Timothy Wilken, MD writes: Do you have your income tax returns done? I work (earning my living) on Sundays, Mondays, Tuesdays & Wednesdays. By working longer hours I manage to finish my work week early so I can have a three day strong-end. This is opposed to a three day weak-end (sp). On those three days of my strong-end  I work on my websites and my synergic science. This particular strong-end was wasted doing my income tax returns and helping my children do theirs. None of us make much more than enough to get by, but we all got to be accountable to the MAN. I had hoped to work more on getting the specifications for the GIFTegrity finished, but now have only a fraction of the time I had hoped for. This small sample from my life is a fact of life for most of us. … We humans have big problems as those who read my websites know. I think all thinking humans would agree that the human population has exceeded the sustainable limits of the Earth’s natural resources. We could further agree that we have achieved this enormous human population only by using our powerful human intelligence to exploit and rapidly consume most of the fossil fuels on our planet. We will, if present trends continue, have consumed all the extractable fossil fuel on this planet within 100 years. This high rate of consumption began in 1930. We should be done a little before 2030, that will be within the lifetimes of many of you reading this now and certainly within the lifetimes of your children. (04/13/02)
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Donella Meadows wrote: If, in the thirty Earth Day celebrations we have held since 1970, the human population and economy have become any more respectful of the Earth, the Earth hasn’t noticed. The planet is not impressed by fancy speeches. Leonardo DiCaprio interviewing Bill Clinton about global warming is not an Earth-shaking event. The Earth has no way of registering good intentions or future inventions or high hopes. It doesn’t even pay attention to dollars, which are, from a planet’s point of view, just a charming human invention. Planets measure only physical things — energy and materials and their flows into and out of the changing populations of living creatures. What the Earth sees is that on the first Earth Day in 1970 there were 3.7 billion of those hyperactive critters called humans, and now there are over 6 billion. Back in 1970 those humans drew from the Earth’s crust 46 million barrels of oil every day — now they draw 78 million. (04/13/02)
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We continue with excerpts from Elisabet Sartouris’ EarthDance. Yesterday, we began with a Twice Told Tale.  Today, Elisabet writes: Though we don’t know what these patterns are as yet, it appears increasingly obvious that they form a cosmic unity of process and pattern rather than a chaotic spray of unrelated parts. A single notion that would account for such pattern is the concept of mutual consistency, which is at the heart of `bootstrap philosophy,’ a mathematical physics conception popularized by Fritjof Capra. This is the concept that the universe is a dynamic web of events in which no part or event is fundamental to the others since each follows from all the others, the relations among them determining the entire cosmic pattern or web of events. In this conception, all possible patterns of cosmic matter-energy will form, but only those working out their consistency with surrounding patterns will last. Mutual means shared; consistency means agreement or harmony. Thus we can sense mutual consistency as the shared harmony worked out among cosmic patterns. The notion can be made more familiar by considering the shared social harmony worked out by groups of people when each individual adjusts his or her behavior to that of the others in a harmonious way. Anyone who cannot do this will tend to be excluded from the group, unless the deviant can force the others to make their behavior consistent with his or hers, in which case a new (if tenuous) mutual consistency would have been worked out. At present our species is not behaving in a way that is mutually consistent with the other species and features of our planet, and the consequences may preclude our survival. (04/13/02)
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