No matter what your political persuasion, no matter how convinced you are, despite the mid-January 2010 Supreme Court decision to hand over the power previously held by we, the people, to international corporate interests, that the folks in power still have our best interests at heart, the fact is: our non-renewable resources are dwindling.
Rare woods like rosewood, for example, are rapidly disappearing with the ravenous appetite for rainforest resources. We don’t grow rosewood in the United States: we pay a premium importing them from Brazil, India, and Madagascar. But cherry and maple and ash wood are abundant, and processed bamboo is renewable and inexpensive.
Crude oil is at a premium, but natural gas and hydrogen burn clean and are available domestically for much less. While it is tempting to use coal due to its cost and abundance, the long-term cost of cleaning up after it after burning it is staggering: it makes the bailout of 2010 look puny by comparison.
But perhaps the most compelling reasons to pursue the manufacture and distribution of eco-friendly products are the long-term ramifications of making products that pollute the environment: the natural world is changing for the worse, and we are the cause. Species are dying at a rate much higher than research shows was the case when natural cycles of the past caused extinction. Humanity depends largely on the sustained survival of many other species currently alive on planet Earth. When those species die off, so do we.
Our food supply, the supply of raw materials for pharmaceutical manufacture, our raw materials to make things in general; in short: everything in our economy depends on making sure that all living things continue to survive: all it takes for digitalis, one of the most important cardiac drugs to disappear, is the extinction of the Fox Glove plant. Plants much more rare than that, growing in tropical rainforests, promise the cure for diseases ranging from cancers to neurological disorders. The rapid destruction of those forests in the pursuit of non-renewable resources is cutting off our options for survival. Going green halts or slows down that downward spiral, and our initiative to manufacturegreen products will put our economy back in the lead.
The United States has devolved from the world’s greatest manufacturing nation in 1980, to a largely service-based economy. Third-world nations are outstripping us in the development of efficiency-based development. We can reclaim the lead by using the one resource where we excel: high technology. We can design products that are at the same time efficient, sustainable, cost-efficient over time, superior in quality, and competitive on the world market. Build it, and they will come…
