Las Vegas Review-Journal

Several years ago, I had the good fortune to sail from Miami, across the Gulf Stream, to the Bahamas. The Bahamas are a string of hundreds of beautiful islands in the warm, clear-blue waters of the Caribbean. I was single-handing the boat and had total freedom to choose which island to sail to each day. I sailed southward through the chain, enjoying the incredible natural beauty of each island that I visited.

There was one destination that I was really looking forward to. It was a large, national marine sanctuary and it was very isolated. There were no nearby cities, towns, villages or ports, and I was looking forward to experiencing a bit of the natural world relatively untouched by civilization.

Once in the sanctuary, I anchored on the protected side of an uninhabited island and rowed ashore. After a short hike over a low hill, I reached the other side of the island, the windward side exposed to the open sea. What I found shocked me. What should have been a pristine beach in an untouched paradise looked more like a garbage dump.

Waves and currents had deposited trash as far as the eye could see. Piled 2 feet high were the unintended consequences of our daily lives -- from plastic dolls to shopping bags to empty soda and water bottles -- the amount and diversity of waste was staggering.

It occurred to me that, because this island was protected, there was no local population to regularly clean up the beach. What I witnessed was a natural phenomenon that reflected just how full of trash the oceans had become. Later research affirmed that there are vast areas at sea that resemble floating garbage dumps, and they are growing.

That experience taught me that we often make assumptions about our world that are not accurate -- out of sight, out of mind, as the saying goes.

Many of us are so focused on the details and complexity of our daily lives that we have become disconnected from nature. And we have learned to overlook the impact of our actions. Nonetheless, the impact is real and ultimately we pay for it, one way or another.

When we hear that we must protect the environment, the context often implies that the environment is something outside us. We then act on this assumption as if it were true. For example, we talk about reducing greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere and weigh it against the economic benefits of building new coal-burning electric plants.

The reality is that we are the environment. We are totally dependent on and are a significant part of the complex web of life that makes up the biosphere. Protecting the environment is nothing more than protecting ourselves. Without a healthy biosphere there can be no such thing as a healthy economy.

Modern technology has provided many wonderful benefits to our society, but they are not free. We pay the obvious price to purchase the technology, whether it's a new television set or the electricity we need to run it. But then we also pay the hidden costs.

Hidden costs come in many forms, including government subsidies to special interests, as well as environmental impacts that can ruin the views of our mountains, cause more cases of asthma, or increase the likelihood of drought. They are like the unexpected piles of trash on an otherwise beautiful beach.

These are costs that society is obliged to carry. The hidden cost of environmental degradation is often referred to as an "externality" by economists, since it is rarely included in financial calculations of profit and loss.

In his 2001 book "Perverse Subsidies," professor Norman Myers estimates the combined cost of direct government payments along with major externalities. He arrived at an annual figure of $2.6 trillion for United States corporations alone. Among the 30 richest governments, there were subsidies of $71 billion for the fossil and nuclear power industries.

The Energy Policy Act, passed in 2005, provided an additional $2.9 billion to the coal industry and $1.5 billion to oil and gas companies. Let's not forget that taxpayers are ultimately the source of funding for all government subsidies.

In contrast, renewable energy systems have few negative impacts on the biosphere and receive a minute fraction of support from the government, compared to the numbers above. This disparity creates an illusion that can have potentially serious ramifications.

If we factor in the effect of subsidies, it is clear that we are paying a lot more for fossil and nuclear energy than what's reflected in our monthly bills, and that the relative cost of renewable energy is much lower than it seems. Although this more balanced comparison does not immediately change the reality of the market, it does provide insight about the direction we must go.

As we sail into our future, we should make decisions with full awareness, so that we can avoid the global equivalent of that beach in the Bahamas. The choice, for now at least, is still ours to make.

Steve Rypka is a green living consultant and president of GreenDream Enterprises, specializing in renewable energy, green building, alternative transportation and lifestyle choices for both residential and commercial clients. The company is committed to helping people live lighter on the planet. Rypka can be reached via e-mail at href=steve@greendream.biz.>steve@greendream.bi More information relating to this column is posted at >www.greendream.bi