The Great Pause Week 65: New Hope Creek Journal, Part Two — Shorting the Future

If a fox spends more energy to catch rabbits than those rabbits return in calories, it will not live very long.

Last week I left off my story of a young graduate student setting fish traps in a North Carolina stream, weighing the fish he captured, and estimating the oxygen use by the fish and also the ecosystems in which they lived, and concluding that sunlight would not be enough to pay for the consumer culture of the fish in New Hope Creek — and maybe not for the greater consumer culture that humans have become accustomed to.

Charles Hall said from that moment he first inventoried New Hope Creek he knew what his life was going to be. From his dissertation onward, through his years as a professor, researcher, visiting lecturer, and award-winning scholar, editing, authoring and co-authoring innumerable original papers and books, his name is associated with EROI — Energy Return On Investment.

Economics is the study of the allocation of scarce resources among competing ends.

In a talk with friends as he hiked through Duke Forest, where his research stream is located, he said: