It's quiet, almost too quiet.

[pecunium]

Yesterday was all atwitter. Katrina had the internet (or at least the parts I haunt) feeling as if something momentous had happened, or was about it. It was pregnant.

Today, pendant le deluge it's quiet.

Thank God this was less than it might have been. The bill isn't in yet, but just as Tallahasee missed getting whomped, so too New Orleans was spared the full fury of the storm.

I'm packing a bag, just in case they call for help.

It has, however been interesting to see the reactions. Some are waiting with nervous dread, some are angry (either a Jobian rage, or a more prosaic one). There are those who are angry with those who stayed (I suppose for making those people fear for others' safety) there are those who are angry with "the gov't" which failed to get everyone out.

There are those who are angry with those who are not as angry as they are.

Me... I'm resigned. There isn't anything I can do, right now. I am a somewhat fatalistic sort. On That Tuesday, when Maia's mother called on the intercom to say I might want to get into my, "funny clothes" because the World Trade Center had been blown up... I went back to sleep. It was a long way away, and if they wanted me to report, they'd call.

I seem moreso now. I blame the war. Driving down the road, wondering when someone might come over the rise and start lighting up one's vehicle (a soft-sided HUMMVEE) leads to that. As does scanning the overpasses for guys with RPGs (AK-47s are less of a worry, most people don't give enough lead to something doing 30+ mph, and I can guarantee you my fatalistic streak won't stop me from adjusting speed if someone aims at me). Spending hours in the days before leaving doing "dead-driver" drills (recall, I was the driver in this equation probably adds to it.

The world and its systems are big. Mankind is small in comparison (the timescale is enough (the time scale makes this so. Apart from setting off a nuclear war, the planet won't really notice how we fuck the place up. Given time, we will disappear, with a few more traces than the dinosaurs, but not so much more than that).

Someday the Big Muddy will find it's shorter path to the sea. Someday New Marid will let go. Someday, perhaps in my lifetime, "The Big One" will happen. Mt. Ranier may send a lahar flow to Puget Sound. The oceans may rise. A tsunami might smash into Washington D.C..

There's nothing I can do about it.

If I know it's coming, I can warn people. If I get sent I can try to help them evacuate. If they don't want to go... well they're grown-ups. If they want to smoke, they can. If they want to drink, they can. If they want to stay, I am not likely to force them to.

The best I can do is look out for me, and mine, and exhort those who make the plans to do them right. The price of individual liberty is you get to make stupid decisions for yourself.

Afterwards, well I'll be more than willing to help them put the pieces back together.

Comments

[samildanach.livejournal.com]

It's not correct that the biosphere won't 'notice' once we're gone. The extinction that we're actively causing is comparable in scale to the major ones recorded in the fossil record. Recovery is going to take geological time.

You're right that, in the end, shit happens. But we get enough right as a collective civilization that I think it's worth trying to engineer human systems that are both sustainable and humane.

And, by the by, thank you.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

The biosphere, in the aggregate, doesn't give a damn. The individual members of it do, but as a whole, no, and I shan't give in to the pathetic fallacy that it does.

I say this in part because the fallacy gives us too many escapes. We have to "save the Earth" because it can't save itself. Well it can. The Dinosaur Killer was as bad as anything we've done.

One of my recent reads was "In the Blink of an Eye" and the hypothesis he posits for the Cambrian explosion argues, indirectly, that a huge extinction (of animals we'll never know of) happened at that cusp; because of a single change in one line of animals (the most dramatic edge until Man started to pass culture from one generation to the next).

We need to save the Earth not for some warm, animistic fuzzy, but for ourselves. We can head to an Easter Island collapse, and it will suck for us; and for the plants and animals we take with us, but the planet won't care and the biosphere will weave a new fabric.

On the scales of a planets lifespan, we don't amount to much at all, a blip, a freak mutation, like photosynthesis, or vision, and unlike them, it may be that this one stays limited to us.

TK

[samildanach.livejournal.com]

Well, I don't mean that it 'notices' in the sense of consciousness, only that the gross disruption to the systems that comprise it will be long-lived.

I can see two motivations to biosphere preservation, one utilitarian and one aesthetic. You describe the utilitarian argument pretty well; this environment is the best substrate we've yet discovered for supporting the infrastructure for human-level consciousness, and it looks like those conditions may be rather fragile.

The aesthetic argument is admittedly much more personal and "fuzzy". The variety of life and its forms of interaction are a marvel to behold, and I detest the idea of replacing it wholesale with an industrial infrastructure for supporting human culture.

Existentially, yeah, we're morning mist under a burning sun, but I think the extropians are onto something when they dream of us becoming more than that.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

I fold the aesthetic into the utlitarian, I suppose.

I think a more diverse place is more intersting to live in, and hence better for me, and mine.

But that doesn't carry much weight in the debate. Being a touchy-feely tree-hugger is a swift trip to the door. Telling a logger he can't get a job because the spotted owl feeds my soul ain't cutting any ice when he can't feed his kids.

The trick is to make the both of them so intertwined that we don't use all the Ponserosa Pine to make our pueblos.

The fuzzy I was deriding is the one which places man as the only beast who can, "save" the planet. Feh. We are, no argument, the only thing which can keep the world as it is (though how it is will, and must, change, for it is an organic whole and we are; for the moment, the major player) but those who argue the earth will, "Die" if we don't save her, nonsense.

What will die is this arrangement. It's happened before, and will happen again, so the saving isn't for the earth's sake, it's for ours.

Which, as a perfectly rational human being, with my own interests foremost, a more than adequate reason, and (IMO) a better one that the one more commonly argued.

Steven Jay Gould said much the same, and probably better than I did, or will.

TK