Now that the public comment period is over, suddenly the Tejon Ranch developers are getting all disclose-y.
Have I left seeing the Everglades too late?
Recently, I have been seized with a great cynicism. When I think of staying in New York, I think of rising sea levels; when I think of moving out west for a new start, I think of the Yosemite supervolcano, or less melodramatically of being another burden on an ecosystem that was never realistically able to host the number of humans it has now. I wonder if we’re even going to be able to get it together enough to get a decent health care plan or get out of the useless, grinding wars we’re in, let alone save the world from the consequences of our endless needs and wants. Here in the States, the new administration has overturned some of the destructive, unscientific things that the last administration did, but not enough. It’s never enough. We’ve already trashed this continent six ways from Sunday. Most people don’t, maybe can’t comprehend the scope of what we’ve already lost, so they don’t understand that we really can lose what’s left.
Still, occasionally there are these flashes of hope.
Maybe I need to go out and look at some birds.
August 7, 2009 at 8:44 am
Carrie, you’re so right, so very right. Why don’t people GET IT! (shakes head despairingly)…Anyway, thanks very much for the links – hugely appreciated.
Now go out and enjoy what’s left and keep doing what you do because it all helps…it just has to.
August 10, 2009 at 10:40 am
Carrie, Charlie, of course you are right. It all sucks.
But it has been sucking massively for the last few centuries (remember the Dodo, Moas, the Great Auk?), possibly millenia (I do believe the theory that mammalian Megafauna was wiped out by humans before, in between and shortly after the ice age(s) has a lot to it) and will go on sucking even more and at an accelerated rate for the next centuries. People will NEVER get it simply because they don’t want to get it.
However, and this might offer comfort to the cynical soul, humanity certainly won’t be around for the entire 2 billion years that are left before the sun explodes and no matter how many creatures we drive to extinction and into what kind of crappy wasteland we turn the world into, this is nothing evolution can’t fix within say a few 100 million years once we are gone – whenever and however that may happen.
Surely we should try with all our might to slow disaster down for ourselves and future generations (like in the Terminator movies, you can postpone Judgement Day but you can’t stop it – gosh, I never thought I’d cite THESE), but it helps to take it more easy or less hard once in a while and to not forget to go out and look at some birds while they are still around.
August 10, 2009 at 10:43 am
Yosemite supervolcano?
Wow, the best chance to go out with a bang, not a whimper.