Some Direction

Please pick up a copy of Plan B 2.0, by Lester Brown. I cannot read it quickly enough, and I cannot stress how important it is to be aware of the Environmental and Economic issues he illuminates. His focused writing, along with the simultaneous reading of Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences by Lawrence Weschler has inspired this unpolished rant:

A reader may want to know; given the environmental problems the world is facing, can we make it work? That is, can we avoid economic decline and civilizational collapse?

We have moved into this new world so rapidly that we have not yet fully grasped the meaning of what is happening. Of course, by sitting here writing this, I'm attempting to indicate to my audience that I in fact have begun to fully grasp what is happening, and that I would like my audience to begin fully grasping at it as well. Amazingly it was less than a century ago that thinkers and artists were observing that time, in fact was relative. With the advent of the railroad and subsequent thinkers like Einstein sitting in patent offices playing with clocks, people could move fast enough to confuse previous notions of what time was and wasn’t, while other people could ponder over the theoretical physics of it. And here we are now, in 2006, scarcely a century since these thoughts were exploding, and we are still (of course!) living under the comforting illusion that time is a relative, bendable, infinite. A disposable tool. Mindsets do not shift so drastically, so quickly. Not in such a divergent, non-contextual, compartmentalized, distorted reality. Postmodernism. It takes a massive tragedy to shift the general mindset, and yet, it will take a shift in mindset to avoid the most massive tragedy we could ever bring upon ourselves. Our own destruction by way of neglect. By way of powerful people making short term oriented decisions. Apocalyptic? Naaahh. Check this out:

At the outset of the 20th Century, 10% of the population lived in cities. In 2000, around 50% of the world population lived in cities. In 2025, the number of city-dwellers could reach 5 billion individuals (two thirds of them in poor countries). Megalopolises. A megalopolis is not a dinosaur. It is a city with more than 8 million people (good start to an essay right there). In 1950 only NYC and London had more than 8 million people. Today there are 22 such cities. In 2015, there may be 33, and 27 are predicted to be in the world’s least developed countries.

The transformation is quiet to some of us, but it is happening so fast!

And try this on, as a sort of teaser for why you should look at Lester Brown’s book:

“The western economic model is not going to work for China. If China’s economy continues to expand at 8% per year, by 2031…it would use 99 million barrels of oil per day –well above current world production of 84 million barrels. And in an increasingly integrated world economy, where all countries are competing for the same oil, grain, and mineral resources, the existing economic model will not work for industrial countries either…Closely related to China’s expanding resource consumption is the world’s fast-changing oil outlook and the new issues it generates. For example, we have long been concerned about the effect of rising oil prices on food production costs, but of even more concern is the effect on the demand for food commodities. Since virtually everything we eat can be converted into automotive fuel either in ethanol distilleries or biodiesel refineries, high oil prices are opening a vast new market for farm products. Those buying commodities for fuel producers are competing directly with food processors for supplies of wheat, corn, soybeans, sugarcane, and other foodstuffs. In effect, supermarkets and service stations are now competing for the same commodities.”

And so…by way of subsidizing destructive habits, or not not subsidizing because we simply lack the cohesive community forum in which to spread a common message. So we still go about our daily business knowing that time speeds up when we are entertained, and slows when we are bored. Aroused, subdued, up, down, that’s how we go. – and yet, and yet…here are all these environmentalists, scientists, authors, companies, NGO’s, governments, who are pointing out that Hey! We’re on the clock, and this time it’s real. Time is real. Not because we say it’s so. Because Nature, the great equalizer, is out of balance and cannot remain so if we hope to coexist with it.

So here I am, marveling at how time appears to be relative, and money appears to be useless while stagnant, and these two things somehow being related, when, in the grander scope of things taking place around me, nature is silently but sublimely demanding our greater attention, reminding us that we can call it relative all we want but there will always be a point of no return, a respect threshold that once crossed cannot be reversed – and any time we speak of willing something to be reversed, as it was, not as it is – we are implying that inevitably the concept of time is real and stable, being tracked somehow in nature, and currently being pressed and raped as we ignore it.