What is the best use of resources economically for humans/nature?

Question

What is the best use of resources economically for humans/nature?

Answer 1

That is a pretty hard question to answer with any specificity. But there are a couple of principals that we should always consider when deciding how to use resources.

1) Sustainability.

2) Unintended consequences & how random changes to complex systems are usually bad.

1) We will be inhabiting this planet for, I hope, many thousands or years. Therefore we should never do anything that will cause lasting damage to the planet or that we cannot not continue doing for thousands of years. Sustainability is crucial and much talked about these days. The link below offers lots of links to various aspects of sustainability so I will not consider it further here.

2) We need to be on guard for unintended consequences of our actions and actually study new technologies carefully before we introduce them on a large scale. Consider what has happened when we did not.

For example consider global warming. Who knew that burning billions of gallons of oil and trillions of tons of coal might end up melting the ice caps? Another similar problem is the ozone hole. Ozone in the stratisphere protects life on Earth from deadly UV radiation. We invented refrigerators about 50-60 years ago and started using a new man made chemical that seemed really good, called CFC's. They were safe, non-toxic, and made refrigerators work great. Little did we know that they would float up into the stratisphere and start attacking ozone and thus endangering life on Earth.

Here is the problem. The Earth's ecosystem is like a very very complex machine. Think of it like a watch. When mankind does things that change the ecosystem, like burning trillions of tones of fossil fuel, that is sort of like taking your watch apart and randomly taking out one gear and putting in another of a different size. What are the chances of your watch still working? Not good. We often make random changes to our planet and we usually do not think too much about what might happen and so we are getting some nasty surprises. Not good.

Answer 2

.The best use of our resources is to feed the hungry, free the oppressed and educate the ignorant.