Peter, almost took issue with “but the Earth can wait”….my immediate impulse was to scream “no it can’t”……took me a nanosecond to get back into my body and realize, of course, the Earth CAN wait….it is patient, we humans are not. As I understand it, the Earth as we know it (allowing for shifting continents/tectonic plates/etc) is good, give or take, for another 5 billion years….so we’re about 1/2 way through our shelf life. You’re right, we cannot wait to act lest WE be no more….and, increasingly, I fear that will be so. Oh, I have images of pockets of Homo sapiens (to evolve into what next over the few millennia if any of us survive?) adapting to the loss of critical habitats & species (our fellow Earth inhabitants). First & second world society members want our “stuff” and conveniences & ease & consumption w/o regard to what the final bill will be….I don’t think we have the means to pay what is due. Maybe, just maybe, if we get on a massive global (with first & second tier countries stepping up big time) cooperation, throwing our best & brightest & best (thoughtfully considered) technology to mitigate the harm already in the pipeline, we might have a chance. The stories our decedents will tell of the marvels of the past will be stuff of legend…I just hope it is not going to be “rinse, repeat”.
I remember seeing a cartoon of Earth at the doctor. Doc said “Oh, you’ve just got a case of the humans. That will have to run its course; there really isn’t a cure for that organism.”
One of my faves is an old Gary Larsen where God is in his laboratory creating the Earth…there it sits on the lab table, almost complete, and God is holding a container like a salt shaker tipped above it. The caption is something like “to make it more interesting” and the label on the shaker says “jerks”.
Barbara, this summer in New England has been unreal. And brought home to me that we really have less time than even the experts predicted: because we thought people would pay attention, governments would act.
The best- the *best*- we can hope for now is that enough gets done in the next decade that we can slow global warming down enough to give us time to adapt to it. Even if we stop pretending now and start really doing the things we can, it is going to keep skidding for a long time.
And yet there are people who are still pretending that pipelines are part of the solution, that we can continue driving our personal vehicles, that there will be enough electricity to both fuel EVs and cool our homes- which means only those of us who are wealthy enough to afford those things, and live where we have access to it. The reality: most Americans won't. And most of the people in the world won't, and most of them have it worse than we do. We are looking at massive changes in how we live, and we are not ready.
Vermont just had ANOTHER 1000 year flood. We were lucky in that no one died. But our farmers have lost crops again. It's not clear we have time to replant. Our roads and infrastructure are going to need rebuilding again.
And it will happen again. I agree with your statement "I don't think we have the means to pay what is due." I am so deeply sad that we are leaving this for our grandchildren, and embarrassed that we can't force our elected officials to do those things we know CAN be done and COULD make mitigate what is happening. Democracy makes a difference, because we know from generations, centuries, millenia, that autocracies do not and cannot, because their priorities always become doing what tains them power, not what is right and good for people's lives.
I guess that is the only thing that keeps me going. Knowing that our best bet for everything is a truly functional democracy. I hope to hell that somehow that's what we emerge with.
Annie, I hear you. It is not just the consumer or the governments (those count), but the corporations and businesses that are so powerful & that thrive on our over-the-top consumption of what they sell-sell-sell. Looking back at critical, societal/health issues and to know that those in the industries KNEW, they knew!!! the truth, the impact, and kept mum for the profits (a vindictive part of me hopes that this ate at their souls for the remainder of their lives….tho’ probably not…). This is now playing out on a global scale. I fear we’ve come to the dance too late…and probably don’t have the necessary moves to reinvigorate it all. But what do I know!? I never sought fame or fortune….but, just “enough” to make it through while doing my part to lend a hand to the effort. Probably not enough to make a difference….I’ve done what I can (ill) afford to lessen my impact & might be able to do more if resources were there (I think there are many people who would make significant changes if they could afford to change/upgrade their personal infrastructure). All in all I gather the Universe wastes nothing….and that somehow, someway we will all be recycled into whatever is created next (yeah, the recycling meme is not lost on me!)/
The issues you've gone on to outline call for a proper response, Barbara, but they're so vast that they don't lend themselves to ready discussion in a forum like this.
I'll come back to you but it would be wonderful if readers could take up the challenge of considering or imagining how we humans -- ourselves for a start, then those who'll have to face far worse -- are to face the chaotic transition we have already entered.
Expressed baldly, my view is that we are obliged to fall back on our innate resources.
So now I'm asking you to ask yourselves, what could that statement mean?
Even if 99% of humans perish (not likely all at once, but maybe in waves or fits ‘n starts….really who knows?) that leaves, based on current (rounding down) estimates of 8 billion currently on Earth, some 80 million left. Depending where on Earth they are, how habitable & resource (food/water) rich it is, our species might get a do-over. We’re adaptable as our evolution has shown. That said, and I’m just riffing here, perhaps a competing species will evolve and crowd us out and we will dwindle away to nothing (could happen regardless). Brings to mind Ishi, the last surviving member of the Yahi tribe in CA to be living “free”—he was in his own world w/in another world when he was discovered as an adult and brought to “civilization”. Certainly a thought-experiment of uncertainties…tho’ curiosity, intelligence (sometimes I wonder) and creativity have carried us along and brought us to this point….a cosmic roll of the dice?
So Barbara. Almost with complete assurance we can see that 99% of humans alive today will be gone by the end of this century. Without any enhancement whatsoever there comes an end to the current crop about every century or so. That is all of us. The good the bad and the hard to look at. If we amended the constitution along the lines of originality as defined by our current desires rather than original content we might engineer a new subset of humans to carry on with perhaps vastly diminished numbers extracting less of a toll on Mother Earth. I would propose we seek improvements in physical properties as well. For instance, brown skin is much nicer to look at and my own white skin is a pain in the ass when exposed to the sun. Also your expertise coming from California would be invaluable in choosing a glamorous but functional line of sun glasses. The possibilities are crazy. Just crazy. We could accessorize the human condition with gmo’s. Such as replacing fingertips with claws so that just about everyone could build their own homes by burrowing. We could add thicker fur to our nearly hairless bodies. Perhaps not even needing clothes. Imagine leathery pads on our feet negating even the need for sandals as we walk the expanding hot beaches. I’m going to quit here but really I haven’t been this excited since the new colt was born last spring and will replace my pickup soon.
Pat, sometime ago I saw a cartoon….a riff on the meme of evolution with a line of “beings” represented, each an advanced stage over the prior one….starting out with a chimp, then an ape, then Neanderthal/Denisovans, then modern human….in this one the final human iteration has turned back and walks toward those in line behind him with, as I recall, saying “go back, we fu*ked up”…. I think I cut it out of the comic page and stashed it somewhere. Really rang true!
So true. While the best of us completed the journey not all of us made it successfully. Then there are the career cretins like myself who purposefully can’t let go and remain haunted in our Neanderthal souls.
“I don’t think we have the means to pay what is due. Maybe, just maybe, IF…”
Well… what do we do when we suddenly realize we are in danger? Do we just ignore the warning and keep on doing whatever we were doing?
Maybe that will depend on what we are doing or not doing.
Francis Drake was playing bowls on Plymouth Hoe when the Spanish Armada hove in sight. He kept playing till the end of the game…
Samurai took tea together—the chanoyu ceremony—before going into battle.
The English played cricket on the eve of the battle of Waterloo.
In every one of these three instances men used the occasion to mark a pause and gather themselves together before going into action. Tea ceremony was quite clear: a last enjoyment in peace of life’s fleeting beauty… before letting go of all that.
We would do well to heed these examples. To stop. To make a pause. And, before turning our minds in all the usual directions—up, down, left, right, 360° in every conceivable permutation—to remember and go to the one place we always forgot. To look into ourselves… Who am I? What am I? What brought me here? What do I think I’m doing? To ask with humility the most basic questions, and in so doing, to prepare the ground for all the secondary ones that follow, the what-am-I-to-do-now? And what are we to do?
After all, when, Barbara, you speak of the bill, “the final bill”, that could fairly be said to represent the cost of all the key questions neither we, our contemporaries nor our forebears ever addressed, all the factors ignored or deliberately suppressed over centuries, even millennia, along with those men and women who raised them and were killed for their pains, whether at the dictates of religion or rulers or thoughtlessly… or out of plain ignorance. And now we face issues so vast and complex that we cannot hope to get our minds around them—the fate of all living beings on the surface of planet Earth.
What faced the builders of the Tower of Babel is as nothing compared to the confusion we now face, the chaos of stratagems and technical solutions, quickfix and “improved”, that claim to address this or that fragmentary symptom, almost never the whole. All this, without counting the host of saboteurs and misleaders and the millions they draw down with them into the abyss.
How are we to tackle the challenge of saving mankind and all those beings with whom we share our miraculous planet unless we first take stock of ourselves and question our place in the order of things, now that the balance of life is so deeply disturbed that our world is turning against us and other life forms?
I had a similar reaction, Pat. I wondered if decedents" meant those deceasing (rather than living). As for Barbara's "jerks" -- sounds like a huge overdose of divine monosodium glutamate, and horribly close to the truth... Just observe today's antics of leading misleader Ted Cruz...
Fire, Wind, Water speak louder than the loudest "person corporate".
In the end, even the stone deaf will hear, even the purblind will see, and even the insane will feel the heat and begin to get the point.
But Earth can wait.
We can't.
Peter, almost took issue with “but the Earth can wait”….my immediate impulse was to scream “no it can’t”……took me a nanosecond to get back into my body and realize, of course, the Earth CAN wait….it is patient, we humans are not. As I understand it, the Earth as we know it (allowing for shifting continents/tectonic plates/etc) is good, give or take, for another 5 billion years….so we’re about 1/2 way through our shelf life. You’re right, we cannot wait to act lest WE be no more….and, increasingly, I fear that will be so. Oh, I have images of pockets of Homo sapiens (to evolve into what next over the few millennia if any of us survive?) adapting to the loss of critical habitats & species (our fellow Earth inhabitants). First & second world society members want our “stuff” and conveniences & ease & consumption w/o regard to what the final bill will be….I don’t think we have the means to pay what is due. Maybe, just maybe, if we get on a massive global (with first & second tier countries stepping up big time) cooperation, throwing our best & brightest & best (thoughtfully considered) technology to mitigate the harm already in the pipeline, we might have a chance. The stories our decedents will tell of the marvels of the past will be stuff of legend…I just hope it is not going to be “rinse, repeat”.
I remember seeing a cartoon of Earth at the doctor. Doc said “Oh, you’ve just got a case of the humans. That will have to run its course; there really isn’t a cure for that organism.”
One of my faves is an old Gary Larsen where God is in his laboratory creating the Earth…there it sits on the lab table, almost complete, and God is holding a container like a salt shaker tipped above it. The caption is something like “to make it more interesting” and the label on the shaker says “jerks”.
Barbara, this summer in New England has been unreal. And brought home to me that we really have less time than even the experts predicted: because we thought people would pay attention, governments would act.
The best- the *best*- we can hope for now is that enough gets done in the next decade that we can slow global warming down enough to give us time to adapt to it. Even if we stop pretending now and start really doing the things we can, it is going to keep skidding for a long time.
And yet there are people who are still pretending that pipelines are part of the solution, that we can continue driving our personal vehicles, that there will be enough electricity to both fuel EVs and cool our homes- which means only those of us who are wealthy enough to afford those things, and live where we have access to it. The reality: most Americans won't. And most of the people in the world won't, and most of them have it worse than we do. We are looking at massive changes in how we live, and we are not ready.
Vermont just had ANOTHER 1000 year flood. We were lucky in that no one died. But our farmers have lost crops again. It's not clear we have time to replant. Our roads and infrastructure are going to need rebuilding again.
And it will happen again. I agree with your statement "I don't think we have the means to pay what is due." I am so deeply sad that we are leaving this for our grandchildren, and embarrassed that we can't force our elected officials to do those things we know CAN be done and COULD make mitigate what is happening. Democracy makes a difference, because we know from generations, centuries, millenia, that autocracies do not and cannot, because their priorities always become doing what tains them power, not what is right and good for people's lives.
I guess that is the only thing that keeps me going. Knowing that our best bet for everything is a truly functional democracy. I hope to hell that somehow that's what we emerge with.
Annie, I hear you. It is not just the consumer or the governments (those count), but the corporations and businesses that are so powerful & that thrive on our over-the-top consumption of what they sell-sell-sell. Looking back at critical, societal/health issues and to know that those in the industries KNEW, they knew!!! the truth, the impact, and kept mum for the profits (a vindictive part of me hopes that this ate at their souls for the remainder of their lives….tho’ probably not…). This is now playing out on a global scale. I fear we’ve come to the dance too late…and probably don’t have the necessary moves to reinvigorate it all. But what do I know!? I never sought fame or fortune….but, just “enough” to make it through while doing my part to lend a hand to the effort. Probably not enough to make a difference….I’ve done what I can (ill) afford to lessen my impact & might be able to do more if resources were there (I think there are many people who would make significant changes if they could afford to change/upgrade their personal infrastructure). All in all I gather the Universe wastes nothing….and that somehow, someway we will all be recycled into whatever is created next (yeah, the recycling meme is not lost on me!)/
Thank you, sister.
The issues you've gone on to outline call for a proper response, Barbara, but they're so vast that they don't lend themselves to ready discussion in a forum like this.
I'll come back to you but it would be wonderful if readers could take up the challenge of considering or imagining how we humans -- ourselves for a start, then those who'll have to face far worse -- are to face the chaotic transition we have already entered.
Expressed baldly, my view is that we are obliged to fall back on our innate resources.
So now I'm asking you to ask yourselves, what could that statement mean?
Or have you other views, other answers?
Descendants ? Or decedents? I can live with dead men talking.
Even if 99% of humans perish (not likely all at once, but maybe in waves or fits ‘n starts….really who knows?) that leaves, based on current (rounding down) estimates of 8 billion currently on Earth, some 80 million left. Depending where on Earth they are, how habitable & resource (food/water) rich it is, our species might get a do-over. We’re adaptable as our evolution has shown. That said, and I’m just riffing here, perhaps a competing species will evolve and crowd us out and we will dwindle away to nothing (could happen regardless). Brings to mind Ishi, the last surviving member of the Yahi tribe in CA to be living “free”—he was in his own world w/in another world when he was discovered as an adult and brought to “civilization”. Certainly a thought-experiment of uncertainties…tho’ curiosity, intelligence (sometimes I wonder) and creativity have carried us along and brought us to this point….a cosmic roll of the dice?
So Barbara. Almost with complete assurance we can see that 99% of humans alive today will be gone by the end of this century. Without any enhancement whatsoever there comes an end to the current crop about every century or so. That is all of us. The good the bad and the hard to look at. If we amended the constitution along the lines of originality as defined by our current desires rather than original content we might engineer a new subset of humans to carry on with perhaps vastly diminished numbers extracting less of a toll on Mother Earth. I would propose we seek improvements in physical properties as well. For instance, brown skin is much nicer to look at and my own white skin is a pain in the ass when exposed to the sun. Also your expertise coming from California would be invaluable in choosing a glamorous but functional line of sun glasses. The possibilities are crazy. Just crazy. We could accessorize the human condition with gmo’s. Such as replacing fingertips with claws so that just about everyone could build their own homes by burrowing. We could add thicker fur to our nearly hairless bodies. Perhaps not even needing clothes. Imagine leathery pads on our feet negating even the need for sandals as we walk the expanding hot beaches. I’m going to quit here but really I haven’t been this excited since the new colt was born last spring and will replace my pickup soon.
You mean (maybe, if we are reading the fossil records correctly) kinda like it used to be?????
Now that you mention it.
Pat, sometime ago I saw a cartoon….a riff on the meme of evolution with a line of “beings” represented, each an advanced stage over the prior one….starting out with a chimp, then an ape, then Neanderthal/Denisovans, then modern human….in this one the final human iteration has turned back and walks toward those in line behind him with, as I recall, saying “go back, we fu*ked up”…. I think I cut it out of the comic page and stashed it somewhere. Really rang true!
So true. While the best of us completed the journey not all of us made it successfully. Then there are the career cretins like myself who purposefully can’t let go and remain haunted in our Neanderthal souls.
GATHERING OURSELVES TOGETHER
“I don’t think we have the means to pay what is due. Maybe, just maybe, IF…”
Well… what do we do when we suddenly realize we are in danger? Do we just ignore the warning and keep on doing whatever we were doing?
Maybe that will depend on what we are doing or not doing.
Francis Drake was playing bowls on Plymouth Hoe when the Spanish Armada hove in sight. He kept playing till the end of the game…
Samurai took tea together—the chanoyu ceremony—before going into battle.
The English played cricket on the eve of the battle of Waterloo.
In every one of these three instances men used the occasion to mark a pause and gather themselves together before going into action. Tea ceremony was quite clear: a last enjoyment in peace of life’s fleeting beauty… before letting go of all that.
We would do well to heed these examples. To stop. To make a pause. And, before turning our minds in all the usual directions—up, down, left, right, 360° in every conceivable permutation—to remember and go to the one place we always forgot. To look into ourselves… Who am I? What am I? What brought me here? What do I think I’m doing? To ask with humility the most basic questions, and in so doing, to prepare the ground for all the secondary ones that follow, the what-am-I-to-do-now? And what are we to do?
After all, when, Barbara, you speak of the bill, “the final bill”, that could fairly be said to represent the cost of all the key questions neither we, our contemporaries nor our forebears ever addressed, all the factors ignored or deliberately suppressed over centuries, even millennia, along with those men and women who raised them and were killed for their pains, whether at the dictates of religion or rulers or thoughtlessly… or out of plain ignorance. And now we face issues so vast and complex that we cannot hope to get our minds around them—the fate of all living beings on the surface of planet Earth.
What faced the builders of the Tower of Babel is as nothing compared to the confusion we now face, the chaos of stratagems and technical solutions, quickfix and “improved”, that claim to address this or that fragmentary symptom, almost never the whole. All this, without counting the host of saboteurs and misleaders and the millions they draw down with them into the abyss.
How are we to tackle the challenge of saving mankind and all those beings with whom we share our miraculous planet unless we first take stock of ourselves and question our place in the order of things, now that the balance of life is so deeply disturbed that our world is turning against us and other life forms?
*
Just a few scattered preliminary thoughts.
Now, look into your own.
I had a similar reaction, Pat. I wondered if decedents" meant those deceasing (rather than living). As for Barbara's "jerks" -- sounds like a huge overdose of divine monosodium glutamate, and horribly close to the truth... Just observe today's antics of leading misleader Ted Cruz...
There will be a few. There are a slew of movies that depict their lives.
Pat, now we are “dead men walking”…..omg.