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Natural Resources And The North American Standard Of Living

John Waring

1989

Published in:

• The Northwest Technocrat, 4th quarter 1989, No. 317

The raw materials required to produce the volume of finished products -- foods, clothes, housing and other buildings with everything in them, transportation, communications, etc. -- for the average man, woman and child, in North America every year adds up to nearly 19 tons.

The conversion of all these natural resources into consumer-usable products in industrial North America is completely measurable at every stage of production, and we should remember production is utterly dependent on the efficient use of technologically produced energy and not on such concepts as money, price and debt. This is a fact of vital importance to the people of this entire Continental area.

This is because our survival as living human beings, the direction of our individual social way of life, and the Continental statesmanship required for our future are all bound up in the functional coordination of our resources with our technology on a dynamic and balanced load basis. People who understand how to measure with ergs and kilogram-calories, horsepower-hours, kilowatt-hours of energy as the prime planning and operational measurement unit for implementation of Continental policy decisions must be the ones, considering the essential needs of each and every individual citizen in North America.

When it is realized that this functional order involves the balancing of 10,500,000 sq. miles of area, with its renewable and non-renewable resources to be conserved and processed with some 35,000,000,000 mechanical-electrical horsepower, the magnitude of this applied science, engineering and agro-biological responsibility is not easily envisioned.

That the preceding is wholly alien to any Price System training is obvious. The Price System demands that we consider money, price, debt, economics, finance, banking, business, crime, philanthropy, propaganda, advertising, government, political ideology and other notions that are entirely useless and incompetent for the production of anything, serving only to adroitly interfere with our human needs. The system is now reaching for its ultimate misuse of science and technology. This is a concern that is vital to our security.

Considering per-capita averages, some people get inordinately more, many somewhat less, of the benefits of this 19 ton and 330 horsepower-hour average, since our present social system differentiates between human beings on the arbitrary and meaningless basis of the number of little green rectangles of paper that each person owns and controls. The raw material figures given here represent the amounts of natural resources required to keep an average person at his or her present standard of living for one year. These are the basics, together with all that is wasted by the system. If we multiply by 75, we can compute annual figures and obtain the tonnage of mined and grown materials -- mainly from domestic sources (North American), but some imported -- that would be required in order to provide for a whole life-span, according to present expectancy (at birth) estimates.

Some people assume that the mines and wells contain unlimited deposits of minerals and that the farmland will replenish its bounty unceasingly. Such is plainly impossible. Notwithstanding the facts of nature, policy and planning through the entire 19th century proceeded with such expectations. Some Wall Street firms guilessly issued industrial bonds with due dates in the early 2100s!

Expansion must be maintained at all costs, as the U.S. Price System learned the hard way in the 1930s. If the "costs" are in human lives wasted and mineral resources blasted, as in World Wars I and II, Korea and Vietnam; but that cannot concern the U.S. Price System -- the dollar dictates decision.

Political government, and not just a mere administration, is entirely dependent on the financial stability of the system. We give you an example: Upwards of a quarter billion cubic-feet of natural gas fuel is legally flared, vented into the air, gone forever, for the commercial reason that it is too cheap to conserve -- every twenty-four hours year round. In the 1930s, 40s and 50s, when the retail and wholesale price of gas was much lower than now, the flaring of gas at U.S. oil and gas fields averaged 1,500,000,000 cubic-feet every twenty-four hours, year after year. This was the Price System's "law" as set by State and Federal politicians who were subservient to the system's oil and gas lobbyists. Natural gas is now the scarcest of U.S. fuel energy resources in terms of years' supply remaining. (All data from U.S. Bureau of Mines published reports.)

We have another example of waste: A daily average of 232,500 tons (1975-85 average) of dissolved solids, much of it topsoil that was allowed to be washed and drained off midwest and prairie farms, flows down the Mississippi River by Vicksburg, Miss. and out to the Gulf of Mexico. The daily average of dissolved solids going down the Columbia River past the hydrologic station at The Dalles, near Warrendale, Ore., averages 31,100 tons. (All data from U.S. Geological Survey published reports). These figures amount to one ton per person every day for the U.S. and Canada, a daily drain that is attributable to the Price System that we foolishly allow to rule us. The hamstrung U.S. Soil Conservation Service and its Canadian counterpart are merely examples of Price System bureaucratic fronts, like the Environmental Protection Administration, giving the public the illusion of resource conservation while their competent professionals are virtually prevented from performing functionally.

In stark contrast to the massive unemployment and bankruptcies of the 1930s, the U.S. participation in World War II used up 5,000,000,000 tons of U.S. non-renewable minerals. Those resources were mined and processed largely for military destruction, and every ton was profitable. So prosperous was this stimulus to the U.S. Price System's financial health that it has been continued for 41 years, nominally under the propaganda prop of a pseudo "Cold War." Close to $3 trillion dollars has been pump-primed into the U.S. Gross National Product (G.N.P.) in these last four decades through annual military budgets -- all under the profitably conterfeit Cold War guise of bogus anti-communism. What this means is that the private enterprise "Free Market Economy" loudly proclaimed as the ideal form of Price System ideology (what we are ostensibly arming to "defend") actually became moribund in the North American scene around the years 1932-33.

Some of North America's most vital resources are being diverted for military use, wasted in Price System stupidity: Very little is left of the millions of tons of U.S. deposits of such as Antimony, Beryllium, Bismuth, Cadmium, Germanium, Fluorspar, Mercury, Platinum, Tantalum, ilmenite and rutile ores for Titanium, Tungsten and other metals; to say nothing of the Copper, Lead, Zinc and Iron ore.

The foregoing, together with the chart that follows this article should be considered when people discuss such topics as family planning, population control and peace.

Technocracy spelled out the potential for an economy of abundance in North America years ago. What we had then has been plundered, wasted and spoiled to a point where we now have less of a chance to make the most of a wonderful continent. We have been handed a social idea that will enable us to shape a heritage to be proud of; let's get to it!

Annual Per Capita Usage of Materials

United States

Sources:

Metals and Fuels are averages of 1983 thru 1985 figures from U.S. Bureau of Mines and U.S. Geological Survey. Organic Renecables are averages of 1982 and 1985 figures from Crop Reporting Services, Forest Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture. Approxemately equivalent figures equate Canada's per capita use of natural resources with those living in the United States, thus aggregating the average per capita standard of living currently in technological North America.