Stephen Dubner's talk on Tuesday night was a sweet mix between insightful and entertaining. He brought in many solid and astonishing arguments, and although he made a few inexplicable jumps from one point in his logic to the next, I feel like I got a lot out it.
During his speech, Dubner explained a few of the theories he is planning to introduce in his next book, so he asked any journalists in the audience to be careful with the information they reveal. Whether he was dropping a hint to the audience about the exclusive nature of his presence or he was just being sincere, I am going to go behind his back. I will not reveal too much, but one of his points hit so hard, I just had to write about it.
Dubner shared how, a little over 100 years ago, horses were the main form of transportation. People today would look back on that and probably chuckle at how simple and environmentally innocent horses must have been as vehicles.
Well, the people of the late 19th century would not have agreed. In fact, they thought their addiction to "rapid" transportation was going to kill them in the end, mainly because of the form of pollution horses literally left behind them.
Horse manure left their world smelling awful, and diseases spread like wild fire due to the massive amounts of it left on city streets. Urban dwellers saw horses as a necessary evil, though, and pretty much came to terms with the fact that what they could not stop using was what was going to bring about the end of the world.
I promise I was thinking along these lines before Dubner said anything, but after he introduced this story, he related it to our world's current addiction to oil and, more specifically, to the automobile. The problem people got all worked up about was solved by another form of transportation that is ironically the scapegoat of the current generation's "End of the World" theory. Of course, there is validity to it. Our use of the automobile has led to many detrimental environmental changes, many we have yet to discover. In fact, in my geology class, I just learned that by using up all of the world's oil resources, we will cause the Earth to return back to its anoxic state. No fun. But by relating this situation back to the horse manure problem, we can let ourselves breath easy (while we still can).
We can do all we want to be "environmentally friendly." It does not hurt anything, and it certainly makes us feel better about ourselves. But now, we do not have to be all fatalistic about oil addiction. Just as technology swooped in to save the world from the dangers of horse poop, it will come again to relieve us of our problem with burning the Earth's natural resources. And if this technological solution also ends up being detrimental to the human race, then hey, at least we won't have to worry about it. They probably will not find out until we are all dead.
-Frannie Boyle is a sophomore in the College of Arts and Science. She can be reached mary.f.boyle@vanderbilt.edu.
