esrosedotblog

It looks like we are headed straight for the shitter.

I just finished reading The Sixth Extinction (2013)

That's us folks. All about the five times the world made a huge paradigm shift. Millions of years. Many causes. All interesting.

Now we are in the sixth shift. Man caused.

Not much to do about it. Humans started fucking with the "balance" from the beginning.

Colbert is good about one thing. She more or less shows man's depredations as just another evolutionary change and, to a great extent, inevitable.

In a way, I kind of felt this inevitability to be comforting. It is all happening, it has been happening for a long time and it will continue to happen. If looked at in the right way it is just a natural consequence of nature and how it works. There have been other life extinctions and this will be another one.

By "extinction" of course, we mean that almost every living thing gets snuffed. An asteroid hit and nearly wiped us clean. Volcanos erupted and covered a lot of places in ash. Now we have smokestacks in Illinois. And every place else. Automobiles. Our houses, our agriculture, our very presence.

So, barring our all committing suicide and letting our bodies rot into the ground, there is no stopping it.

One thing is sure. I won't be here.

Climate change which is now undeniable except to a few rock heads is the most obvious outcome, the measurable visible one.

There is no doubt that it is happening. Whether it is a blip on the curve or if we are headed to a big hot spell where it all steams away is up in the air, so to speak.

It is also up for conjecture about how long it will take. This warming to extinction.

I won't be around which does allow a little detachment. Not much.

I have never been much of a worrier about posterity. Is that right? Posterity is what comes after me, right? I am too self centered.

If the times before now were bad and the times ahead worse, then I have lived in a pretty good time and it is all I know. My issues, such as they are, are local. My age. How much longer I will be robust and engaged. Whether I have time to get another dog. Things like that. None of which, except maybe the dog in a few months, I can do anything about.

I have always been one that believed "they" would figure out how to deal with the climate changing and the water rising. To tell you the truth, I don't worry much about the fact that some buildings along the coastline will get wiped out. They shouldn't have been built there in the first place.

In fact, the place I am staying on my July trip won't be there either, Scituate Harbor. But it is there now. And I am going to go there and smell the sea air and not worry about which generation is going to have to put on boots and wade out of the area to higher ground. To say nothing of wearing loincloths and sleeping in caves.

Wait. Didn't we already do that? Yes. It is in the book I am writing about here.

Labels: extinction, global warming