Look for the bare necessities

Today, for the first time in a while, I slowed down. 

The everyday race did not control me as much as usually. And I think this is correlated: I did not feel the urge to consume as much. To eat, to drink, to buy... 

When you are never anchored in the now, but always striving towards a future goal, you keep planning and wanting new things. You never stop to realize you actually don't need much. That old Baloo from the Jungle Book had it all figured out. 

 We are dissatisfied because we are unable of being satisfied with the present, with what we already have. So we need more, we need new, we need better. Of course, advertisements won't tell you that. It is precisely this dissatisfaction that feeds capitalism. Who will buy if not the frustrated part of us? 

 Sure why make a generality out of what I personally feel? Maybe because we are all moulded by the consumerist society we grew up in, Vast question to make out what is innate and what is shaped. But no matter who the culprit is, we have made our happiness depend on what we have. As hard as it is to accept, there is some truth to it. Good news is it is not fixed, we can change this once we've accepted it, that is.

 

Song courtesy of Mr Louis Armstrong. Source: Disney Corporation

The timing for fossil-fuel

A predominant driver for climate change is the intensive use of hydrocarbons. When they are burnt, Co2 gets rejected into the atmosphere. It traps infra-red radiation that would normally escape to space, and reflects it back to earth.

The consequences of human-based activities have grown dramatically since the Industrial Revolution. The latter refers to the transition period from an organic economy to a fossil-fuel economy.

Let me contrast the two epochs. In an organic economy, human beings derive energy from solar radiation. The land captures the heat which is then converted into food. The sun’s energy also drives wind and water fluxes which are transformed thermodynamically. However these processes are lengthy and the energy produced is low in density.

Conversely, fossil fuels constitute huge supplies of energy. Indirectly, it is also solar radiation that produced this energy (through organic matter decaying). They were formed over millions of years, but over time they became very dense energy reserves (Jones 2010).

The first law of thermodynamics states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Thus it is not that hydrocarbons contain “more” energy than the energy used in an organic economy. If energy cannot be created, it can be transformed (Bejan and Kutz 2009). The transformation process has already taken place in the case of fossil-fuels. Whilst it is an ongoing process for organic energy sources.

The key difference, then, is that fossil-fuels provide energy that is “available for immediate use” (2010, 453). Energy density grew as a function of time. The transition process from solar energy to readily usable energy has already been broken down.

Clearly this availability is very attractive: why wait for a relatively small energy supply when we have condensed energy we can use right away?

In a way, should we expect a new energy shift, that is, towards more sustainable energy supplies, to be so evident in that context?

I argued that the time component played a crucial role in the transition from organic to fossil-fuel economy. I relied on Jones' findings. His argument focuses on how hydrocarbons' dense energy enabled the transport of goods and people in a particular context. It is a local example, that we can hardly generalize. That is why I ignored the social component of his paper. However, his observations on the energy transition mechanisms were clear and more general. 

Time to think

Source: Xetobyte

Time... An abstract concept that has come to run our lives in many ways. It can be anything: fleeting or slow, good or bad, infinite or interrupted. 
Anyway the point here is to unveil the consequences that our relationship to time (since the mighty Industrial Revolution) has on our environment. 
How does our desire for shrunken time frame our relationship to nature? In other terms, in what ways does the faster pace of our daily routine damage planet earth?
Of course our desire for immediacy is detrimental to nature indirectly. But I'll try to look at the mechanisms that affect it.
I thought of this topic because it affects us so much, without us realising it.
Unintendedly, we are actors of earth's destruction. Our impatience is one way through which this is happening. 
I'm the first one trapped in this race against time. In theory I would like to be slow, but in practice, I walk fast, like all of us urban-dwellers. I guess decelerating is a slow-growing process ;)