A lot of things have been bouncing around my head the past couple weeks regarding the state of the planet's ability to sustain the current batch of species, including us. There were too many strands to make a cohesive piece, but I wanted to share this anyway on this Easter morn.
o When Obama's top climate science advisor is considering geo-engineering to stave off global warming, you know we're in deep doo-doo.
o Geo-engineering may be the single most dangerous, arrogant and deluded scientific posturing of them all, with the distinct possibility of killing off photosynthesis as one potential side effect.
o Any society that doesn't include reverence for nature in its worship has screwed the pooch for all future generations.
o America's green obsession is like its diet obsession -- nothing real will come of it.
o Everyone but the absolute craziest is an environmentalist -- each of us just has a different idea of what the threshold is for the Earth. For some, it was 40 years ago; for others, its 40 years hence. In other words, even the most rabid anti-nature conservative will probably agree that the Earth cannot sustain 50 billion people on the planet all driving Humvees. But of course, the difference is what form of current scientific reality you're basing your opinion on.
o The same goes for sacred places. Everyone has one -- a place of nature they would NOT like to see condos or convenience stores. I gotta think even Cheney doesn't want oil rigs at his favorite fishing hole in Wyoming. Again, it's just a matter of degrees.
o The Earth's atmosphere is only about 50 miles wide. Think of a city 50 miles from you, and then think of all the garbage we throw into that thin layer of atmosphere everyday. The sky above us is the atmospheric equivalent of a landfill.
o To give you a better idea of how thin an egg shell is the atmosphere, imagine a large globe. Now imagine the lacquer on it. That thin layer of lacquer would equate to the thinness of our atmosphere.
o If humans can't see, touch or feel pollution, they don't think it exists.
o Obama said he would consider his presidency a failure if he doesn't get out of Iraq, fix healthcare and contain global warming. He needs to re-arrange his priorities because all else pales to the third problem.
o As Bill Mahr said recently, we lose the polar ice caps, and we're screwed because of all the heat that will no longer be reflected back into space. And those ice caps are going faster than anyone expected. Most think they have 30 years at best.
o If we don't apply every nation's skills and populations to solving global warming, a full-court press bigger than WWII, the Apollo missions and the Manhattan Project combined, then there is very little hope. And even if we do, we'd be lucky to survive.
o There may be a damn good reason we've never heard anything from those SETI scanners -- when a species evolves far enough to dominate the planet, they invent their own doom. Difficult to control the millions of years of DNA to WIN at any cost when now it takes pulling back on the reins of species success.
o We're just these 5 to six foot creatures wanderiing around on this floating dustball in space. Where did all this hubris come from? Because we took care of some bad mammals with fangs?
o The ancients and the pagans worshipped nature for one simple reason -- they understood it provided FOOD. We've lost that direct connection.
o The best thing Christianity did was put the slave on the same or higher plane than the king, in God's eyes, and replacing human sacrifice on the altar with the symbolic one of Jesus. The worst thing was it increased our disconnect from nature.
o I knew we were in trouble since at least the time of this movie.
o Bottomline, our problem is a lack of humility, which means a lack of sense of reality, which means DELUSION. I love the human race because I'm part of it, but we have to recognize our place in the world and the universe. And we ain't at the center of it.
o Sorry for all the heavy thoughts this Easter morn, but if the holiday is essentially a moral challenge, then I think we gotta face the largest moral issue that humankind has ever faced.