Ecology

THE ARRIVAL AND IMMINENT DEPARTURE OF A SINGULARITY – Marilyn Armstrong

/ Marilyn Armstrong / 13 Comments

Fandango’s Provocative Question #47

A provocative question today that I think currently means very little. It probably meant something 200-years ago, but now? I doubt it.

Here’s the question:

Technological singularity?

Personally? I think we reached it years ago — probably at least 50 years ago — and we are already in the throes of it. It did not need to become a net negative, but because of other issues — politics being the obvious one but also human greed, corporate greed, and a refusal to believe that the world was not made to accommodate us and when we push its boundaries hard enough, it will, in its own way, push back.

We have a dying world. We have a horribly over-inflated belief in humanity’s place in this world. And it will come to pass — is already coming to pass — that we shall discover how unimportant we really are. We are mosquitoes sitting on the back of a world that is getting ready to take a dip in waters lethal to our kind.

We shall be cleaned out and slowly but surely vanish. The planet will survive and recover in its own way. Whether or not that recovery leaves room for our kind? I’m not overly optimistic about it. While we are making enormous progress on one level, we are destroying what needs to be saved at the same time. It won’t do us any good to create a green world when we have already destroyed the greenery.

We can try, but we’d better start trying a whole lot harder than we currently are. Because I don’t think we can call a time out on the changes we have created and the desolation it is likely to bring.

Sorry for not sounding more chipper and cheery. If someone has something chipper and cheery to add that is based on science and not a personal opinion, shout it out.

BUILT ON THE ROCK ~ OCTOBER 28, 2019 ~ MELANIE B CEE

/ Marilyn Armstrong / 12 Comments

Garry is forever telling me that I do make a difference even though I usually can’t see how. But this is actual evidence that I have made a difference to at least one person and hopefully, a few others. The diagnosis that we are killing the world we need to live in is incontrovertible. It’s not a rumor, it’s not fake anything. It’s real and it is happening now. 

A year ago, I had dozens of birds. This year, I have half the species of last year. We have southern Eastern Equine Mosquitoes killing people and mindless spraying of poison over our woods. Which quite probably explains why the birds are gone. We’ve lost 30 million birds over the past 10 years and stand to lose at least that many in the next few.

There is a mass extinction in progress — and we are as much on the bloc as the now-defunct Black Rhinoceros. If this scares you, terrifies you, haunts you? Find out more. Tell others. Do everything you can to help save the world we know and love.

CONTROVERSIALBADGE

This post will contain two subjects that tend to get people riled.   The first is religion and the second is climate change or whatever trendy name they’ve slapped on that today.

If either really irritates you to the point of stroking out, please feel free to read no further.  It’s okay.

I follow an “LDS” (formerly the Mormons) blog entitled “By Common Consent.” I like it because the hosts allow a variety of opinions and invite some interesting people to write about their experiences.  Not all of them could be counted among the ‘faithful’ and some apparently have had negative experiences with the Church. All that is required of the reader of that blog is to be respectful. Regardless of the content of the piece that’s shared.   They don’t accept writers who are really far out there, extremists and any kind of hate or bigotry writing (speech). It pays to remember that the blog is LDS based though.  Because most of the content is about the LDS Church and beliefs and rites.  

The content today was about the testimony. Now I admit that I naively believed that only Mormons bore their testimonies.  That it might be an odd concept to the person who isn’t a member. I’ve since revised my thinking to include the fact that everyone (religiously-inclined anyhow) has a testimony and that each religion deals with that idea in its own way.   A testimony, in case you don’t know, is (my interpretation, which probably is flawed) the relationship, based in faith, that a person has with God and to a lesser degree, their preferred religion.   

In the LDS Church, one gets up (or has the opportunity to do so) once a month in “Fast and Testimony” Meeting and share their testimony.   To me personally, it’s an opportunity to talk about how one’s life is blessed by having God in their life or influencing their actions and decisions. A chance to humbly thank God for all the bounty He may have provided to the individual. It’s not about who got married, or had a kid, or went to Bura-Bura on vacation.  It’s not for bragging or being entitled or any other close-minded crap that such people tend to think is interesting.

Too often though it is about the latter and not the former. God isn’t thanked at all if He’s thought of. That kind of testimony is one reason **Koff-koff excuse koff-koff ** that I’m not very active in the church currently.   I find the sometimes smug attitude sickening and distracting from why I personally go to church – to improve my relationship with God.

God reminds man though, that we’re not to judge others. We have enough things of our own to worry about (i.e. our own business) without thinking snide things about other people. I sometimes find that hard to do.  

Today the woman writing the BCC post asked the rhetorical question: “So tell me – do you think voicing criticism has the potential to damage testimony, and if so, do we have a responsibility toward each other to take care with how we share it?”   

I have a huge problem with idiots. I think that’s well documented.  And my viewpoint about the question had nothing to do with the author being an idiot. The idiot part comes in from the idea of having politically correct (touchy-feely) censorship of one’s most intimate inner thoughts. Which are what the testimony IS (in my opinion).   

But I get why she asked the question too. There are people in the LDS Church who view testimony meeting as a chance to air every slight and grievance they ever had, real or imagined. To be acid-tongued and sharp with those in alleged authority with whom they take exception. To belittle others. To me?  That’s not a testimony, that’s bile – regurgitated. So sit down and shut up and don’t blast a spiritual event with garbage.

I asked a question today on SYW about where the line is drawn between honest debate and hate speech (verbal bullying).   I’m interested to see what people say about that too.   Where do we stop being overly sensitive and start with real disagreement with someone’s harsh words?   Is that censorship too?

As a good blogging buddy used to write:  “No answers here…”

The second part of this post is about a personal terror.   The very idea scares the crap out of me and keeps me awake nights.  Wakes me up in a cold sweat. I’ve heard a huge variety of opinion on climate change and what that is going to mean to the world I once knew (because she’s a’changin’ and she ain’t gonna be the same).   

The video clip I shared is about 5 minutes and the fellow speaking is a sensible person (IMHO) who has a realistic manner and speech.   What he said in this video clip scared me silly.   He wasn’t even trying to frighten.  He was stating facts, backed up by scientists and really incredibly smart people (well, presumably).   I don’t know who Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez even is, never heard of her before today. Another benefit (I suspect) of living a largely mushroom life.  I don’t CARE who she is just to be clear. Don’t let the title of the video mislead you. But be prepared for a shock.

Judy Dykstra-Brown is the one who brought the blog and video clip to my attention.  I’m not sure whether to be grateful or horrified that what I’ve thought for a lot of years now is coming true. And that right soon. Dang.

One of the points made in the video has been supported (unwittingly) by Marilyn of Serendipity and her blogs over the summer about the mosquito problems in her area.  

The things talked about in that video are real. As Beau says “It’s not fake science and it’s not fake news.  It simply IS.”   

How these two subjects overlap in one sense is that the LDS Church has cautioned its members for YEARS (longer than I’ve been alive) to start saving at least seven years’ worth of food, and obviously water.  Mormons have been ridiculed and poked fun at for being “dooms-dayers” and weird because they allegedly stockpile that way. Well, who is laughing NOW?  

This ought to cover my posts on Pet Peeve Monday – even though it’s not a pet peeve, it’s quickly becoming part of my social phobia/anxiety disorder.

Also, this post might fit into the 31 Days of October Challenge.   If the material shared isn’t a horror story, I don’t know what might be.   

Can we stop the world long enough for me to get off?   I think I’ve had enough of this particular Tunnel of Terror ride. 

https://bycommonconsent.com/2019/10/28/testimony-and-its-opposite/

https://judydykstrabrown.com/2019/10/28/beau-of-the-fifth-column-and-climate-change/

https://beckiesmentalmess.blog/2019/10/28/the-monday-peeve-7/

https://lavent69.blog/2019/09/30/the-31-days-of-october-challenge/

DON’T PUT ME IN CHARGE! – Marilyn Armstrong

/ Marilyn Armstrong / Leave a comment

FOWC with Fandango — Ruler

Let me start by saying I do not want to rule the world. I don’t even want to rule this house. Not even a tiny corner of it. I get exhausted trying to manage dogs, convince them to go out to do their business and not steal my socks.

So if you give me a superpower, I might use it to eliminate us. What an annoying bunch we are.

As custodians of the earth, we’ve failed. We have poisoned the water and air, brutalized the earth, slaughtered the wildlife, cut down forests, dammed rivers, and polluted everything with our garbage.

We haven’t been any better to each other than we’ve been to the animals we’ve driven to extinction or near-extinction. We’ve murdered each other and stolen the darkness. We’ve made privacy a joke, eliminated alone time, and somehow, lost respect for each other and life. If we could start over, maybe we’d do a better job, but I don’t see a “redo” in the works.

Autumn at home

If indeed we were chosen to care for this world, we have done a poor job. Personally, I’d make a terrible ruler. Humans cannot be trusted. Even when we try hard, we just don’t seem to get it. I think we weren’t meant to be in charge. We need a better leader, one with the power to make things right and keep them that way.

See? I told you.

Don’t put me in charge. You won’t like it and I know I wouldn’t.

OUR CLIMATE CHANGE DIDN’T HAPPEN SINCE TRUMP TOOK OFFICE – Marilyn Armstrong

/ Marilyn Armstrong / 35 Comments

NOTE: I’m not putting in any pictures of dead creatures, malls, or rivers the color of fire. These are too depressing. There are plenty of pictures of slaughtered animals, poisonous rivers, dead malls.

If you have the stomach for it, look them up. 

Forty years ago, I was the English-language editor at the University of Jerusalem’s Environmental Health Laboratory. I worked there for almost five years during which we addressed issues of wastewater, air and soil management.

The country was still quite small. I think we had maybe 7 million people at that point. The scientific staff traveled from kibbutz to kibbutz, then to any other area that was under cultivation. The goal was trying to explain why it was so critical we stop using nitrogen-enriched fertilizer and start managing wastewater while finding ways to use it.

No one listened. My boss predicted we’d lose our aquifer by 1985. He was wrong. It was dead by 1983.

The point to this is not that I knew something secret and important about our climate before most people were really up to speed on the subject. The point is that we have known about the danger to our environment for at least 100 years. We have had better science and statistics about it for at least the past fifty.

We can loathe Trump for taking a desperately bad situation and making it worse at every possible opportunity. But the reality is that with or without Trump, the planetary climate madness we are seeing was going to happen anyway, no matter who was in office. Because we didn’t do nearly enough. This issue did not begin in 2016. Much of the worst damage was done in 1916 when we casually and carelessly dumped poison into our air, water, and land.

Since the 1970s when we declared “Earth Day,” we’ve done some good stuff. We didn’t do nothing, but we didn’t do enough. Not here. Not in China. Not in Europe. Not in South America or Africa or Australia.

We improved car emissions. We knocked out the smog in some major cities. We cleaned up some horribly polluted rivers. Some of us did our best to manage recyclables. Some places did better than others. We didn’t build enough plants to deal with the plastic and paper and we charged extra for products made from recycled materials — which was not what people expected. Reality notwithstanding, we didn’t expect to be charged a premium for recycled goods. A lot of places — like where we live — do not have “real” recycling. We don’t even have a dump much less a recycling plant.

Despite all arguments anyone cares to make, WE DID NOT DO ENOUGH. If we had done enough, we would not be where we currently are. 

The world’s population has grown exponentially everywhere. For every little green area we plow so we can build a condo or mall we don’t need, birds and other small animals die, often forever. In poor countries, you can’t blame them for trying to create farms to feed their people. Large mammals — like elephants — are antithetical to local farming.

Of course, most of the large mammals are murdered for worse reasons: fun. I have a venal hatred of “sport” killing. There’s nothing sporting about it and I think everyone who slaughters an animal that is disappearing deserves to die a similar death, but slower including a full understanding of why he is dying.

Then there’s all the drilling for oil — and the massive spillage in the arctic and the Gulf of Mexico — and add to that fracking. What could possibly go wrong with that?

I spent five years surrounded by nothing but environmental scientists. I edited their material, sent it to magazines for publication. Read the papers. Understood how important it was.

And for all of that, I didn’t understand. I didn’t imagine it would happen to me. That my world would change. That my birds would die. That insects that aren’t supposed to live in this climate would move in bringing with them diseases that would kill us. And our way of stopping the insects –which are the direct result of the climate change we’ve been denying or worse, ignoring — is poisoning everything.

It’s a planetary problem and it needs a planetary solution. It needs us to do the single thing we never successfully do. Work together for a common cause, even if we hate each other. It doesn’t matter how we feel or what our political system is. This is a planetary issue and we need a planet-size solution.

For all I know, we are beyond fixing it. Maybe we can ameliorate the process. Maybe we can stop building on every piece of ground we find. Maybe we can do something to create food for more people with less destruction to the earth. I don’t really have answers. I just know we are in serious trouble and aren’t addressing it.

AN OPEN E-MAIL TO HUMANITY FROM PLANET EARTH – BY TOM CURLEY

/ tomcurley1 / 3 Comments

This last weekend millions of people all over the world went on strike for awareness about Climate Change and that we REALLY have to do something about it. There was lots of talk about how we are destroying the planet.  They mean well, but they are missing a really really huge point.  I tried to point this out before. I’m pointing it out again.

Original Post

Hello humanity, this is Earth. The planet Earth. You’ve called me by different names like Gaia, Mother Earth, Terra, etc.

It really doesn’t matter what you call me as long as you don’t call me late for dinner. To be honest, I never got that joke. I’m not sure exactly what “dinner” is., but I’ve noticed it’s a popular joke with you folks.

Anyway, I’m writing this open letter because I’ve noticed a lot of you have been concerned with what you call “climate change.”  You seem to be concerned about “saving the planet.”

I’m flattered that so many of you are concerned about me. I mean, the dinosaurs were living on me for almost a billion years and never once did one of them even notice I existed. Now that I think about it, the fact they had brains the size of a walnut might have had something to do with that.

“How do you expect me to remember birthdays? You know my brain is the size of a walnut!”

But I digress. Sorry. I do that a lot. I’ve been around for over four and a half billion years. Cut me some slack.

Be that as it may, the reason I’m writing this letter to you is though I appreciate your concern about my welfare, you need to know you don’t need to save me.  I’m doing just fine.

I’ll continue to do just fine. Like I said, I’ve been around for over four and a half billion years and my surface is constantly changing.  When I started out, I was basically a really hot rock. The only thing I had to do was make volcanoes.

Granted, at first, it was interesting, but I got to tell you, after the first billion years or so, it got a little old.

Then it started raining. It rained for a long time, even by my standards.  All of a sudden almost three-quarters of my surface was covered in water.

That was cool.  I had clouds and snow and much better sunrises and sunsets.

Then the oddest thing happened. I’m not really sure how, but life formed. At first, it was pretty boring. Single-celled organisms that pretty much ate stuff and reproduced.

But then they got bigger and more complex. First small fish, then bigger fish. That was neat. Then a few of them left the water and started walking around on land.  That was weird.

Hey Phil! You got to come up here and see this!

The next time I took a look (you have to realize that your perception of time is different when you’ve been around for billions of years) I was covered in plants and trees and there were insects and dinosaurs everywhere. They were interesting but all they really did was wander around and eat each other.

Get in my belly!

Again, cool at first, but trust me, anything gets boring after the first hundred million years or so. Things were going fine until this big asteroid crashed into me. I gotta tell you, that one hurt. I remember thinking “Oww! That’s going to leave a mark!”

And it did. After that, the climate on my surface changed and all the dinosaurs disappeared.

Then you guys came along. Now realize, that by my standards you’ve only been around for about a year or so. Even so, I’ve been fascinated by watching you.

You guys actually figured out how to use fire.

You invented the wheel. You created civilization. You created beer! Not one dinosaur in over 500 million years ever came close to doing anything like that. You guys did it after being around for only a few hundred thousand years.

I was impressed. Lately, and by lately I mean for maybe the last 40-thousand years or so, you’ve been inventing all sorts of really interesting things. I have to confess, I’ve really gotten into Netflix.

But I have noticed that you’ve been changing my surface environment lately.

Yes, it’s definitely you folks doing it. It took me hundreds of millions of years to turn hundreds of millions of years of dead dinosaurs and plant life into coal and oil and you’ve managed to burn most of it and dump trillions of tons of CO2 into my atmosphere in a few minutes by my time frame.

Impressive.

You might want to stop doing that. After the asteroid hit, my surface changed so much that the dinosaurs died out. All of them.

It happens. If you keep doing what you’re doing, you’re going to have a harder and harder time living on me. Trust me, you’re not the first living things that have come and gone, and you won’t be the last.

I have to admit, I’ll miss you guys. Like I said, I’m really into Netflix and again, you invented beer!

So basically, what I’m trying to tell you is even if you keep doing what you’re doing, I’m going to be just fine. You don’t need to worry about me.

You need to worry about you.

Sincerely yours,

According to Terry Pratchett

Earth

FLOCKING TOGETHER – GREGARIOUS! – Marilyn Armstrong

/ Marilyn Armstrong / 16 Comments

FOWC with Fandango — Gregarious

Flocks of Goldfinch
Common Goldfinches – Five which is
A flock of Goldfinches
Goldfinches
Goldfinch flock

Birds do it! Bees do it! Sometimes, even people do it! We’ve put up the feeders. I actually ordered a new hanging feeder because the flat feeder gets emptied in mere minutes.

Now I’m hoping the birds show up. I don’t know how much damage the poison has done, so I’m a little nervous. I know a lot of people don’t like feeders because they are messy. Good birdfeed is expensive and then, there are squirrels. But if we don’t feed them, we won’t have birds or squirrels.

There was a question in one of these question and answer things not long ago about whether or not anyone was willing to actually do anything to help the environment.

You could put up feeders. For birds, for squirrels, for all the small creatures whose world we are destroying along with our own. Yes, it’s messy but it’s not that big a deal to clean it up, either.  Think about it.

If a bird feeder is too much work, we are absolutely doomed.

“NO” IS SOMETIMES THE PERFECT ANSWER! – Marilyn Armstrong

/ Marilyn Armstrong / 22 Comments

Remember how, many years ago in a galaxy far, far away — you know,  during the Reagan administration — our government decided the best anti-drug program was “JUST SAY NO!” Make every person 100% responsible for whatever happens to him or her. As history tells us, this anti-drug campaign was so successful, we no longer have drug problems in this country.

So I thought we might use this same highly successful approach to other major social issues.

NO!

Like health care. As we move from an era of medical insurance to “Good luck, buddy,”  we need new coping strategies. How about “Say no to sickness!”

If you feel like crap, just say NO. Cancer or heart disease got you down? Smile! A bright smile and a positive attitude coupled with a firm take-no-prisoners attitude to germs and chronic ailments will wipe away your tears.

Let a smile be your umbrella when your arthritis is throbbing. If you can’t breathe because you don’t have an inhaler? Say NO to wheezing. Everything will be right as rain.

Gun violence is another good example of a problem that wouldn’t exist if we each had a better attitude. Alternatively, if you are a devotee of second amendment rights, try getting a bigger weapon. When bullets start to fly, just say NO! Like magic, bullets will bounce right off you.

Would I lie to you?

There is no problem too complicated that magical thinking will not make it disappear. We can fix everything with firm resolve, a positive attitude, and denial.

Speaking of climate change (we weren’t but now we are), there’s no such thing. Nothing is going on. No need to seek higher ground. Well, what about water pollution? Nonsense! Funny-colored smelly water is merely chock full of extra nutrients. Yummy!

JUST SAY NO is the ultimate, cost-effective way to deal with pretty much everything. A few television advertisements and some billboards along the highway? Bob’s your uncle, the problem vanishes.

Maybe you can add some pamphlets. If these don’t quite do the job, you’ll probably die. In which case, it becomes someone else’s problem. We all know — at least those of us who have read Douglas Adams — that someone else’s problem, is invisible. If we can’t see it, it’s not there. (Phew. I was worried for a minute.)

It’s entirely up to you. Just say no. And keep saying it.