This week's topic was very relevant to my life. Environmental responsibility--how to we, as humans, do our part to take care of the world? There is a teaching in Judaism called Tikkun Olam which is the idea that Jews have the responsibility to repair the world--to make it a better place when they left than when they received it because the land is not just for us, but also for the generations after us. We should not leave it up to our children and our grandchildren to clean up our messes. Therefore we much all take responsibility to do our part to make the world a better place. This can be very easily done, as we learned in class, by recycling or by switching to an alternative source of energy.
I had never heard of Marcellus Shale before class on Tuesday night. While what we talked about in class sounds like a very good idea--the resource would bring jobs and a burst in the economy to Pennsylvania--it also seems like a stop gap. This is just a resource that will last 20 to maybe 50 or 100 years. But what do we do after that? While I really like the idea of switching from oil to a natural gas like shale, I really think that it is the responsibility of this generation to not let this resource go to waste. We need to take the time while we are using this resource to find an alternative, more permanent resource. It would not be fair to leave our grandchildren or great-grandchildren with the task finding an energy source when we've used up all of the known usable energy sources.
I had never heard of Marcellus Shale before class on Tuesday night. While what we talked about in class sounds like a very good idea--the resource would bring jobs and a burst in the economy to Pennsylvania--it also seems like a stop gap. This is just a resource that will last 20 to maybe 50 or 100 years. But what do we do after that? While I really like the idea of switching from oil to a natural gas like shale, I really think that it is the responsibility of this generation to not let this resource go to waste. We need to take the time while we are using this resource to find an alternative, more permanent resource. It would not be fair to leave our grandchildren or great-grandchildren with the task finding an energy source when we've used up all of the known usable energy sources.
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