When the beach is a living place, an ecological rather than economic place, it is the best thing in the world ...
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These little baby birds are absolutely delightful. I'd encourage everyone to spend time on the living beach rather than watching television or spending money at the mall, but then the beach would become too crowded and the birds would fly away for a more isolated place.
There's a lot of nostalgia for the moon landings this time of year and it is just sad, so very sad, to hear people lamenting humankind's retreat from the moon and failure to visit Mars and so forth. The moon, Mars and outer space are not humankind's home. The Earth is humankind's only home.
Charles Krauthammer laments the future not turning out as nearly everyone imagined:
Michael Crichton once wrote that if you told a physicist in 1899 that within a hundred years humankind would, among other wonders (nukes, commercial airlines), "travel to the moon, and then lose interest . . . the physicist would almost certainly pronounce you mad." In 2000, I quoted these lines expressing Crichton's incredulity at America's abandonment of the moon. It is now 2009 and the moon recedes ever further.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
The moon is a beautiful place. The photographs from the Apollo missions indicate as much:
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/...
Though the most beautiful thing visible from the moon is the globe of the Earth shining blue, white, and green in the lunar sky. Who ever would want to leave such a beautiful planet to live in a desolate sterile wasteland such as the moon or Mars or pretty much everywhere else in the Universe?
Not that the modern technology-obsessed people care too much about the living Earth, our home. Humans have rendered much of the Earth a desolate sterile wasteland on behalf of money and civilization and progress and especially money.
There's no home for humankind on the moon, Mars or anywhere else. What this means is that those people who are destroying the Earth for profit & pleasure & progress are actually destroying humankind's one and only home.
What are the consequences of destroying your only home besides a ponzi-scheme bubble economy and a human population bubble of evolutionary unprecedented proportions? Well, the Earth becomes inhospitable to civilization and then to humankind and ultimately the Homo sapiens go extinct.
There's no happy ending to the human story. Humans won't ever visit Mars, return to the moon, or survive on the future extremely inhospitable Earth.
Too bad for humankind.
But Nature will survive. Nature has survived much worse catastrophes in the past. The living Earth is owned by Nature, not humankind.
Stop worrying about the economy. Stop spending money. Stop working.
These are the sacrifices you need to make if you want to minimize future suffering. They are too much to ask, I know.
David Mathews
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