907 The Tree of Knowledge

Message no. 907[Branch from no. 903] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Friday, May 4, 2007 2:25pm Subject: Re: The final project -- conducting a survey to find a solution to environmental problems

It is scary, isn't it Dawn! Awareness always is -- maybe that is why God warned us not to eat from the tree of knowledge. Always fills me with shame... but it is too late, and now ignorance cannot lead back to bliss, so we must strive on and learn ever more! :)

I don't know if country people consume more or less than city people in the U.S.... good question. One could argue that transportation needs are greater with the longer distances in the country and this uses a lot of resources (both getting the stuff yourself and shipping the stuff out to the stores there). One reason for cities of course was that by concentrating resources in one place you lower the transaction costs and increase efficiency. But of course, cities are no longer near the sources of resources as they once were. We have long since consumed the forests and mines and fisheries and fields of good soil that used to surround cities. So now our resources come from the "country". Theoretically it should be better to live near the resources, and for this reason people in third world countries who live in the "countryside" still consume less than people in the city. But in the U.S. that may not be true, because resources first have to go to the city to be processed and then get shipped BACK to the countryside to be used. In fact very few of us in advanced countries who live "in the country" live close to the land at all. Rather, we are almost like living in space stations orbiting the city, but at a distance so we can pretend we are in the country, while tied to the economics of the urban sphere.

Thanks for being the first to take the plunge and start investigating how many earth's you use!