Teaching Environmental Literacy: Across Campus and Across the Curriculum

2 Population, Energy, and Sustainability

2 Population, Energy, and Sustainability Bennet B. Brabson Physics In their comprehensive article on sustainability, Thomas Prugh and Erik Assadourian (2003) introduce the general the idea of development, followed by the more specific idea of sustainable development. ‘‘All people and cultures try to improve their lives and conditions: this process is often called development.’’ They then paraphrase the Brundtland Commission’s (1987) definition of sustainable development as ‘‘roughly, the ability to meet our needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet theirs.’’ Immediately, this definition raises the question of what future generations need. Though it would be presumptuous for us to decide what they need, they will, no doubt, want more than to simply survive. Like us, they will want choices; they will want to thrive. Since our lives are so extensively shaped by the consumption of energy, it is likely that these future generations will also want substantial energy. Of course, this presents an intriguing dilemma. The world population, now greater than 6.7 billion people, is growing and projected to reach 9 billion by 2050. At the same time, we are rapidly depleting our nonrenewable fossil and nuclear fuel resources 40 ⭈ bennet b. brabson to meet our own energy needs. How, then, can we reconcile our own enormous and growing appetite for energy with this concept of sustainable development and the evident energy needs of our children? Clearly, energy must enter our discussions of sustainability and sustainable development. Sustainable development can be viewed as the integration of three key categories of human needs: economic (material goods and services), environmental (‘‘natural capital,’’ including clean air, clean water, biodiversity, and raw resources ), and social (education, collaboration, quality of life . . . ) (Prugh and Assadourian 2003). From this perspective educational institutions provide a microcosm of the world. Just as the long-term economic, environmental, and social health of the world depends on our choices and decisions about energy, so also does the health of an educational institution. Environmental literacy at the university scale, then, includes an understanding of the economic, environmental, and social consequences of energy use at local and global scales and, perhaps more importantly, learning how to make choices and decisions about energy use during this intense period of student learning. Sustainability and Our Energy Supply Just how much fossil fuel energy do we have? Environmental literacy must surely address this question. The university students of today will be making most of the future decisions about energy. It is critical that these decisions be informed ones, based on an accurate assessment of the world’s available energy. Human beings are greatly resourceful. Replacing physical labor by harnessing external energy sources has a long and auspicious history. While renewable resources such as wind, water, and wood have been used for several thousand years, the last four hundred years have witnessed the rise and recent dominance of the use of the nonrenewable fuels, coal, oil, natural gas, and uranium. During the twentieth century the consumption of these relatively plentiful nonrenewable resources grew exponentially, mainly because our unbounded human ingenuity found so many ways to use them. At this moment in our human story, both the energy use per person and the population itself continue to grow. For both of these reasons we are rapidly drawing down the world’s nonrenewable fuels, both fossil and nuclear. The history of U.S. oil resources serves to illustrate this point. The United States was self-su≈cient in oil until 1965. Since that time we have been obliged to import oil. In spite of new oil from the Alaskan north shore, U.S. annual oil production peaked in 1970 and has been in decline since that time. Remarkably, the amount of oil we consume each year continues to grow. At present we in the United States consume some five times more oil per person than the world average and are obliged to import the majority of the more than seven billion barrels we consume each year. As our own oil resources dwindle, we Population, Energy, and Sustainability ⭈ 41 find ourselves turning to our unrivaled military strength to protect our external oil supply lines. A more detailed analysis predicts that a finite resource like oil will be produced and consumed according to a bell-shaped curve called the Hubbert curve (Hubbert 1971). According to this model, when first discovered, the production of a resource such as oil grows rapidly as...