Do You Think of Yourself as a Consumer or a Conservator?

One of the things that intrigue me is how unscientific most people seem to think. I think most of us learned the scientific method in primary or secondary school, at least I hope so. Science has dominated scholarship for years and yet, so many people, even those trained in the sciences seem to not think very scientifically on most subjects. I am surprised by the number of doctors who often rely on antidotal information over scientific studies.

When I was young I read a book by C.P. Snow, “The Search.” Now the man has written 44 books, but this one caught my eye as a must read for folk who want to know about science. C.P. Snow as I recall was a crystalogist, aah call him a chemist. He writes about science at its beginnings when the field was wide open and discoveries were being made all over the place. It excited me about science and its practice.

Now you know I’m a pastor, a theologian, and a person who basically views things with the eyes of faith. But I am also a scientist, a social scientist with a B.A. was in sociology and I prize my scientific background. I see not conflict between science and religion, they walk hand in hand as we try to understand the world in which we live.

Today 95% of climatologists, the scientists who study our world’s climate systems, agree that we have global warming – 95%! Today, according to a Rasmussen poll 68% of folks polled think climate change is serious which is a significant shift from 2009 when on 46% of Americans thought it was a problem and 48% thought it was exaggerated.

Bill Moyers last Sunday visited with Tim DeChristopher who went to prison protesting an auction of gas and oil drilling right to 150,000 acres in publicly owned land in Utah. He falsely bid on most of the parcels, which is illegal as he lacked the money to pay for them and went to jail. He was offered many plea deals (see previous article) but chose a jury trial and jail to make his point. He has a documentary coming out, Bidder 70 that I’m anxious to see. It also pleased me that now he is going to seminary to be a Unitarian minister.

DeChristopher remains optimistic about the planet’s survival but wisely he questions how people will react to global warming change – adapting and working together, or warring over the remaining resources. Good question. Scary question.

This all brings me to the hard part, the title of this piece. Personally put, am I a consumer or a conserver? I would hope you’d ask yourself the question as well. Sadly, I think I have to condemn myself as one of those with a large carbon footprint. I live in two buildings, which we heat year round (at least one of them) even if we go south. We are very bad recyclers. We don’t garden. I love energy burning gadgets. We’re okay with insulation but we could have a more efficient dwelling. And we live in a country that uses 19% of the total primary energy consumption; 98 quadrillion Btu of 511 total world Btu. China uses more but look at their population. They have a population of 1,354,040,000 and ours is 315,931,000. Or has we have heard we are 5% of the world’s population and use 20% of its resources.

This self-examination can suck. But we all need to listen to our scientists and think about the future and what we can do in the present or our future progeny may be at war with each other over resources. I guess we are now. It is oil now, but the next fight will be over water.