With no further effort at all, merely
by letting our current momentum sweep us along with it, we can
grind through the world's last wilderness by 1984 at the latest.
Just the undisciplined dash for energy can by itself obliterate
wilderness. So dash on then, find the energy, and spend it! But
what to do for an encore? The recoverable fossil fuels will be
gone. The feasible damsites will have been built upon and will
before too long be silted in. We'll have run out of ways -- once
we find any -- to dilute atomic waste from fission and realize
that fusion is best left in Pandora's box, remembering what came
out last time we opened it. We will have endangered the Oxygen
sink of the atmosphere by probing the earth's fossil fires in
geothermal experimentation. So we will use less energy, not more.
We will return return to ways of getting by with the energy the
sun gives us each day instead of exploding and spilling our way
through the energy capital the earth took four billion years
to acquire.
Do we return to those ways while
the world still has wilderness in it, or do we postpone the inevitable
turning until we have severed outright and irrevocably those
unbroken living connections to the beginning of life that the
wilderness has so far preserved? Do we really want to repudiate
the evolutionary force? These are questions a rational man should
not have much trouble answering if he paused to think them through.
Charles Burnham warned against
making little plans; they lack the power, he said, to inspire
men's admiration or support. So why not a big plan? Blessed as
we are with more data than were ever collected before, and confronted
with an improving technology that might better serve us than
direct us, we should prepare a plan not for a decade or a century,
but a bolder plan to last a millennium, with option to renew
. . . .
--DAVID BROWER
from the foreword,
Earth and the Great Weather: 1971
