The Infinite Earth

Years ago I had the great good fortune of working for and being befriended by a Forester. As executives in a multi-state forest seedling nursery operation, we enjoyed many hour drives from one nursery to another telling our stories and discussing our views.

Wally became a young forester in the 1950's, when Timber was the core of wealth, when log trucks and wig-wam burners were common sights in the Pacific Northwest. He came of age professionally under the new operational regime of "reforestation", instituted in the early Forties when decades of new chain saw technologies had made it clear to a few far sighted men that trees were being cut much faster than they grew.

So, I had the opportunity to hear the stories and experiences of a friend who had worked with men for whom the Forest was infinite. Men who had come of age in the era of the Axe, when trees were litterally chopped down by human muscle and the vast sea of forests of the Pacific Northwest would never, never be exhausted.

Today, most of us experience the atmosphere and the oceans as infinite. We have no personal experience of the limits of these planetary things. Stand on the shore of the Pacific on a bright clear day, and your body is assualted and enchanted by its insignificance within the fabric of these two masses.

Like my freind Wally, who lived through the end of the Infinite Forest, we live in a time when the Infinite Earth has already vanished (at least for those who consider the ratios of global "harvest" and global "regeneration"). We all understand without debate that reforestation is an integrated part of Forestry, even though it causes near-term ecomonic burdens. The coming ecomonic, cultural, political and biological struggles the living Generations face as the Infinite Earth gives way to a Small Planet will be similar to the changes in the practices in Forestry, except of course in scale and complexity.

Oil Companies Suffer Drop in Oil Margins, updated July 2006

In October 2004, immediately prior to presidential elections, the relationship between the cost of oil and the price of gas suddenly shifted in a way that resulted in the price of gas being nearly $1.00 less per gallon that it would otherwise have been.

My original October 2004 analysis illustrates the event, and proposes a striking hypothesis.

I have updated the analysis in July 2006, and find the original hypothesis unchallenged.

Who Killed the Electric Car? A short review

The short answer to the title is "The EV is not dead." [EV = electric vehicle]

Yes, the General Motors model EV1 is dead. This movie details, from the Board of Directors through engineering, advertising and front line marketing to end users who organized and worked to save it, who fought to kill it (quite literally shred them) and how, why, and when that happened.

It sounds dry, but so does the story of “Titanic” (we all know the ship sank, we all know Oil killed the EV). The stakes here are the well being of a society, and we are part of the movie. The audience applauded at the end. The film encourages us with options. A pampheteer outside the theater provided me with these links:

• www.pluginamerica.com
• www.pluginpartners.com
• www.calcars.org
• www.eaa-phev.org
• www.eaaev.org

Its a political documentary. If what happened to the EV 1 doesn't assault your sense of social morality or/and mid-to-long term capital strategy, then you can go back to "parading your Hummer" and skip this movie. If you're a Chevron stockholder or a member of a royal family, you should wear your thickest skin.

What is it?

I came across this image some years ago, and it stays with me.

Want to know what it is? Hint: something that has never been seen before (except perhaps symbolically).

DNA Rules!

Often, I find the root of understand to a difficult social conundrum lies with the exclamatiuon "DNA Rules". I usually get strange looks, but it makes such basic sense.

We have inherited our bodies from a time less than 600 generations ago, when the rules of survival and reproduction were not so obscured by abundance, as they are today.

For example, today I was listening to Dave and Sheila's afternoon dialogs on Kink.fm, and was entertained by Dave's pummeling after expressing that a 19 year old female is, well, hot (in the context of a pop-news story). In the full consideration of a person, age often adds huge values, so what is it that makes a culturally immature young woman be described as "hot".....? [DNA Rules] = For millions of years, human males that were attracted to young females HAD MORE OFFSPRING, simply because young females have greater child bearing probabilities than older females. This trait, how ever faint its effect on reproductive success, is amplified over more time than we can imagine.

I compare this example to the reaction I have when I see a rodent out of the corner of my eye - a strong defensive response, inherited from the Survivors within the structure of my limbic wiring.

Another good example is the difference in the ability to multi-task between men and women. (Recognizing of course that embryonic brain formation has strong environmental influences), I sometimes wonder at a woman's ability to handle several steams of conversation. Why is it a common joke that men don't multi-task...? [DNA Rules] = Because the males that were multi-tasking were just that much more likely to get KILLED BY THE BEAR, compared to the intensely focused minds of the hunters who took the fur and meat home and fed the offspring. Again, a small effect amplified over so many generations.

"DNA Rules" is not meant as an abdication social and moral structures to the wilderness of some kind of survival-of-the-fittest apology for destructive behavior. Rather I mean to understand the deep, deep currents upon which we float. The waves on the surface of the ocean to the cold dark deep are as we and our civilization are to the mass of life.

So, when you are faced with behaviors you just can't make sense of, imagine the simplest aspects of the behavior set in a clan of characters extracted from the first chapter of "2001 - A Space Odyssey", and see if it doesn't resulting in a subtle advantage to reproduction.

Five Stages of Inconvenience

While discussing "An InconvenientTruth" and the topics it raises, I've found many people (i too) traverse these five Stages of Inconvenience:

Denial

The Greenland ice shelf cares not for anyone's denial. If one is still denying the fact of global climate change driven by human generated carbon, then reason is not the problem.

If Thomas Paine was right, ("Time makes more converts than reason") then their time simply has not come.

"We're F**ked"

A classic polar flip. Easy to move through except for end stage pessimists and cynics. Yes, the problem is bigger, by magnitudes, than anything we've faced... ever.

Hope matters. Keep talking.

"I won't live to see that..."

I've never had to face death (except in the sense that my life expectancy is now 9,236 days and counting) and I have the deepest respect for those of us living with death on our shoulder. Speaking with Elders about further bright futures can be cruel - escaping from darker futures may be enticing.

The idea that the tribulations lie in some distant future is a matter of probability The sudden breakup of the Larsen B Antarctic ice shelf in 2002 shows us how poorly we understand the game board upon which we play, and how quickly massive things can happen.

Agedness is not a good foundation to support disengagement, inaction and a return to the Denial stage.

Whelmed

Even with a positive attitude, hope and creativity, facing the insurmountable is whelming. Becoming overwhelmed can lead to damage, and is not recommended.

Break it down. Just take a little piece right now. You're not alone in this.

What I do doesn't matter

A sad byproduct of Individualism that undermines so much of our social and civic fabric.

Modeling matters. We primates shape ourselves through mimicing the models around us.

Be a model. You won't be able to see or experience the immediate effect, but you can be confident someone is looking for you even if they don't know it yet.

Another Inconvenient Truth, circa 1776

The difficulty we as an audience must overcome while consuming "An Inconvenient Truth" is the sensation of going to a movie: drive to the theater, buy the ticket, eat the popcorn as we watch the advertising, make insightful comments on the way back to the car.

This media is no more a movie than "Common Sense" was a little pamphlet.

"Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages are not YET sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favour;a long habit of not thinking a thing WRONG, gives it a superficial appearance of being RIGHT, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason."

COMMON SENSE, by Thomas Paine Philadelphia, Feb. 14, 1776

rights via *The Project Gutenberg Etext of Common Sense, by Thomas Paine*http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/147