by Reiner Klingholz

A stable environment is indispensable for human existence. Humans need air to breathe, clean water to drink, soil that can be used to grow food, bodies of water to supply fish, forests to save the ground water, and a climate that respective cultures have adapted to.

Simple arithmetic shows that problems arise when more people compete for the same resources. Many raw materials are lost, as well as their quality, through this process: water will become not only scarce, but also polluted. Soil erodes or becomes salted. Forests lose their worth as erosion control or genetic resources.

On a regional basis and in individual cases, humanity has already proven for a while that it can solve environmental problems. The result was the principle of sustainability, once known in German forestry when the depletion of the forest supply threatened entire regions. Sustainable management originally meant taking only the same amount of wood from a forest that could grow back in a year.

This principle is still valid today in all global areas of the environment, which given the growing world population and increasing raw material consumption, is particularly difficult to maintain. Today, however, there are technical means of regulation that make it possible for resources to be better, more sustainable, and more efficient to use than ever before. Theoretically, the global environment problems are at least more resolvable than the growing world population.

Sustainable agriculture means, for example, that it is possible to generate high revenues without endangering the fertility of the soil long term. High revenues are especially important in regions where the remaining forests must be laid bare for new farmland.

In many tropical regions, sustainable forestry means to restore an old situation. For parts of the last decades, deforested areas that have become unusable after being used for agriculture for a short period of time are reforested.

A sustainable exposure to drinking water presents an irresolvable problem in certain regions where there is little or irregular rainfall throughout the year: mainly, when the population density is so high, there simply not enough water resources to cover the personal, agricultural, and industrial need.

In the area of energy and climate, it is currently impossible to know if sustainability is possible. Out of the traditional energy sources, only wood is suitable for sustainable use. The amounts range, but even through intelligent forest management, there is not nearly enough to cover world wide demand. Also, the other sources of renewable energy, such as wind, water, and solar power, are currently not in an adequate or technically mature form that is available to cover the energy demands of society.

Fossil resources - coal, crude oil, and natural gas - are available in large amounts in the Earth’s crust, but they renew themselves too slowly. The burning of coal, oil, and gas would not be a problem per se; the resulting exhaust gases would not lead to massive local pollution and the greenhouse gases would not add to climate change.

For energy resources, the problem does not lie only in the limitations of the sources, but mainly in the finite nature of the natural depressions: the atmosphere is only capable of disposing of a certain amount of greenhouse gases again within the natural cycle. Radioactive waste from nuclear energy lacks a general way to decompose that could lead to a historic period with harmless resulting product from nuclear waste.

Sustainable energy policy means that there must be sufficient amounts of energy for all areas of life for the next generation, which without would compromise certain areas of life. At the same time, it is irrelevant as to which energy sources are used. In the long term, renewable sources like solar energy in the broadest sense - i.e. solar, wind, and hydropower, such as biomass - have the highest potential to save and to achieve a sustainable energy economy.

In the medium term it is necessary to use energy as efficiently as possible, whether it is finding the most economic value as possible from a used kilowatt hour or a refueled liter of gas. The way to decouple economic growth and energy use has been pursued for a while in industrialized countries and due to continually increasing standards, all of the technical improvements so far have been mostly overcompensated: for example with transportation, where car motors become continuously more efficient, the total energy needs still increase because there are always more people with more powerful cars and that are used more frequently. Therefore, a sustainable energy economy also means for the citizens of industrialized countries to consume less, or at least refrain from consuming unnecessary things.


State: August 2011
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