Throughout my life I've been either burdened or blessed -- you choose -- by a keen awareness that mankind lives on a razors' edge. My first recollection of this was in 1962 after I got my first drivers license. I was at my neighborhood gas station fuel up my first car, a green, four-door 1951 Chevy. Gas was 24 cents a gallon.
As I fueled my trusty old "Pickle Wagon," (as my mortified girlfriends used to call the beast.) I watched other motorists fueling their Detroit steeds, and it just popped into my heads. I can still hear the bells dinging and dinging as six cars filled up. (Pumps had bells in those days that dinged at ten cent intervals.)
"Well, this sure can't last forever!."
Even as hormonally poisoned teenage boy with his first set of wheels, I had enough sense to know that cars, trucks, trains and planes running on finite million-year old fossilized trash from the earths' previous incarnations was not a sustainable model.
That was 45-years ago -- a long time by human standards, but less than milli-second on Mother Earths' watch. While my 1962 moment did not come with a time frame, it appears that "can't last forever" meant roughly 50 years.
Back then the term, "environment," meant where you were at any point in time. The new shopping malls, for example, were a "shopping environment." With the exception of a small handful of environmental pioneers, like Rachel Carson, the idea human activity -- short of all-out nuclear war -- could threaten the earth's life-support systems, was an awareness yet to mature.
I clearly remember the first time I even saw the term, "Environmentalist." It was a couple of years after my gas station revelation. It was scrawled on a small sign in the window of dingy second-story office on Canary Row in Monterey. I recall turning to a friend and pointing to it. "What's that," I wisecracked. "some new religion?"
It would be years more before I "got it," and came to understand that there really is no free lunch, not in business and not among creatures great and small. And that someday a million years from now my bones might be being pumped out of the ground, refined and poured into some future 16-year olds ride.
Or, not.
The other possibility is that my bones will lay undisturbed until the earth is swallowed by the our expanding sun 5 billion years from now, my CO2 safely sequestered to the very end -- because there would be no humans left to refine me into some manner of fuel.
Those who know me well know I am a veritable connoisseur of catastrophe. I am a professional pessimist -- which I firmly believe is a healthier way to live than being an optimist. Think about it. Optimists spend a goodly portion of thier lives being disappointed when things come up tails when they were sure they were going to be heads. Ah, but we pessimists are far better off, because part of our lives are spent being ready when shit hits the fan and the rest of our lives pleasantly surprised when it doesn't.
I can imagine the worst possible outcome for any given set of circumstances you can cook up. That's just the way I process data. But, it is data I am processing. When I come up with a hand-wringing scenario I can defend it with data.
Here's the kind of data that keeps me up at night lately:
- The world population increased from 3 billion in 1959 to 6 billion by 1999, a doubling that occurred over 40 years. The world population is projected to grow from 6 billion in 1999 to 9 billion over the next 30 years.
- It takes an average of 25 gallons of water to produce one pound of wheat. It takes 5,214 gallons of fresh water to produce one pound of beef. (Ummmmmmm steakkkkkk)
Stephen Pizzo has been published everywhere from The New York Times to Mother Jones magazine. His book, Inside Job: The Looting of America's Savings and Loans, was nominated for a Pulitzer.
You are right on the money Stephen but while one's view of the world's condition might be pessimistic, for many the same conditions are very optimistic. I find most of my answers in God's word and yes contrary to what many think, God does, shortly now, have a change in store for the earth. Consider just two scriptures.
2Tim 3:15 reads, "But know this, that in the last days critical times hard to deal with will be here. For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, self-assuming, haughty, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, disloyal, having no natural affection, not open to any agreement, slanderers, without self-control, fierce, without love of goodness, betrayers, headstrong, puffed up [with pride], lovers of pleasures rather than lovers of God, having a form of godly devotion but proving false to its power; and from these turn away."
Rev 11:18 says, “We thank you, Jehovah God, the Almighty, the One who is and who was, because you have taken your great power and begun ruling as king. But the nations became wrathful, and your own wrath came, and the appointed time for the dead to be judged, and to give [their] reward to your slaves the prophets and to the holy ones and to those fearing your name, the small and the great, and to bring to ruin those ruining the earth.”
Yes we are close to a change, note that it does not say God will step in after the earth is ruined and gone but while man is in the process of ruining it. Both these scriptures apply today.
by
Dennis Moore (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 4 comments)
on Monday, November 26, 2007 at 1:28:13 PM
