same way that some things that are renewable are not necessarily sustainable, some nonrenewable resources are highly sustainable. Iron ore, which is used to make steel, is a classic example. Iron is nonrenewable,