Future is in our hands

In the early 1940s, as a barefoot-in-summer lad in Ireland, I had my introduction to the natural environment. My family had a small store and pub on a gravel coast road in The Burren, a barren karst limestone district on Galway Bay.

My father had built a small windmill, using the dynamo from a Ford car, with a wooden wind direction indicator, on an eight-metre pole. The constant winds from the ocean kept three “wet” batteries charged, which provided enough electricity for four light bulbs and a wireless radio. Every night, my father and the neighbours from miles around gathered around the wireless to listen to the news/propaganda from the war fronts.

I remember those days now as I consider what is happening to the planet.

In the past 250 years, since the beginning of the industrial age, our planet has been subject to the constant increasing impact of humans, who are overusing and abusing the very basic elements of the sensitive natural environment. This impact cannot continue. The natural environment will eventually succumb to our carelessness unless we, collectively, make some basic changes.

Our planet has evolved to its present form over the past 4.54 billion years. Our human existence has been around for about 40,000 to perhaps 100,000 years, equivalent to a fraction of a second or the blink of an eye.

Since the discovery of fossil fuels, particularly coal, oil and natural gas in the mid-1800s, humans have feasted on their use to produce energy. These fossil fuels built up over the billions of years. The movement of Earth’s crust over the millions of years covered these fossil-fuel resources, challenging modern surveying and seismic technology to discover and extract them.