Sometimes people wonder at my ideas on conservation and ecology, and I find that telling a story helps to relate my ideas best. There is an apocryphal story in Archeology, that took place about 100 years ago in the Fayum Basin of Egypt. A team of Archaeologists were excavating in the region, and came across what seemed to be a cemetery of mummified crocodiles. They were considered all but worthless, and as they dug up hundreds and hundreds of them they treated each as more worthless than the last, even to the extent of using them as kindling for fires. Eventually they broke through into some kind of main chamber and, expecting a human mummy of some kind, they were disappointed to find only more mummified crocodiles. Some versions of the story say that the lead worker in a rage picked up one of the crocodiles and threw it against a wall, it broke open to reveal that it contained a papyrus scroll, with valuable written data, poetry, philosophy, laws, edicts, accounting records and such, truly a treasure of ancient knowledge, and they had used a good chunk of it to fuel their fires. This story is central to my ideas on ecology and conservation, as our technology grows and our understanding of the world becomes more complex, we will finally be in a position to understand the true value of what it is we have around us. Those Archaeologists didn’t understand what they had until it was too late, and we are poised to make the same mistake when it concerns our natural world. As our technology and electronics becomes more sophisticated via methods of super conductor research and nano-technology it is entirely possible that some day we will have computers and machines that operate on micro-voltage, like our brains, rather than ordinary voltage. if this is possible, then in the future all the electronics in a city will be able to run off of the energy stored in a modern AAA battery, possibly even from the voltage left inside one that has been used up, and in such a future, excavating in a landfill would be worth while, just to find ancient run down batteries. We cannot pretend to understand the true value of the natural world yet. All the ecological experts agree that the world oil resources are a one time only gift of solar energy stored in the ground, something like a trust fund, and we as humans, are acting like an irresponsible teenager with a trust fund, whose strategy in life is to figure out how to burn through his trust fund faster, rather than more wisely. Chances are that no technology will be as expedient to us as burning fossil fuels, but even if they aren’t, they are still worth while, solar and wind, electric cars, all seem to be pale imitations of the power and ease of just burning up our crocodiles, but they are our only chance to reach for a sane strategy before our moment of realization comes.