The Inconvenient Sequel to Ecovangelism

Urban Dictionary defines “Ecovangelism”: A socio-political movement disposed to make extreme claims and advocate extreme measures regarding the preservation, restoration, or improvement of the natural environment.

First, let’s have a word on Urban Dictionary for those not familiar with it.   

“Urban Dictionary is a crowdsourced online dictionary of slang words and phrases that was founded in 1998 as a parody of Dictionary.com and Vocabulary.com by then-college freshman Aaron Peckham”.

 “Crowdsourced” means anyone may suggest or nominate a word. Popular usage will ultimately determine its fate towards a permanent place in the Standard Dictionary.

There had since been millions of entries by 2009 and new submissions per day are registered.  This is all possible because online information, unlike those in hard copy book-bound dictionaries or Encyclopedia, can be collected and sorted almost without limit in “the cloud”.

Meanwhile, the word “televangelist” first came to global use in 1973.  Only 100 new words came out in that same year. Believe it or not, words and phrases which sound new, like fact-check, factoid, and yes, affluenza were words introduced then. As an aside, most who watched the news last year thought affluenza was a newly minted word. A Dallas legal team used it to defend/justify the behavior of a teenager – scion of a millionaire family - for drunk driving that killed four people.  But I digressed.

Televangelism is uniquely a U.S. original, perhaps brought about in the early years of broadcast media when radio and television were largely unregulated, in a country that was and still is anchored in Judeo-Christian philosophy. Televangelists proliferated globally until many of them fell out of grace (pun intended) after a series of scandals that were moral, social and financial in nature. There is just a handful now. It is the reputable ones that survived and do still enjoy a substantial support – free of any scandals or cases of fraud – and in return they continue to do a lot of public good in the world. {The true standard upon which televangelism should be modeled after is Rev. Billy Graham, who has now been succeeded by Franklin Graham}. A significant alteration at the turn of the new century was a subtle change to more positive messages against what used to be fire and brimstone, gloom and doom to those not heeding the ways of righteousness.

But, in case you have not noticed, the gloom and doom remains an active forecast but not from televangelism. It is no longer for those violating the tenets of piety. Instead, humanity and the world are both doomed due to man’s profligacy and reckless abuse of resources.  We are destroying the environment with our carelessness and irresponsible behavior. Fire and brimstone will be the literal heating up of the planet as human settlements and practices continue to spew carbon into the air.  The melting of the polar ice caps and rising sea level will be the end of humanity.  Suddenly, our sins are against the environment. The televangelists of yore, barely over a generation ago, were replaced by the new, louder voices from the wilderness – the ecovangelists. Both televangelists and ecovangelists prophesy despite the fact that predicting the future is a universal impossibility. The world had ended many times over from century to century if the countless doomsayers had their say. Today, sea levels will inundate many places on earth as polar ice caps melt.  This is despite the fact that there is not enough ice to melt from both poles to raise sea levels as to submerge even half of what Mr. Gore says will be under water.  It is not like melted ice will be concentrated in places ecovangelists choose to highlight. Water will spread out evenly – seeking the appropriate level. BUT, as depicted in many monster and disaster movies, Manhattan, New York becomes the epicenter for raging sea levels or a speeding glacier (an oxymoron in itself). If its earthquakes and fire it is San Francisco or LA.  If it is space alien invaders or Superman’s nemesis, it will have to be Washington, D.C., specifically, the White House.

Let us not forget that the “tip of the iceberg” says a lot about what the doomsayers may neglect to mention. If only 1/10^th of the iceberg is visible from the surface, and 9/10^th underwater, then only 1/10^th of every floating ice berg will contribute to the rise in sea level. 90% of all ice berg everywhere is  already accounted for in the current sea level.  Likewise, only the surface of the ice sheets, just 1/10^th of the entire ice shelf, in both the Arctic and Antarctic will contribute to additional sea level. Mountain ice and snow, if they all melt completely, will contribute to the rising sea level; but not the entire mountains made up of rocks and soil. Mr. Gore may need to re-do his math or review his accounting principles.

It is easy to label those whose views on climate change are different from the prevailing ideas put forward by those who claim that climate change is the world’s biggest existential threat. Climate change deniers are also called by many other names: ignorant, uneducated, ill-informed on the science of climate change, uncaring, heartless, selfish individuals, etc.

Arguing over the science of climate change does not present a simple straightforward platform.

There is not enough data because even if we go beyond the past century, it will not be enough from the context of earth’s history. Often, proponents of climate change go back or begin their perspective only from the time of the industrial revolution. Part of the reason is that that was the starting line for when carbon began to emerge as a polluting agent.

Climate change proponents, to use their labeling system, are historical deniers if they fail to acknowledge the far longer history of the planet – multiple-glaciation alternating with global warming over thousands and thousands of years.  We must consider where we are today in the history of the planet. The last ice age lowered the sea level around the world when much of the fresh water was frozen and concentrated in and around the poles. The islands of Japan, Taiwan, The Philippines, Indonesia and many others were connected to the mainland by so called land bridges. That is how early humans and all other organisms reached and colonized those places. When sea level rose as polar ice caps melted the land bridges disappeared under oceans, separating these island-countries as we know them today. Please read the quote below:

“At least five major ice ages have occurred throughout Earth's history: the earliest was over 2 billion years ago, and the most recent one began approximately 3 million years ago and continues today (yes, we live in an ice age!). Currently, we are in a warm interglacial that began about 11,000 years ago”.

Imagine a stair case that is 11,000 years long.  The industrial revolution began in 1820, or maybe as late as 1840.  So, if we reckon the global warming story from that period, it will be as if we just stepped from an imaginary platform on the side and hopped onto that stair case less than 2-1/2 centuries ago, ignoring our story before that. That’s when we began using fossil fuels but already for over 10,000 years earlier the entire earth was emerging and warming up from the last active ice age. We are merely a part of the natural processes that encompass millions and millions of years where organisms adapted to the changing environment. Adaptation defines what we are and how we look today. We reached the top of the food chain when we began to lose much of our body and facial hair so we can take advantage of a warming climate. Organisms that did not adapt became extinct. Or, if we go back farther than that, the mighty dinosaurs died off when they could not adapt to the global cooling after an asteroid impact 67 million years ago. Relatively few dinosaur species actually died outright from that impact that covered merely 110 miles across. Global cooling created by all the impact dust that blocked much of the sunlight was what killed the big dinosaurs. There is undeniable scientific evidence to back it up. Mammals with their fur and live births and extended period of parental care, thus passing on knowledge for far longer time made for superior adaptation.  And we are here today because of global warming.

All of these arguments will be for naught if we do not suggest an alternative.

1.       If carbon build up is the concern then we should be developing the proliferation of the eater of carbon – trees and all plants. Money and resources for a global campaign to plant more trees will be far less than how much had been spent arguing against the use of fossil fuels and endorsement of alternative forms of energy. Trees for building materials and for food production are clearly the low lying fruit (pun intended) that will have far ranging benefits, including flood control, that will truly have relatively more immediate global reach, specially to third world countries. If only a fraction of time and energy spent on climate change campaigns were on planting trees, the planet can be a tad cooler.  Imagine if just a little more of the sun’s energy were absorbed by trees and plants around the world, while gobbling up carbon and exhaling oxygen in return.

2.       We can continue with alternative energy program that works, discard the white elephant projects, but nuclear energy should remain a viable option as well. In fact, it is more critical against limited supply of fossil fuels.  It is more consistent, if not even more reliable, and unhindered where wind power and sunlight can be interrupted by weather. We are aware of the issues dealing with the byproduct of fission reactors and potential accidents (quite low now due to modern safeguards). Make note of this: On top of existing reactors operating worldwide, China has 23 under construction, 33 planned; Russia has 11 and 14, respectively; India 4 and 20; Japan 2 and 12; S. Korea 6 and 6; USA 1 and 9, putting America under a clear energy disadvantage.  Fusion power – the energy source of the universe – should be a priority for alternative power source. The universe had been using it for 13.7 billion years. We should be funding its research more than we are spending on electric cars.  Speaking of electric cars, we should keep in mind that no matter how much we increase the use of electric cars in the U.S., its impact on carbon footprint reduction is negligible because 81 per cent of electricity (from which all electric cars get their charge) comes from oil, coal and natural gas – all fossil fuels.

 

3.       Efficiency in electrical usage by way of more efficiency in electric motors that run the machines, low wattage high output lamps; more energy-saving homes and offices and factories, etc. deserve more research funding and should be ongoing until more than 90% efficiency is achieved.

4.       Here’s a radical idea. Much of fossil fuel today is used by the commuting public – wasted on the road to and from work. While public transportation works in many places, there is a lot more wasted by individuals driving, often singly, their own vehicles. All kinds of scheme had been tried that worked for a while, like carpooling, but we know the best way is still to cut the distance between each commute. City planners and residential visionaries should get together to make the ideal condition: Place every worker’s residence close to where they work. Every morning in every city we observe this: vehicles jamming every artery towards each metropolis but make note there are vehicles too, perhaps not as heavily but still quite significant, leaving the city areas outward the suburbs. From a much higher view we see vehicles going to and fro, much of them commuting from homes to their places of work. An algorithm ought to be developed in work/residential placements, matching people to their work location(without sacrificing lifestyle: amenities and affordability and needs like school and day care, etc.) , with the aim of cutting commute time and distance.  Ideally, people’s residences are matched to their places of work; a matching program in place so as to make that a permanent fluid activity by and between human resources, city planners and home builders and residential managers. Like I said, this is a radical idea but it should be part of the conversation platform where more pipe dream suggestions had been brought up before.


This might be inconvenient to ecovangelists but they ought not be left to monopolize the conversation.

  

For All in Tents and Porpoises

A funny story – it was funny then, to me, anyway – that I keep recalling it every now and then, went like this:

There was a camp ground for boy scouts by the beach close to the sea where dolphins also come by each morning.  The camp director actually fed the dolphins at about the same time the boy scouts have their breakfast.  Each morning the camp director would announce breakfast to the boys and calling out to the dolphins with, “For All in Tents and porpoises…“, to come and get it.  Corny now, perhaps, but it was a clever pun I can’t shake off.  I understand it later became a title of a funny book. 

The origin of the pun is of course, the phrase, “For all intents and purposes”. I will for a minute try to make light of something that has become part of a national conversation that is taken so seriously, despite the fact that it borders on hilarity if not outrageously ridiculous.

What is the intent and purpose of ESPN pulling out a sports commentator from covering a football game because his name is Robert Lee, so as not to offend some segments of the listening audience or fans?  If there is a height to stupidity, this is the Mount Everest of the absurd and empty headedness that is usually associated with political correctness run amok.  If we go by the Malay word origin of “amok or amuk”, we just witnessed an uncontrolled social homicidal rage by these institutions, such as sports organizations like ESPN, that have no business getting involved in political discourses.  Unfortunately, sports these days are also a media vehicle and, as such, they are pulling the same band wagon filled with anything and everything that has to do with political correctness.  Robert Lee, the unfortunate sportscaster of Asian descent, is about as far from Robert E. Lee’s family tree as tamarind is from blueberry.

What is the intent and purpose of removing confederate statues from public parks and sites today?

There are voices now clamoring for removing the Mt. Rushmore Monuments of four presidents because George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were slave owners.  I can hear Abraham Lincoln speaking to the other three granite faces that are on that mountain.  Abraham Lincoln once had one of the best comebacks to critics who called him “two faced”.  He said, “I leave it to my audience. If I had another face, do you think I would wear this one?” I am imagining him telling the other three, “Well, if they succeed in blasting us out of this mountain, then I wish they’d make another one somewhere and then perhaps I will have my other face on it”.

When we visited the Gettysburg National Military Park a couple of years ago everyone who was there felt nothing but respect and solemn admiration for those who died there.  It was a war that by Providential Grace led to the unification of a country that was about to be divided. The price for unity was paid for by blood from both sides.

Let’s imagine now if all the Confederate statues were removed from that national park.  Many of the statues were far apart from each other to signify where soldiers and officers may have fallen.  I can hear it now as one Union statue yells to another, “Is it just me imagining this? Where are the other dead whom we fought with?  Did we win this war without anyone to oppose us?  What was the intent and purpose of the war?”  Yes, Gettysburg will be meaningless if the story is not told in full.  It loses much of its significance when half of its history is erased. But, what would be the intent and purpose of doing so? If we are still arguing about the civil war and slavery a century and a half later when much of the healing had gone on, wounds almost all covered with dry scabs, numb to the touch for much of the nation, what intent and purpose is served by statue removals, other than coercing collective amnesia.  The statues had been there a while, silent, vigil, unmoving and un-intrusive to the daily activities of people, generations of them walking by and often oblivious to the presence of these inanimate objects which, like all open air statues, suffer from the ignominy  brought upon them by discourteous pigeons.  Is it not enough that they suffer through that every day? It is not enough for these folks, mostly young, whose moral compass is likely guided by social media than a deep sense of history or respect for what this country had gone through.

What is tragic about all of these is that the obsession and the compulsion to act on statue removal and attempts at revision of history are from a narrow slice of the population that seems to suffer from self-induced insanity. It is as if they woke up one morning and they started hearing voices.  It has to be that because so much of what this country had gone through is well accounted for and many generations were fine with it.  What ill, what injury, what consternation did just occur to bring about this sudden tinge of self-righteousness?  Is it perhaps a failure of higher education, where professors, some of them, more so from the so called liberal colleges, are indoctrinating rather than teaching?

How tragic it is that Columbus is also on the historical chopping block. First of all, if old Christopher didn’t show up someone else would have.  If they prefer the New World was never opened to European explorers, are they prepared to criticize the progress achieved here today?  Their ability to express their rights to protest is guaranteed by a new nation that took all pains to make sure it is in its Constitution. That nation was born from that discovery by somebody who now, sadly, is likely to be associated with mattress sales or extra discounts at department stores. Yet, his name needs to be expunged, his statues, yes, countless inanimate objects scattered all over the country, removed. For what intent and purpose?

At some point, we are heading towards a downward spiral weighted down by political correctness. Political correctness has become a battering ram against an imaginary or imagined harm caused by the creation of events in the course of developing a civilization. We are not looking forward if our attention is towards what is already behind us.  Are we going to let these modern day Don Quixotes fight these windmills of their imagination, believing that a magic eraser will actually clear history in order to create a better Utopian narrative, free of sad, bad memories?

What would be the intent and purpose of that?

Noli Me Tangere

The Latin phrase - it is a complete sentence actually - literally means “Do Not Touch Me”.  It is the title of the first of two novels written by Jose Rizal – Philippine national hero – that helped to spark and sustain the revolution against the 300-year Spanish rule over the 7,000 island archipelago just off the mainland of Southeast Asia.  Tragically, Jose Rizal was tried and found guilty of treason against the Spanish-ruled government.  He was executed by firing squad on December 30, 1896.  If the execution was delayed for just a bit, his story would have taken a different turn. In less than a year and a half, the Spanish American War was declared on April, 1898 and on May 1, just days after, Commodore George Dewey sailed into and entered Manila Bay to engage the Spanish armed forces, or what’s left of it - to a quick capitulation. The Spanish American War was over that summer in July, 1898.  It was a very short war indeed, for which the new American democracy, then relatively still a political infant itself, just barely over a century old, was given the territories of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines – the spoils of an uncontested war. 300 years under Spanish colonial rule versus a mere 50 years as a U.S. territory made for a glaring contrast.  Of lesser importance in the general scheme of things but quite personal to me is that a century after the pivotal event it gave me the ability to write this in English.

Noli Me Tangere

“In the catalogue of human ills there is to be found a cancer so malignant that the least touch inflames it and causes agonizing pains; afflicted with such a cancer, a social cancer, has your dear image appeared to me, when, for my own heart’s ease or to compare you with others, I have sought, in the centers of modern civilization, to call you to mind.  …

To this end, I shall endeavor to show your condition, faithfully and ruthlessly.  I shall lift a corner of the veil which shrouds the disease, sacrificing to the truth everything, even self-love – for, as your son, your defects and weaknesses are also mine.”

 --- Europe, 1886   Jose Rizal

I re-read the novel once more, perhaps for a third or fourth time since high school. It was originally written in Spanish, printed in Berlin, at Rizal’s personal expense, and distributed mainly in Manila in mid- 1860’s.  It had since been translated into other languages, including Tagalog, but as luck would have it from what I already described from three paragraphs above, I was able to read it in English. The story, obviously, has not changed, but my perspective had and I view it differently now.  What is hard to believe is that its relevance is, to me, even more valid if not terribly more pressing, not just for the Philippines but for every country that is in dire strait presently. It is more so for countries that had in their past a prolonged subjugation of their people by a foreign entity, for far too long.

Jose Rizal, if I were to surmise, used “Noli Me Tangere”, as a plea by a nation, by a people, begging not to be touched  because it was suffering from a cancer that was metastasizing, thus much too painful to the touch.  It was a social cancer, a political malady, a moral disease that was gnawing at the very cultural fabric of a people under stress and too sick to even realize it was gravely ill. Juxtapose that analogy around the world today and we see that in places like Venezuela, El Salvador, Honduras and Cambodia, and every place where hidden beneath a frail façade, under a semblance of order, where a functioning government or society seems to function well with a calm exterior, there is a cancer from within.

As in the actual physiological form of cancer, the national maladies come in various virulent forms. Similarly, there is no vaccine for it and the task to fight it is not short of total excision. It is also very difficult to detect.

We see these warnings uttered over a century ago, albeit from an obscure writer from an obscure land.  The examples are as varied as the carriers of virulence come in many forms.  Just recently, America had been gripped by a condition that if we are not careful could metastasize into something horribly deadly.  If slavery was a cancer, the civil war was a raging battle to excise it and the country had begun to heal beginning at the turn of and through the mid-20^th century, that went into remission. For a while there, perhaps out of a hopeful longing, most of the nation see only the scabs of many wounds all over the country. Then perhaps the scabs had plateaued and only slightly noticeable.  Events of late, particularly in Charlottesville, VA, some sectors of our society succeeded in picking at the scabs.  The scales are beginning to unravel and it is seen to bleed.  The blood will divide the nation which will carry with it errant cancer cells that can spread once more. There does not seem to be any agreement in how to stop the bleeding, even as everyone seems to agree that re-opening the wounds will only cause pain, and there is no predicting what salve will work, let alone if there is any willingness from all sides to offer relief.  Again, if we are not too careful, the scabs will re-open wounds once more and we may find the cancer too painful to the touch.  Then, we will all be begging, “Noli Me Tangere”, as Jose Rizal once said.

The Spanish-American War had a handful of profound turning points for the Filipino people, not the least of which was the unshackling of three-hundred years of bondage, the dramatic improvement in education, the sudden surge in literacy, and exposure to modern knowledge. BUT, it was clear, as had also happened elsewhere, the people went from one colonizer to the next.  Granted, relatively speaking, the natives were now handled with softer gloves but they were virtually a colony once more, though legally a U.S. “territory”. Places like Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, even Hawaii, were protected territorial entities as well.  History books are vague about whether the Philippine Islands were a U.S. Colony until its independence on July 4, 1946. Let us set that aside because prior to all of those events, stormier ones preceded the history before 1898, three to four centuries earlier.

This is not a knock on the countries today that were involved in the colonization of half of the world then (between 1400-1500) but we must mention them by name as part of the historical record, adding quickly that today’s population are not the same ones then; in fact, we are addressing entirely different governments responsible for the colonies 3-4 centuries ago.  But we will be remiss not to identify, for lack of a better word, “the common denominator”.

The Philippines, from one side of the globe, had one thing in common with countries halfway from the other side.  The maladies they suffered, the subjugation of the native peoples, the superficial progress and their present day symptoms of trouble, can be traced to the colonization by Spain and Portugal of all of South America and the Caribbean and of course The Philippines. Then the French, the Belgian, the Dutch and British colonies made up the rest, covering the other parts of Asia and Africa.  Some countries fared better than others, post-colonial period, and historians and political scientists will agree or disagree with the how and why but the fact of the matter is the one nagging question: How come colonized countries had always suffered from stunted growth – economically and politically? If we run our fingers on the globe, starting from Mexico, southerly to Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, all the way to Venezuela, Brazil and Chile, then from Algeria to Libya, Chad, Sudan to the Congo to South Africa, we see a pattern of free people that have a hard time governing themselves after their independence. If dictatorship or flawed elections, coups and violent turnover of government power were not the method, corruption was and still is the primer beneath the exterior paint that outwardly shows a people deeply reliant on a confused culture, a devotion to religion, but an unparalleled compliancy.

These colonized people were not properly prepared by a rushing exit of the colonizers.  Often the exits were forced by revolution combined with a weakened resolve by the colonizers either out of guilt or by its own internal upheavals at home.

BUT, we should set that all aside.  It is part of history. We learn from it and not repeat it. Looking back at the past does not move any nation one foot forward towards a better future. The social, economic and political cancer does not go away completely. Instead it only goes into remission. It stays hidden within the folds of human nature.  It calls for an even stronger resolve because cancer cells now can cross oceans and over connected lands.  A cancer cell hunts and destroys the good cells in order to perpetuate itself, to flourish and reproduce. If we allow ourselves to be willing hosts and be the welcoming recipients with our complacency, political correctness, unabashed but divisive political beliefs, and the unwillingness to recognize the symptoms, then we will split ourselves while the cancer keeps subdividing to make more malignant cells.  If we allow that, then soon we are only setting ourselves up to scream, “Noli me Tangere”.

{Post note: Noli Me Tangere is a downloadable PDF in various translations. I read the one translated by Leon Maria Guerrero who, as a Filipino himself, did a fine job of converting the original Spanish into words relatable to every Filipino citizen today. The other translations were all superbly done as well.}

  

We’re all going to be Civilians

A hodgepodge of semi-errant thoughts is what happens when the mind, having a mind of its own, cannot quite slow down to idle.

In the End We’re all going to be Civilians

In a rare moment of humility that’s what a general might say to himself or maybe even loudly to those who served with him, as he contemplates the end of his last assignment. It too could be what a CEO or a once highly driven executive would say at the inevitable twilight of his or her career.  Civilian – a word only associated with “one not in the military” – might as well mean an ordinary folk, a man or woman on the street, a dude, a Joe Blow, a hypothetical average worker, a retiree.

Indeed, that is what life is all about for everyone.  No matter how high up we get our career to soar, how much wealth we’ve accumulated, how much power we’ve attained, we will all get to be civilians in the end.  The power gained is all temporary.  The CEO will soon be an ex-CEO.  The same fate awaits the filing clerk and the forklift operator at the end of their final shift. Ordinarily, we will be led to believe that the CEO will be a far greater civilian than the ones whose earnings were 1/600 of his but we will be wrong. The power to hire and fire secretaries, assistants, high powered VPs and managers that were a red hot symbol of authority and privilege shall become a darkened ember that is now reduced to firing the cook, the gardener and the pool guy.  That is a far greater step down from what authority the CEO used to have compared to someone who could not fire anyone. That is because the latter had not lost any power at all, when there was none to begin with. The CEO had lost far too much but still he will live far more comfortably, his vacations and his homes and his stock portfolio, and all things that indicate wealth will be intact.  Yes indeed, but those are not that shall be measured.  In fact, it will never even count. One day we will all, without exception, step through that threshold, into the other divide, and we will all be assessed as mere civilians, where name, rank and serial number will neither matter nor be required.

There is a yardstick somewhere that will not measure the accumulation of wealth, social honors, plaques and awards. The universe is much too big to be bothered with such trifles because those material things will all turn out to be trivial at best or worse, invisible in the vastness of the cosmos. The whole rigmarole that is the saga of life can simply be divided into three reels of film for those fortunate to get to their golden years: Growing up, earn a livelihood and care for family, then retire into the sunset. The film will be reviewed by the Ultimate Critic. How we chose who will critique us from when we first became aware of our responsibility to the world around us and conducting our life accordingly is what determined “how we lived”.  From The Reviewer’s point of view we will all be treated as civilians.

Is the Goal to Simplicity Complicating Our Lives?

There is no turning back. The train of technology had been and still is speeding faster and faster, hurtling down the winding tracks that endlessly lead to “what will they think of next?” to simplify our lives and make things easier over and over, one new thing after another at an ever increasing pace. The skeptics won’t believe it anymore when told that this or that will simplify things. The question really is whether all things that are supposed to make things better really do, and do they get any easier to use. 

It took a very long time from writing with quill pen and ink to the first manual typewriter, then to the first electric one.  It was decades and decades of copying parchment after parchment to publish or publicize anything till the Gutenberg press. But by comparison, technology wheezed by from the first mimeograph machine to Xerox and then on to Laser printers. The jump to 3D printers is akin to a Rolls Royce Phantom VIII leap-frogging over the horse and buggy.  It took many thousands of years from when communication developed from grunts and hisses and facial expressions to sign and hand gestures to the first repeatable vocalizations that preceded language. Long distances brought the smoke signals and tom-toms and the first telegraph.  By comparison the speed of development from the first telephone call to broadcast radio to satellite phones and TV to GPS to smart phones to Alexa and Echo was a blur. 

It is understandable that knowledge building upon knowledge is responsible for the rapid development of technology so that artificial intelligence (AI) must be engaged to help out. AI’s advantage is that computer chips and every conceivable algorithms that go with them can be added almost ad infinitum to machines and devices, whereas, there is not much we can do to add more mass to our brain or increase the folds and creases on it. Elon Musk mused about the dangers of AI but that train of thought too had already left the station.

Did all these technology that come like rolling waves, one after another, simplify life? No question, some aspects of our lives have gotten better but “simplify” is not exactly the word most folks have in mind. In psychology, “Reactivity is a phenomenon that occurs when individuals alter their performance or behavior due to the awareness that they are being observed.” In the following example we are presented with something totally the opposite of it – a purely modern phenomenon that is the absence of awareness of the world outside of the 3 by 5 inch screen: A young woman about to enter the gym looking down at her phone, tapping at the keys, suddenly stopped right in front of the glass door. Still looking down at the phone, she remained standing there, head hunched over the device, oblivious to people wanting to exit the gym. Fortunately, this one did not end like some of those youtube videos, because someone about to push out the door patiently waited until the woman looked up.  How many such similar cases of unexplained states of oblivion had often been the cause of major traffic accidents, some resulting in fatalities? 

We’ve seen photos of children, people from all walks of life looking down at devices on their laps held by opposable thumbs while sporting events are going on; public speakers are on stage; church services underway, etc.  People don’t talk to each other at waiting areas anymore. Where it used to provide brilliant hues to interpersonal relationships, the art of conversation will seem like a worn out faded canvass; texting is the new writing; spelling and sentence construction a few years ago will in fifty years take on the same distinction of linguistic antiquity as Shakespeare’ language is today, where adverbs and modifiers have become extinct, and grammar shall be less popular than Latin or Sanskrit. One of the things that did become simple is that “so” and “like” are now the go-to words to start a sentence, whole messages not exceeding 140 characters are the driving force behind the inevitable devolution of phrases and full sentences into acronyms.

But for all the capability that these modern conveniences offer, navigating through the functions and features seem to far exceed the average person’s ability to cope.  It is a reasonable bet that the average person utilizes less than half of the capabilities available in every modern device (from smart phones to printers to digital cameras); and by the time that person crosses the threshold of 50%, he or she is buying a newer device with the latest and the greatest features.  Then the learning curve starts all over again.  The bottom line is that if all these modern devices, including the so called plug and play, are that easy to operate, why is there still tech support for every device?  It seems that for every little feature added to any device, the complexity rises with every additional dollar these machines cost over the previous model (which still works just fine).  These complexities have become technological and emotional burdens that face every consumer - cussing and moaning at every frustrating moment towards these uncaring, unsympathetic machines and devices. 

  

Water

We all do take certain things for granted.  And there are quite a number of them but a friend of mine suggested this: Water.  He lives in Florida, the sunshine State, with its famous and highest producing aquifer system, so water should be farthest from every Floridians’ mind but Jim is concerned, should he be?  

Half the world probably does not worry too much about it for as long as water comes out of the faucet. When people from half of the globe go to the grocery store they’d still get their favorite pack or any variety of energy-vitamin-electrolyte laden versions of it. It cannot be said of the other half. I am loosely rounding off the half and half here, guesstimating actually, but we are aware that there are places on earth that are just too parched, where people are too thirsty, where getting clean drinking water is a constant preoccupation, a daily struggle, where tap water is as foreign as indoor plumbing.

Every creature depends on water. We can survive for three weeks without food but only a few days without water. One estimate is 100 hours on good weather but much shorter under a broiling sun.  Without air, 3 minutes and a few seconds are all the average human body can withstand; much shorter under stress.  On the basis of that we know the two things that our lives literally depend on.

 

Water – a simple molecule made up of just two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen – is the universe’s gift to any living creature at the only place we know to harbor life, probability that life exists somewhere else in the universe notwithstanding.  Of course, it may not be such a unique gift since hydrogen is the most abundant element in the entire cosmos, and the simplest, with one proton and one electron; the only element without a neutron in it. Oxygen, the third most abundant in the universe makes up about 20% of our atmosphere but it is one of the most reactive –it will combine with almost every other element to make all kinds of compounds.  The combination that matters to all earth life forms is that of oxygen grabbing two atoms of hydrogen and voila we have water.  It is the most pivotal phenomenon in nature if we were to make one up.  Science fiction aside, it is safe to assume that if there are other life forms in distant planets in alien solar systems, life will have to have evolved just like ours – dependent on water.  Why hydro sulfuric acid for blood, as in the movie “Alien”, when water-based plasma works best?  That’s what makes water the most versatile universal solvent, the wonder material, Creation’s miraculous substance from which all life must originate.

Cosmologists are fond of saying that earth is the goldilocks planet – not too hot, not too cold, where water ordinarily exists as a liquid. What makes it perfectly right is that 75% of its surface is covered with water.  What is even far more astounding is that water, with its hydrogen and oxygen, is the precursor to life, growth and propagation. Throw in carbon to the mix in countless combinations with just a handful of other “minor” elements and we get plants and creatures from protozoa to penguins, anteaters and antelopes, hummingbirds and humans – all carbon based life forms. Amino acids – organic compounds that make up proteins – are essentially compounds of hydrogen, carbon and oxygen linked by atomic bonds in myriad combinations. DNA structures and markers of DNA, popularly labeled G, A, T, C, are each made up of hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen (which happens to be 70% of earth’s atmosphere).  Carbohydrates and protein and water are what we are.  “Proteins are polymers made by joining together small molecules called amino acids. Amino acids and proteins are made mainly of the elements carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen”. 

The environment is predominantly water.  We are 60% water. Where water is scarce in desert areas, creatures survive there because morning dew is present.  Water, which can exist as a solid, liquid and vapor, has this one other more miraculous property, not shared by other substances – it actually expands, increasing its volume, under extremely low temperature, i.e. when it turns into ice. Intuitively, substances shrink in volume when subjected to cold temperatures.  That is a critical property for water/ice. Ice therefore will float on water, thus preventing ponds, rivers and lakes from turning entirely into a solid mass. The layer of floating ice turns into a surface barrier, a blanket if you will, on top, so that water underneath will remain liquid so fish and other living things below will survive winter.

Water is a vivid representation of our life.  We’re made mostly of it, we depend on it, we’ve adapted to the environment with it. Our history of survival throughout eons of climate changes we owe to water. Here we are worrying about climate change.  Our ancestors had survived and adapted to several extreme climate events for thousands of years.  There had been several ice ages alternating with extreme global warming.  Survival of all living things depended on water.  Why are we not, therefore, more vocal about conserving water, keeping it clean, protecting its sources, and insuring its worldwide availability for every living thing that needs it. Shouldn’t we be fighting for the protection and conservation of water? 

But no, because so much energy, so much talk, so much money is expected of nations to “fight” climate change instead.