“What’s the value of energy?”
by Greg Good
If you know me, you might expect this of me. When this question was posed to me, I didn?t think first of fuel economy. I didn?t think of Mid-East oil and national security. I didn?t think about conservation or alternative energy sources. I thought of Henry David Thoreau and his reflections on the necessities for living which he included in the first chapter Walden, ?Economy.?
There he wrote that: ?The necessaries of life for man in this climate may, accurately enough, be distributed under the several heads of Food, Shelter, Clothing, and Fuel; for not till we have secured these are we prepared to entertain the true problems of life with freedom and a prospect of success.? He goes on to note observations by Charles Darwin and Justus von Liebig that naked Fuegeans are warm while clothed Englishmen shiver and that food is the first fuel that stokes our internal fires ? this, in 1854, before Darwin and von Liebig had come to represent natural selection and metabolic chemistry, respectively.
The rest of Thoreau?s ?Economy? ruminates on the stratagems we employ to stay warm and the purposes for which we stay warm. He also reflects on the extremes his contemporaries pursued, and the waste of themselves this produced. He wrote: ?The luxuriously rich are not simply kept comfortably warm, but unnaturally hot; as I implied before, they are cooked, of course à la mode.?
Thoreau continued to advocate an austerity that, frankly, obscures the value of his reflection. This value is obviated all the more because we all know that Thoreau did not himself live completely by his own advice. He suffered deprivations when he so chose, but generally, he lived as comfortable a life as any of his neighbors. Still, he made a valid point worth our consideration today.
The value lies not in his support of austerity, but in the purpose which he thought this practice served. Why be conservative in our use of fuel? Because then we release ourselves to pursue other goals. If we focus on richer foods (inner fuels), more heat from outer fuels (coal or oil), better clothes and shelters (to retain the heat from inner and outer fuels), then we have forgotten why it is we wished to stay warm in the first place. We also have to expend more of our own lives toward these ends. Thoreau wrote: ?Why has man rooted himself thus firmly in the earth, but that he may rise in the same proportion into the heavens above??for the nobler plants are valued for the fruit they bear at last in the air and light, far from the ground??.
I remember one of Thoreau?s thoughts about the grand purpose of life, and although I cannot find the exact quote in his books or my notes, it has inspired me all of my adult life. This transcends any contemporary concerns about coal, oil, solar, or conservation. It includes them all. Somewhere Thoreau asked himself what he could tell the deity he had done with his life while the deity had kept him warm.
Indeed. Not to diminish the importance of conservation or of the consequences of our continuing extravagant use of energy?and I am as responsible for this extravagant use as anyone else?but what indeed are we doing while we are kept warm? I am not making a theological or moral statement here. I am very much a pragmatic person. We are drawing on resources. Most of those resources we are now drawing down cannot be renewed. What are we doing with our lives to justify that use? I hope each of us thinks about this, and that we each try to do something worthwhile. I, for one, do not intend to wallow in any sense of guilt. I will instead do something while I stay warm.
