Skip to the end for The Long Now stuff:
 
 
 
 
Jim,
 
I recently caught a picture online of Glacier National Park taken in 1965, the year of my birth.  It looked no different, I thought, than the other pictures I had always seen, not having ever been there myself.  And it's quite a beautiful picture taken at midsummer with nearly the top half of the mountain glistening like Dream-Whip frosting running down the sides of the mountain.

 

A picture in 2009 in midsummer.................ain't hardly nuthin' there a'tall.   Nada.   A little bit of whitish toward the TIP of the mountain.

 

That's all that's left.

 

There is no quick solution and most are financial sinkholes.  And there really isn't much we can do except get ready to move North when things start getting humid and tropical in Arkansas. Sure they have chaotic winter storms still, but the average winter there is nothing like it was in 1991 when my sister moved there.

 

Now, the climate of the world chandes like a bouncing ball over geologic time so often and for so many different reasons we will never get an accurate count of how many times or their exact circumstances.  BUT...it is either a natural process occurring sslloowwllyy over time. Or it arises out of a catostrophic incident extremely quickly; within days, if not hours (asteroid, etc.).

 

What we are experiencing is NEITHER naturally slow over hundreds and thousands of years (an Ice Age) or catastrophically fast.

 

It is a rate of change right in the middle.  Slowly.  Observable and FELT by me across my short 45 year lifetime.  Even the weather here in San Francisco is completely different than in 1995 when I moved here, and the 3rd and 4th gernerationers out here say the weather the past decade is nothing like it was experienced by generations of living here.  The patterns are completely shattered.

 

So, I must draw the conclusion that our Industrial Revolution did initiate this process, plus the general overcrowding, overfarming, overproducing, overpolluting, and everything else.  Not that the IR was bad, certainly not, and they cannot be faulted back then for lack of scientific insight that would have helped them plan better for consequences in the long term.  They barely knew what oxygen was, much less the possibility of on ozone hole or whatever.  The onus is not on them.

 

It is on US because we ARE aware now of all of these possibilities and systems and how they interplay.  And all we can really do is sit back and see what happens.

 

Really.

 

BUT, if it is the end of us and we do ideed disappear, that's really all okay by me.  And ultimately we have not harmed the Earth, but temporarily bent it to our will.  When we are gone, it will absolutely restore and recover itself over time, practically back to a Garden of Eden.  I would think the Fundamentalist Deny'ers would love this return to an Earthly paradise, but they cannot see through their Ego-lensed glasses.

 

There is an excellent podcast that is non-political and talks about what would happen if, for WHATEVER reason, we were just...gone.  What would happen.  The man giving the talk had a book out 2 years ago, and this is his podcast from The Long Now Foundation monthly seminar in February 2010.  It's the most amazing talk I've ever heard.

 
World Without Us, World With Us -Alan Weisman
Open attached filepodcast-2010-02-10-weisman.mp3

 

Main page:

http://www.longnow.org/

 

 

We really must take the longer view from now on.

 

And we REALLY must get back to fractals.  I've never in my life typed out a single word about this before.

 

Thanks for reading,

 

James C. Causey Jr.

Rockin' FractInt Since 1991