A day devoted to birds and animals ...
http://www.flickr.com/...
#1 Baby Geese
#2 Tracy Aviary
#3 Hogle Zoo
#4 Utah's Hogle Zoo
This world is filled with so much beauty it is difficult to justify any time spent thinking about anything else. The newspapers are filled with tragedies, the magazines are filled with tragedies, the television is filled with tragedies both real and imaginary, music is filled with tragedies, and I can see pain & sorrow & relentless suffering in the eyes of every human I happen to meet.
Why have humans chosen to live in such a foolish and destructive manner? There's no tragedy like humankind in the entire Universe. How much I would love for humankind to live in a different manner ... peacefully. At peace with God, Nature and each other.
But that is not at all possible.
Time is running out for humankind. James Hansen says as much in the latest issue of New Yorker magazine. The article isn't available online (I happened to read it while enjoying carrot cake and coffee), but Elizabeth Kolbert mentions it online in her blog:
Hansen is opposed to coal in general—he believes that all coal-burning power plants will have to be shut by 2030 in order to avert catastrophic climate change—and to mountaintop-removal mining in particular. The practice is, as he put it to me recently, "doubly bad"—bad for the climate and devastating for the local environment. Many critics of the practice had hoped that the Obama Administration would put an end to mountain-removal mining; however, earlier this month, the Administration announced that it had decided only to regulate the practice more tightly.
http://www.newyorker.com/...
Not mentioned on the blog and mentioned in the article -- and something which you can verify easily enough online if you are so inclined -- is that James Hansen has concluded that 350 ppm carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has already pushed the climate beyond the point of no return. Not that it matters because carbon dioxide has already passed 380 ppm and there isn't any reason to doubt that humankind will push that number well beyond 400 - 500 ppm in the 21st century.
There's no stopping humankind.
Humankind isn't running out of time. Humankind has run out of time.
Humankind has already damaged the Earth sufficiently to guarantee the eradication of technological civilization and the extinction of the Homo sapiens.
Just as humankind has already pushed all of the rare animals at the zoo beyond the point of endangerment to beyond the edge of extinction. Humans cannot live at peace with anything and humans will destroy everything -- everything -- before our species is finished.
Humankind is going to pay a very high price for all of this pollution, destructiveness, violence and stupidity. That bill is going to become due at some point in the 21st century. It is very likely that people alive today will live long enough to witness unimaginable horrors.
The economic crisis was just a little taste of the troubles to come. The crumbling infrastructure is just a small sign of what's ahead. The melting icecaps and rising oceans and expanding deserts and the billions of unfortunate barely-living people are all signs of the horrors ahead.
There's no tragedy in the Universe more tragic than humankind.
But it is too late for tears. I'll devote myself to the beauty of Nature. There's no point in fighting on behalf an already lost cause.
David Mathews
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