Impacts of Green Energy

I remember when I first heard environmentalists complain about the effects of wind turbines or hydroelectric damns I thought they were crazy. Their standards seemed to be for perfection. Reading The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw, about the woman who founded the Belize Zoo and her fight to oppose a damn that she predicted would wipe out the scarlet macaw in Belize, really changed my mind. It became clear after reading that book that there are extreme effects even from green technologies. Hydroelectric damns ruin the ecosystem downstream as sediment is washed away and not replaced; nuclear power plants, when using once-through cooling systems can also kill our water life; and wind turbines are a threat to species in the area around them (whether it is fish when they are placed in the sea or the birds that fly around them).

Many of us think that if we use the right technology, we can continue to consume as much as we want without affecting the environment. Unfortunately, that just isn't the case. On the scale that we are living, everything we do can have big consequences. This is especially the case when we look to move technology into places that are currently free of such human encroachment. This means that we can be smarter about it - by say building green technology in places we have already developed. For example, building solar panels on roofs is far better than in an otherwise untouched desert. But in the end, conservation and self-sacrifice need to get us a long way so that we don't need lots of new green technology that moves further and further into our untouched nature.