Dang! This being old, although in comparison to an old coot past his 90th year, in comparison, he'd most likely still tell me I'm a spring chicken. But hey, the way my hip has been bugging the bejeezus outta me the past few days and after mucking out the barn, scraping chicken crap out of the coop, then 2 hours pushing a lawn mower, I'm feeling anything but like a spring chicken this morning - even a cannibal wouldn't like gnawing on these old bones, bet the meat is tougher than a chunk of rawhide that's been laying out under the hot sun in the Mojave Desert for a year. Now, I could just go on and on about every little ache and pain I have, and old guys like me can go on jawing for a long time just like a politician and never really have anything important to say - but hey - I've been passing on some of David Suzuki's ramblings from his book, The Legacy; interjected of course with some of my own ramblings, which I consider to be important, maybe not as important as Mr. Suzuki's but still along the same thinking path.
Something Mr. Suzuki wrote, even though I had to re-read his words three times (mathematics not being a strong point) really grabbed me by my short and curlies and got me more than a little bit worried once again. He writes: "Imagine a test tube full of bacterial food. One bacterium is added to the test tube and begins to grow and divide every minute. (The bacterium represents us and the test tube, the planet.) At time zero, there is one cell; at one minute, there are two, two minutes, four, three minutes, eight; and so on. That's expotential growth. At sixty minutes, the test tube is full of bacteria and there is no food left.
When is the test tube half, or 50 percent, full? At fifty-nine minutes, of course; yet one minute later, the test tube will be completely filled. At fifty-eight minutes, it's 25 percent full; at fifty-seven minutes, it's 12.5 percent full. At fifty-five minutes, the test tube is only 3 percent full. If at that moment, one of the bacteria points out they have a population problem, others would jeer. "What have you been smoking? Ninety-seven percent of the test tube is empty, and we've been around for fifty-five minutes!" Yet they would be five minutes from filling it."
Now, I'm not the brightest guy on the block, like I said, math not being one of my stronger points, but I don't have to get hit over the head to realize that if the human population keeps reproducing at its current rate, the 8 billion residents so far on the planet, before long reaching 16 billion, with our maniacal, suicidal manner of harvesting the forests that produce our air, there's a good chance we'll all just suffocate. And what about the water; take a good look at what's going on in Alberta, soon to become the toxic wasteland capital of North America, due to the intolerable, inexcusable manner of extracting oil from the tar sands. Hey, we can't eat, drink or breathe oil - so what is our most important commodities - come on people - doesn't take a scientist, a businessman or a politician to figure that scenario out - CLEAN AIR, PURE WATER, RICH SOIL.
Like the test tube for the bacteria, our home, planet Earth, is finite and fixed - what we have here is all that we have - even if another planet exists somewhere out amongst the countless stars that we could survive on, we cannot travel fast enough through space to reach it. At the moment, the way things are going and I blame my generation the most for our failures, none of us will be leaving a legacy for our children or their children's children, because we are using everything up right now and at a suicidal rate. Never in the history of the human race has extreme ecological reasoning been needed - ECONOMY IS NOT THE ANSWER. If we choose economy over ecology, we, the human species, I believe is doomed and the end will neither be swift nor pleasant.
It's a glorious day and I feel privileged to actually be allowed to step into the sunshine without too many problems lying heavy on my shoulders. I love this Earth and everything about it - it's my home and I feel sad to see it being treated in such a senseless manner - what are jobs and money if the world, our home is unfit for habitation. And on that cheery note - I bid thee cheers, eh! To be continued...
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