I have come to the conclusion that the only way out of our many environmental problems is $10 a gallon gasoline, but I don't know how to work towards that fast enough. I don't think I have it in me to be a part of a Monkey Wrench Gang. So barring that kind of radical activity, we should all be rapidly shunning the "easy motoring lifestyle" and all its trappings, and it seems that how we feed ourselves has the greatest impact there.

I cooked some farm-raised rainbow trout a few weeks ago. Tending to the fish over the burner, it occurred to me how many thousands of calories in the form of electric heat I was pumping into these fish, only to get a few hundred calories that were usable to my body. Then I went further to the air pumps aerating the farm ponds, the processing of the feed on which they were raised,the shipping, refrigeration, etc etc. On recent drives out of town for work I saw rolls of hay in farm meadows and wondered how many orders of magnitude fewer calories were contained in those hay rolls compared to the calories it took to run the harvester and baler. It amazes me that this system works, even in the short term. But for fossil fuels it wouldn't, I suppose. Earth receives a fixed amount of energy each year from the sun and its own internal radiation. We need a balanced budget amendment for energy. William Schlesinger at Duke hit on this idea quite nicely in a recent opinion piece when he said, in effect, that we must learn to live within "the sustainable economy supplied by nature." (The actual quote was "coastal citizens should realize that the sustainable economy supplied by nature will be with us long after the phosphate deposits are gone.")

So today I rode my bike to work again. By the end of the year I may have done my penance for the two trips to out of town this week.