Extra Credit: David OwenExtra Credit: David Owen

David Owen I must say is one funny guy who really knows his stuff. After opening with a story on how he allowed a man to shoot him in the stomach (he was wearing some type of bullet proof jacket), he spoke about his time living in Manhattan and threw out some interesting statistics. One that I never really thought about was how about 75% of people in Manhattan don’t own cars because of capacity issues so the majority of people walk everywhere.

He continued his story by talking about his move from Manhattan to Connecticut and how people may think they are living more efficient in the country area but really they are not.  When he moved from the city to the country his electricity increased, and him and his wife no longer only had one car but they increased to two and then eventually bought a third. They no longer could walk to do the small things like go grocery shopping, like they did in the city, they now had to drive everywhere so it was more convenient for them to have more than one car. This is when Owen pointed out that a key to sustaining resources is shrinking the distance between people and their destinations but “as easy as it is to say, it’s hard to do.” Especially, he continued to state, that when in certain cases, like natural disasters it pays to be sparsely populated.

Owen then moved to one of his main points in the talk and that was that if we pursue efficiency alone or first then we make our problems worse. People use efficiency gains to increase consumption not decrease it. For example, when new refrigerators came out that used electricity people would buy them but then keep their old refrigerators as a second one for leftovers or beer in the basement or garage. That doesn’t help the problem at all.

Overall I found the talk very interesting and it really made me think further into the issue of  “going green” and what that actually means. I also thought it was funny when he mentioned an old folks home having a large amount of STDs, that is awkward to think about if you ask me.

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