I understand that expecting some sort of big shift in how we live is not feasible, it's just a shame.
The solution to extincting the whales for whale oil was petroleum. The solution to denuding the landscape of trees was coal. The solution to coal is natural gas, solar, nuclear power.
The only alternative to technology is to shrink the human population by about 95%.
The arc of whales would have followed the arc of so many other natural "resources" that are produced or even consist of living beings. There are several native hardwoods that are either effectively extinct or impossible to obtain because they were mined out.
No, we stumbled on a vast reservoir of energy buried under the ground and we've been draining that reservoir as fast as possible. We'll transition off petroleum about the time it becomes economically infeasible to extract and burn it, and not a second sooner.
By all means, bring on solar, nuclear, wind, whatever. They are just more reservoirs to tap to run this machine. Just so we can dig up, slice up, chop up, burn down, and chew up another order of magnitude of the biosphere. Because money and grandkids and ice cream.
We are too many and too greedy, and this planet has finite resources. "Technology". Always magical technology. Well until technology can grow a watermelon in a lightbulb, we are gonna keep munching away at this planet until the biosphere collapses around our ears.
> this planet has finite resources
No matter is being destroyed or is escaping the planet, aside from a solar system probe now and then. Energy can repurpose and reconfigure existing resources.
When you hear about a helium shortage, that's not a shortage of Helium on Earth, that's a shortage of Helium in the strategic helium reserve, which has been a source of extremely cheap helium for decades and made helium extraction uneconomical. When the reserve eventually runs out, and the price of helium subsequently increases, helium extraction will resume.
Except that's not where our solution to this problem lies. We have all the technology we need to be carbon neutral today, namely in the form of nuclear power. In fact, Nixon planned on 1000 nuclear power plants operating in the U.S. by the year 2000. The reason why we don't have that reality today has nothing to do with technology, and everything to do with behavior and choices we've made. We chose to protest nuclear power, we chose to close down power plants that were generating electricity carbon free, we chose to do this because we decided that it was nuclear power that was the enemy of ecology, in the face of this misinformed public politicians found it easier to keep their jobs by walking back plans for nuclear power than to educate the populace.
Decades later today, we find ourselves forced to sleep in this bed of coal and natural gas, but we ignore that this is a bed that we ourselves willingly made by choice, and continue to maintain by choice using bullshit excuses such as cost or time or profitability to bury any practical alternative (in a society where for the first time since the invention of currency, government mints can generate money out of plain air no less).
That shouldn't be surprising. New problems present themselves all the time and it then takes X amount of time to develop a technology solution to them.
It's awesome that you are giving back though, Hawaii has got to be a really fascinating and challenging case study for conservation vs. consumerism.
Indeed, and it is actually something I personally struggle with. The situation is actually much more dire than people realize. I myself am actually part Native Hawaiian and it is so disheartening to see fellow locals actively protest conservation measures. I do what I can to testify in public meetings but local pushback on things like ungulate eradication or land use laws are intense.
I don't want to dismiss them entirely because the concerns come from a real place, but those reasons are all economic in nature. And, you end up in the unenviable position of being a relatively privileged person telling a disadvantaged community they can't have the economic advancement they want. It is genuinely difficult.
Between the two, I very much expect one to save us before the other, if either can save us at all.