Underlying
all the grand and sweeping fantasies of endless economic growth powered somehow
by lukewarm sunlight and inconstant wind, I’ve come to think, lies the
simple fact that the human mind never quite got around to evolving the capacity
to think in terms of the huge amounts of energy our species currently, and
briefly, has at its disposal.
It’s
one thing to point out that a planeload of tourists flying from Los Angeles to
Cairo to see the Great Pyramid, back when political conditions in Egypt allowed
for that, used more energy in that one flight than it took to build the Great
Pyramid in the first place. It’s quite another to understand exactly what
that means – to get some sense of the effort it took for gangs of
laborers to haul all those blocks of stone from the quarries to the Nile, load
them on boats, then haul them up from the Nile’s edge east of Giza and
get them into place in the slowly rising mass of the Pyramid, and then to
equate all that effort with the fantastic outpouring of force that flows
through the turbines of a modern jet engine and keeps an airliner poised in the
thin air 40,000 feet above the ground for the long flight from LA to Cairo.
This weeks’ Green Thought comes from John Michael
Greer’s internet blog ‘The Archdruid Report’ (http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/)
