Homework #7

At the beginning of this Alternative Energy Technologies course, I thought that the only obstacles keeping humans from living on sustainable resources were money, the ill-informed, and conservatives. Looking back, it is abundantly apparent how naive I was. There are countless challenges in living on sustainable resources. We will forever be needing more energy to meet our skyrocketing demand. We must consider wildlife and ecosystems that may require alterations or destruction in order to accommodate our energy production. We must make the processes efficient enough that we produce more energy than we use in its creation. I was blind to all of these factors, and more, before starting this course. I was also unaware of the extreme advantages that traditional energy sources have in these fields, with the only major downfalls being their long-term environmental impact, and their centuries-long renewal time.

Furthermore, I had this silly image of coal, oil, and natural gas as being these dark, devious energy sources that only serve to destroy the Earth and fatten industrialist pockets, whereas sustainable resources were these pillars of virtue that cradle the Earth and all of its creatures, while simultaneously meeting all of our hefty needs. I can liken this pristine image to that of the Giving Tree from Shel Silverstein's book of the same name. In the book, the tree provides the boy with everything from its apples to its own wood, without asking for anything in return. I have learned throughout this course that, similar to sustainable resources, the tree would have required expensive soil, daily watering, and years of growth before yielding to the boy. Even then, the tree still would have had a possibility of providing a bad apple in a small harvest,  or overshadowing other wildlife and choking out its existence.

Nevertheless, humans need energy just like the boy needed to eat apples. We may not like to pay the prices for sustainable energy resources, but it is a step we must take if we want to continue existing. Not only are we damaging our planet through the use of traditional resources, as I knew before this course, but we're also going to run out of these resources some day, and it is currently impossible to sustain our current lifestyles without a heavy reliance on traditional resources.