Henry Ford: Environmentalist!

Environmentalists hard at work saving the planet

Hey, High School kids!  Do you want to help the environment?  Reduce man’s grimy footprint on this pristine globe?  Make the world a better place for polar bears and unicorns?  Then go to College and get a degree in Engineering.  Or Agriculture.  Or Business.

What’s that you say?  Engineers, Farmers and Businesspeople are greedy, heartless and evil and it’s their rapacious behavior that’s made the planet the mess it is.  Au contraire, mon frerre.  Stop getting all your information from “Captain Planet” cartoons and episodes of “Law and Order: Greedy Capitalist Pig Prosecution Unit.”

What is Environmentalism?  C’mon, let’s all say it together now, “Reduce, Re-use, Recycle.”  What is it Engineers, Agricultural Engineers and Farmers and Businesspeople do every day?  They focus all of their energies on reducing waste!  To a businessperson waste is money and time.  To an Engineer waste is energy, material, money, time…  To an Ag professional waste is money, time, water and soil.

When an Engineer makes a system better she makes it do more with less material, energy or both.  She also increases production and decreases cost.  That means she makes more money and consumers pay less.

When an Ag Professional makes agriculture better he makes more plants grow in less space/more livestock grow from fewer resources.  That means he makes more money and consumers pay less.

When a Businessperson makes business better she provides more, better goods and services for less money.  Lower prices for us and a higher salary for her.

Everyone of these people are Environmentalists.  In the Engineering/Agricultural/Business world one hears terms like “continuous improvement,” “lean,” “sort, set in order, standardize, sustain,” and “reduce” and “re-use” all day long, every day.  These are the underlying goals in every decision that is made in Engineering, Agriculture and Business.  Waste is money.  Energy is money.  Raw materials cost money.  There is not a single business in this great land of ours that is not already focused on a daily effort to reduce the materials required to produce or provide their good or service and reduce the energy required to produce or provide their good or service and reduce the effort necessary to provide their good and service.

Study Henry Ford and his assembly line.  Prior to Mr. Ford automobile manufacture was extremely wasteful, required great amounts of energy and produced tremendous waste and pollution.  Henry Ford and his Engineers spent great amounts of time looking at all aspects of automobile production and reduced the effort, energy, materials and waste required to manufacture an automobile by tremendous amounts.  Look at an assembly line.  It is a model of efficiency.  There is minimal waste, it uses the bare minimum of energy to perform the task at hand and it pollutes as little as possible.  Return to the same factory in a year and it will be even better.  Come back in five years and you might not recognize the place.  The same goes for a farm or an office.  Continuous improvement.

If you truly want to have a positive impact on the Environment study a field that has proven methods of improvement over centuries of field research and get a job in that field.  You’ll never regret your decision and you’ll truly make a difference in this world.  Or, you can have a wealthy father, major in journalism and shout a lot, like Al Gore.  My money’s on the Engineers, Ag Majors and Businessfolk.

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