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By Root 992 0

of the natural world—has been high since the 1970s, especially after the OPEC oil embargo crisis of ’73-’74 and NASA’s launch of ERTS-1 (later renamed Landsat), the first civilian satellite to disseminate graphic images of clear-cuts gnawing away the vast rain forests of the Amazon basin. Today, news feeds crackle with stories about dwindling oil, fights over water, and soaring food prices. Many plants and animals are disappearing as their habitats are converted to plantations and parking lots. Still others have been harvested into oblivion. Fully four-fifths of the world’s land surface (excluding Antarctica) is now directly influenced by human activities.19 The lingering exceptions to this are those places that are truly remote: the northern forests and tundra, the shrinking rain-forest cores of the Congo and Amazon basins, and certain deserts of Africa and Australia and Tibet.

Perhaps no resource pressure has grown faster than our demand for fossil hydrocarbon fuels. This began in Europe, North America, Australia, and Japan and has now spread to China, India, and other modernizing nations. Because the United States has been (and still is) the largest consumer of these fuels, let’s illustrate the rapacity of this phenomenon as it has unfolded there.

In 1776, when the United States of America declared independence from Great Britain after a little over a year of war, most of the fledgling country’s energy came from wood and muscles. Yes, there were sawmills turning waterwheels to cut logs, and coal was used to make coke for casting iron cannons and tools, but the vast majority of America’s energy came from fuelwood, horses, mules, oxen, and human backs.

By the late 1800s, the Industrial Revolution, steam locomotive, and westward expansion had changed all that. Dirty black coal was the shining new prince—fueling factories, coke ovens, foundries, and trains all across the young nation. Coal consumption grew from 10 million short tons per year in 1850, to 330 million short tons just fifty years later.20 Little mining towns sprang up all over Appalachia, like now-defunct Ramseytown in western Pennsylvania, where my grandmother was later born. Nearby Rossiter produced my grandfather, who worked in the coal mines as a teenager.

But in the twentieth century, coal was surpassed. Oil, first drilled out of a quiet Pennsylvania farm in 1859 to make lamp kerosene, caught on slowly at first. Gasoline was originally a junk by-product that some people dumped into rivers to get rid of. But then someone thought of pouring it into a combustion engine, and gasoline became the fuel of Hercules.

Packed inside a single barrel of oil is about the same amount of energy as would be produced from eight years of day labor by an average-sized man. Seizing oil fields became a prime strategic objective in both world wars. The Baku fields of Azerbaijan were a prime reason that Hitler invaded Russia, and it was their oil supply, gushing north to the Russian army, that stopped him.

By the end of World War II, cars and trucks had outgrown the rail system, locomotives had switched to diesel, and the liquid-fuels market was really taking off. Oil consumption surpassed coal in 1951, though sales of both—along with natural gas—continued to rise strongly. In just one hundred years (1900-2000) Americans ramped up their coal consumption from about 330 million to 1.1 billion short tons per year,21,22 a 230% increase. Oil-burning grew from 39 million to 6.6 billion barrels per year,23 a 16,700% increase. In comparison, that old stalwart fuelwood rose a measly 12%, from 101 million to just 113 million cords per year. 24

Although the U.S. population also rose quickly over this same time period (from 76 to 281 million, or +270%), oil consumption rose far faster on a per capita basis. By the beginning of the twenty-first century the average American was burning through more than twenty-four steel drums of oil every year. In 1900, had my Italian grandfather already emigrated to the United States, he would have used just twenty-two gallons, about one-half of one