Part of my PeakOil story....
Let me provide a bit of my background, particularly how I came to accept that the Hubbert Peak of Oil has or will shortly come and be past, but also some of my understanding of the Earth and system theory. For most people, learning about PeakOil is a journey, a series of events that unfold that bring one to accept the concepts - my history is no different. Only in hindsight do I see that I've been on a 25-plus year journey to understanding, with each step along the way adding a critical piece or two.
I discovered the discipline of geography in my first semester of college in 1977. That year I took a course called "Landscape Appreciation," which provided me with an overview of various topics of what I came to know as the subdisciplines of human geography. The passion that my instructor exhibited was contagious, drawing out my desire to learn more about patterns on the earth, its physical environment, distribution of human activities, and the importance that location and spatial relationships play - the "where" is as important as the "why" and "how." Before the first college year was out, I had added geography as a second major in addition to the computer science degree I had already planned to earn. I further surprised my girlfriend (who became my wife before I graduated) by declaring that I wanted to go on for graduated studies in geography.
Eight wonderful years in the early and middle 1980s were spent at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis getting first a M.A. degree, and then a Ph.D., in geography. My Masters study focused on urban geography and urban historical geography, under the supervision of John Borchert, reading about the morphology of cities, their role as central places, their internal structure and regional economic importance, the relative locational advantages, particularly transportation, that favored the development of cities at different periods of history, and so on. But before that degree was earned, my interests began to shift to that of physical geography, particularly water resources. At the same time I was refining my interests in geographic information systems, the use of computers and techniques of spatial analysis for applications of planning and mapping.
The doctoral work that followed had three components - (1) that of completing a dissertation, (2) that of working for two years as an assistant on a state-funded research project, a multidisciplinary water resources project with the goal of developing recommendations and standards for enhancing the State of Minnesota's GIS data system to better monitor, map, analyze, and management water resources; and (3) that of working as the assistant to my advisor on his capstone research just before retirement on a comprehensive economic and historical analysis of the Upper Midwest. My doctoral dissertation had the typical lengthy descriptive title of a disseration - "GIWRSM: A Geographically Integrated Water Resources Similation Model with Application to the Twin Cities." It's 300 pages described the math, theory, data, and application behind a 20,000 line FORTRAN-based computer model intended to simulate the hydrology of the Minneapolis-St. Paul Metropolitan Area (then over 2 million people) in order to tabulate the likely extent of environmental change to water resources, paticularly soil moisture and groundwater recharge, due to urban expansion. You could say this dissertation was my first formal exploration in to the affects that humans were having on the Earth's resources, and our interdependence with these resources. With this model I wanted to look forward, and backwards, to the human role in environmental change. [If you are interested in my modeling work, you might want to read the one refereed journal article I managed to publish out of the research: "Spatial Changes in the Hydrology of Portions of the Twin Cities, Minnesota: A Simulation Study," Physical Geography 12:147-166, 1991.]
It was during the research for my dissertation that I can claim to have first become aware of the infamous Club of Rome report, Limits of Growth, that first warned people of the significantly changes that were coming. But I must also admit that at the time I did not actually read the complete book. I reviewed pieces of it only for the modeling approaches they used - the World model they developed - and I actually had ignored their conclusions. If only I would have known at the time.
I should also add that during graduate school, I was an excellent student at learning the fine art of being a purely objective scientist. It was drilled into us, formally and informally, that as scholars and professors we were to remain objective. Our task was to expand knowledge, and teach that knowledge to others, but to keep emotions and personal feelings out of it. And when teaching, we are not to take advantage of our position to "convince" students to think a particular way - only to present the skills and information necessarily for the students to make their own decisions.
In September 1988 I began full-time teaching of physical geography at a four-year private liberal college in the Midwest, a post I was to hold until the summer of 1994. My role in the three-member geography department was to teach introductory courses in physical geography (weather, climate, landforms), upper level meteorology and water resources, cartography, spatial statistics, remote sensing, and geographic information systems. I was also the map library curator, college weather observer, and local coordinator for an affiliation with the National Center for Supercomputer Applications at the University of Illinois. It was a busy, intense time that also coincided with the births of my second and third children (twins). But it also represented a period of my life with lots of inter-reflection.
I can date the first significant change in my global and environmental thinking to the summer of 1990. That summer I read the book by Jeremy Rifkin, Entropy: Into the Greenhouse World [Bantam Books, original edition 1980; revised edition 1989]. I had received a copy of that book gratis from its publisher, who was hoping I would select it for a coursebook. Rifkin opened my eyes and mind, allowing so many aspects of my education and teaching to come together. While focusing on global warming, he pulled together population, resource use, biomedicine, economics, and a variety of other aspects and issues. As the title implies, Entropy, of particular importance is the laws of thermodynamics, that the use of any resource involves energy and reduces the future usefulness of the resource, with the energy essentially lost. Rifkin also did a very good job of exposing the affect of exponential growth in population in negating any savings that efficiencies might bring. An example that he uses several times in the book is that of more fuel efficient automobiles, pointing out any savings gained in fuel savings were quickly overtaken by increased fuel being consumed by all the more automobiles on the highways due to population increases. To paraphrase the book, therefore, "It is not how to create a more fuel efficient automobile, but how to do without the automobile in the first place."
My teaching began to change from that summer of 1990 onward. It was also about this time that I began showing the BBC Science program, After the Warming, by James Burke, which was also a focus on global warming. I began to question my objective-only role as a professor, although I only started with "baby steps" to changing too much.
By 1994 I was burning out. I also began to question the fact that up until now I have only been a student, and now a teacher of students, without much actual practical experience in my own field. So when the opportunity came up to go to work for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as a planner and GIS specialist, I took the chance. Thus began a period of five years as an applied geographer, working 40 hours a week as a civil servant. What drew me in particular to the position I assumed in September 1994 was the fact that I'd be playing a key scientific role in a major environmental project, using my GIS and analytic skills to help engineers and project managers evaluate the role of further commercial navigation on the Upper Mississippi river system, and in particular the environmental changes taking place. This was an opportunity in part to return to the research I started in graduate school. At the same time was serving as the coordinator of GIS data for the district serviced by the Corps of Engineers office I worked for, coordinating and sharing information with other state and Federal agencies. And as it turned out, I wasn't done with teaching, as I was selected as one of the instructors for annual courses on GIS taught with the Corps and the Department of the Army, taking me out New England for four weeks a year. I was even blessed with the opportunity to twice travel to St. Petersburg, Russia, to teach GIS to Russian Navy personnel as part of a joint U.S.-Russian environmental cleanup project involving aged nuclear power facilities of the Russian Navy.
My years with the Corps, which lastest almost five years exactly, provided the practical experience and education that I was looking for when I left teaching. But at the same time, I came to seriously question the "engineering approach" to problem solving that I was experiencing. In particular, the focus on small, incremental corrections only, through small environmental projects that always involved manipulation of a local environment through some engineered structure, without a clear "big picture" view and understanding. I was not seeing how significant changes or improvements were taking place by this approach. So I also chose to move on.
The story continues in Part II, which will come later....
I discovered the discipline of geography in my first semester of college in 1977. That year I took a course called "Landscape Appreciation," which provided me with an overview of various topics of what I came to know as the subdisciplines of human geography. The passion that my instructor exhibited was contagious, drawing out my desire to learn more about patterns on the earth, its physical environment, distribution of human activities, and the importance that location and spatial relationships play - the "where" is as important as the "why" and "how." Before the first college year was out, I had added geography as a second major in addition to the computer science degree I had already planned to earn. I further surprised my girlfriend (who became my wife before I graduated) by declaring that I wanted to go on for graduated studies in geography.
Eight wonderful years in the early and middle 1980s were spent at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis getting first a M.A. degree, and then a Ph.D., in geography. My Masters study focused on urban geography and urban historical geography, under the supervision of John Borchert, reading about the morphology of cities, their role as central places, their internal structure and regional economic importance, the relative locational advantages, particularly transportation, that favored the development of cities at different periods of history, and so on. But before that degree was earned, my interests began to shift to that of physical geography, particularly water resources. At the same time I was refining my interests in geographic information systems, the use of computers and techniques of spatial analysis for applications of planning and mapping.
The doctoral work that followed had three components - (1) that of completing a dissertation, (2) that of working for two years as an assistant on a state-funded research project, a multidisciplinary water resources project with the goal of developing recommendations and standards for enhancing the State of Minnesota's GIS data system to better monitor, map, analyze, and management water resources; and (3) that of working as the assistant to my advisor on his capstone research just before retirement on a comprehensive economic and historical analysis of the Upper Midwest. My doctoral dissertation had the typical lengthy descriptive title of a disseration - "GIWRSM: A Geographically Integrated Water Resources Similation Model with Application to the Twin Cities." It's 300 pages described the math, theory, data, and application behind a 20,000 line FORTRAN-based computer model intended to simulate the hydrology of the Minneapolis-St. Paul Metropolitan Area (then over 2 million people) in order to tabulate the likely extent of environmental change to water resources, paticularly soil moisture and groundwater recharge, due to urban expansion. You could say this dissertation was my first formal exploration in to the affects that humans were having on the Earth's resources, and our interdependence with these resources. With this model I wanted to look forward, and backwards, to the human role in environmental change. [If you are interested in my modeling work, you might want to read the one refereed journal article I managed to publish out of the research: "Spatial Changes in the Hydrology of Portions of the Twin Cities, Minnesota: A Simulation Study," Physical Geography 12:147-166, 1991.]
It was during the research for my dissertation that I can claim to have first become aware of the infamous Club of Rome report, Limits of Growth, that first warned people of the significantly changes that were coming. But I must also admit that at the time I did not actually read the complete book. I reviewed pieces of it only for the modeling approaches they used - the World model they developed - and I actually had ignored their conclusions. If only I would have known at the time.
I should also add that during graduate school, I was an excellent student at learning the fine art of being a purely objective scientist. It was drilled into us, formally and informally, that as scholars and professors we were to remain objective. Our task was to expand knowledge, and teach that knowledge to others, but to keep emotions and personal feelings out of it. And when teaching, we are not to take advantage of our position to "convince" students to think a particular way - only to present the skills and information necessarily for the students to make their own decisions.
In September 1988 I began full-time teaching of physical geography at a four-year private liberal college in the Midwest, a post I was to hold until the summer of 1994. My role in the three-member geography department was to teach introductory courses in physical geography (weather, climate, landforms), upper level meteorology and water resources, cartography, spatial statistics, remote sensing, and geographic information systems. I was also the map library curator, college weather observer, and local coordinator for an affiliation with the National Center for Supercomputer Applications at the University of Illinois. It was a busy, intense time that also coincided with the births of my second and third children (twins). But it also represented a period of my life with lots of inter-reflection.
I can date the first significant change in my global and environmental thinking to the summer of 1990. That summer I read the book by Jeremy Rifkin, Entropy: Into the Greenhouse World [Bantam Books, original edition 1980; revised edition 1989]. I had received a copy of that book gratis from its publisher, who was hoping I would select it for a coursebook. Rifkin opened my eyes and mind, allowing so many aspects of my education and teaching to come together. While focusing on global warming, he pulled together population, resource use, biomedicine, economics, and a variety of other aspects and issues. As the title implies, Entropy, of particular importance is the laws of thermodynamics, that the use of any resource involves energy and reduces the future usefulness of the resource, with the energy essentially lost. Rifkin also did a very good job of exposing the affect of exponential growth in population in negating any savings that efficiencies might bring. An example that he uses several times in the book is that of more fuel efficient automobiles, pointing out any savings gained in fuel savings were quickly overtaken by increased fuel being consumed by all the more automobiles on the highways due to population increases. To paraphrase the book, therefore, "It is not how to create a more fuel efficient automobile, but how to do without the automobile in the first place."
My teaching began to change from that summer of 1990 onward. It was also about this time that I began showing the BBC Science program, After the Warming, by James Burke, which was also a focus on global warming. I began to question my objective-only role as a professor, although I only started with "baby steps" to changing too much.
By 1994 I was burning out. I also began to question the fact that up until now I have only been a student, and now a teacher of students, without much actual practical experience in my own field. So when the opportunity came up to go to work for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as a planner and GIS specialist, I took the chance. Thus began a period of five years as an applied geographer, working 40 hours a week as a civil servant. What drew me in particular to the position I assumed in September 1994 was the fact that I'd be playing a key scientific role in a major environmental project, using my GIS and analytic skills to help engineers and project managers evaluate the role of further commercial navigation on the Upper Mississippi river system, and in particular the environmental changes taking place. This was an opportunity in part to return to the research I started in graduate school. At the same time was serving as the coordinator of GIS data for the district serviced by the Corps of Engineers office I worked for, coordinating and sharing information with other state and Federal agencies. And as it turned out, I wasn't done with teaching, as I was selected as one of the instructors for annual courses on GIS taught with the Corps and the Department of the Army, taking me out New England for four weeks a year. I was even blessed with the opportunity to twice travel to St. Petersburg, Russia, to teach GIS to Russian Navy personnel as part of a joint U.S.-Russian environmental cleanup project involving aged nuclear power facilities of the Russian Navy.
My years with the Corps, which lastest almost five years exactly, provided the practical experience and education that I was looking for when I left teaching. But at the same time, I came to seriously question the "engineering approach" to problem solving that I was experiencing. In particular, the focus on small, incremental corrections only, through small environmental projects that always involved manipulation of a local environment through some engineered structure, without a clear "big picture" view and understanding. I was not seeing how significant changes or improvements were taking place by this approach. So I also chose to move on.
The story continues in Part II, which will come later....
posted by Kevin Anderson K9IUA at 11:45 PM
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