greygirlbeast | Entries tagged with earth day

Not losing heart, but also not up to my usual Earth Day post.

Everyone either knows the score or is busy denying the score. Or is busy spinning the score so it means what he or she wishes it to mean. It's worse, and getting worse yet. But there's still beauty, and some of us see the beauty and the wonder and won't go quietly. The Anthropocene Epoch has arrived, whether I like or not, but I will always be a traitor to my species. 6.918 billion humans vie for extremely limited space and resources, pushing all else aside. It's not that humans can't be beautiful - they can. They can be beautiful, and noble, and brilliant. But they're not that brilliant. Like any animal, they eat, they fuck, they breed, they eat, they shit, they breed. Oh, I can love them. Now and then, I can love them. Now and then, they shine. In startling moments, in darkness and in light, in cacophony and profound silences, they can shine. One by one, or, more rarely, hand in hand.

Still, I'd trade a billion of them for a thousand Siberian tigers, or a thousand White rhinos (and yes, I'd take my place among the billion being traded). I'd trade three billion for...I said I wasn't up to this. And I'm not.

Balance is gone, and we've lost a world.

We live here, instead, in this diminished and rapidly diminishing place. And most, in their arrogance and ignorance, do not see what's been lost. And I can't show them, though I have been known to try.

But, in the eyes of Progress Man - Mr. and Mrs. and Miss H+, the thoughtless, heedless Multipliers, Profiteers, and Despoilers – I am a wicked beast, and I take my solace in the knowledge that even this Age of Man shall pass.

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Sunny out there, but chilly, too. I would be at the shore today, even with the low temperatures, if I had that option.

Current Mood: okay
Current Location: Earth That Is
Current Music: Arcade Fire, "Empty Room"

A sunny day so far here in Providence, though there may be thunderstorms this afternoon. Still, we were told we'd have a cloudy, rainy day in the mid-fifties, and, instead, we've gotten a sunny morning in the mid-sixties, so that's not so bad.

Yesterday, I wrote 1,243 words on a piece that I actually began, and then shelved, back in March. It was originally called "Untitled 37," but I've retitled it "Three Months, Three Scenes, With Snow." It will be appearing in Sirenia Digest #53 at the end of the month. I think I like where it's going. Spooky does, and usually she's a better judge of these things than I am.

Looking back over the last couple of months, so very little has been written. It's a bit terrifying. So much has to be written in the next few months.

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On Tuesday, we saw Matthew Vaughn's Kick-Ass, and I truly loved it. The pacing was a bit off towards the beginning, but that's really the only complaint I can muster. This film is a fine example of how a studio may have no idea whatsoever when it comes to marketing a film. The trailers gave me the impression it would be a light-hearted superhero spoof. Nope. It's something far worse and something far better. Chloë Moretz' "Hit-Girl" will surely be one of this years most memorable film characters. Great movie. Highly recommended. Just keep in mind that it's rated R for a reason.

Spooky's been watching Glee and enjoying it. Last night, I watched the "Power of Madonna" episode with her and...to my great surprise...loved it. Then I watched "Hairology," because I wanted to see if the newest episode was a fluke, but no, I liked it, as well. Let's just say I'm still a little weirded out. Sue Sylvester rules.

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Spooky's been making some really wonderful pendants from beach glass ("mermaid's tears") I've collected since coming to Rhode Island. She's sold four of them in the past two days, almost as quickly as she can make them. You can see the one's that have not yet sold here, at her Dreaming Squid Dollworks Etsy shop.

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Today, I find that I'm not up to my annual Earth Day post. I just don't have the heart for it. I will merely note that the human population now stands at 6,816,419,848 (up about one hundred million since last year), and that the US population has risen to 309,118,407.* I will also note the issue of carrying capacity, and that, as far as Homo sapiens is concerned, the Earth’s carrying capacity is estimated by ecologists to be about two billion people (which we reached in 1927). So, we're 4,816,419,848 humans over the line. No species may indefinitely defy the carrying capacity of its environment. Not even clever humans. Sooner or later, this will end.

* courtesy the US Census Bureau's US and World Population clocks.

Current Mood: sitting upright
Current Location: Amenthes Rupes
Current Music: Lost Signal, "Quicksand Effect"

We seem to have made it through the whole winter without contracting anything vile, but now, as the spring begins in earnest, Spooky and I both appear to have come down with something unpleasant. Which just figures.

Yesterday, I wrote a very respectable 1,451 words on "At the Deeper Gate of Slumber." It's coming out a sort of sequel to Lovecraft's "The Haunter of the Dark" (1935). I think I'm liking where it's going. Anyway, it'll appear later this month in Sirenia Digest #41.

We had rain last night, and it was a fine, hard rain. The sort I just want to lie in the quiet and listen to for hours. The sun's back this morning. There was a moderate seizure late yesterday. Which I should have seen coming, after two nights of bad insomnia (and last night made night #3).

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In last year's Earth Day entry, I noted that as of "...14:57 GMT (EST+5) today, the Earth's human population had reached 6,662,970,347 (with the US population accounting for 303,912,188 of those humans; that's one birth every 7 seconds in the US)." This year, the human population has risen, as of 14:35 GMT (EST+5), to 6,775,017,443 worldwide, with the US population weighing in at 306,268,833*. Humanity has radically outstripped the carrying capacity of its environment. "Carrying capacity" is defined as the population of a given species that can be supported indefinitely in a defined habitat without permanently damaging the ecosystem upon which it is dependent. For humans, the Earth’s carrying capacity is estimated by ecologists to be about 2 billion people. And we passed that number 4,775,017,443 people ago. As I wrote last year (quoting my entry from 4/22/07):

"And today is Earth Day. And it seems to me that people are more concerned with finding 'green' solutions that will permit business as usual, and continuing technological escalation, rather than drastically scaling back this runaway civilization, which is the only truly 'green' solution. The only solution at all. I might as well be asking for world peace, and I know that. Humans hate. Human breed. Humans consume. Humans spoil. There are other things that humans do, and some of them are wonderful, but the global effects of these wonderful capabilities pale by comparison with all the hating, breeding, consumption, and spoilage. I do not hate humans, and I don't want to give that impression, but I see no point in denying that today, on this Earth Day, I'm rooting for the other team."

* courtesy the US Census Bureau's US and World Population clocks.

Current Mood: not hopeful
Current Location: Aethiopis
Current Music: The Editors, "An End Has A Start"

There have been previous Earth Days when I've had a great enthusiasm for reporting just how awful the state of the planet is. Today, I just can't seem to muster the gumption (as they say back in Alafuckingbama). Sure, I could point out that as of 14:57 GMT (EST+5) today, the Earth's human population had reached 6,662,970,347 (with the US population accounting for 303,912,188 of those humans; that's one birth every 7 seconds in the US)*. I could get started about all those damned plastic water bottles, or the melting ice caps and rising sea level, or the fact that humans have triggered one of the most dramatic mass-extinction events in the planet's history, or the fact that populations of large shark species have declined more than 50% since the 1970s, with many coastal species, including the tiger, scalloped hammerhead, bull, and dusky shark having lost 95% of their worldwide populations in this thirty-eight year period. But. I think numbers and facts just make people act stupider, to tell you the truth. If you'd like, have a look at my Earth Day entries from 2004 and 2005, days on which I had more "gumption" than I have today. Oh, and this quote from my Earth Day entry last year:

"And today is Earth Day. And it seems to me that people are more concerned with finding 'green' solutions that will permit business as usual, and continuing technological escalation, rather than drastically scaling back this runaway civilization, which is the only truly 'green' solution. The only solution at all. I might as well be asking for world peace, and I know that. Humans hate. Human breed. Humans consume. Humans spoil. There are other things that humans do, and some of them are wonderful, but the global effects of these wonderful capabilities pale by comparison with all the hating, breeding, consumption, and spoilage. I do not hate humans, and I don't want to give that impression, but I see no point in denying that today, on this Earth Day, I'm rooting for the other team."

* courtesy the US Census Bureau's US and World Population clocks.
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No writing again yesterday. A lot of reading. Thinking. And dithering. And the dithering has to stop today. I have come, very reluctantly, to the conclusion that I may have to set The Red Tree aside, write all the pieces I need to write for the next four or five issues of Sirenia Digest (say May-September), and then go back to the novel once we're in Rhode Island, where I can do the research that needs doing for me to write the prologue, which needs to be written for me to finish Chapter One. It really doesn't matter, as all this stuff has to be written, either way, but I am loathe to set the novel aside without even Chapter One finished. Regardless, no more dithering. Oh, and I also have to get the introduction to A is for Alien written, and a couple of other things, as well.

Yesterday, we mostly read House of Leaves, though, about 4 p.m. or so we drove over to Decatur, to Books Again, where we still had more than $78 in credit from the more than $500 dollars in credit we got when we took in mountains of books after the move from Kirkwood in December 2004. I had this fear of forgetting about the credit and not remembering again until we were in Providence. Anyway, yesterday we picked up the following (because, you know, we need more books to move):

The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer by Doron Swade (2000)
A Thread Across the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Cable by John Steele Gordon (2002)
Three Men on the Beagle by Richard Lee Marks (1991)
Return of the Crazy Bird: The Sad, Strange Tale of the Dodo by Clara Pinto-Correia (2003)
Deadly Beautiful: The World's Most Beautiful and Poisonous Animals and Plants by Laurence Gad (1980)
Crossing Over: Where Art and Science Meet by Stephen Jay Gould and Rosamond Wolff Purcell (2000)
The Nature Companion's Rocks, Fossils, and Dinosaurs (2002)
Cabal by Clive Barker (1988; to replace my battered paperback of the same)

Books Again (and it's bookshop cat, Octavio) should be added to that very short list of things I will miss about the South. There's a photo (by Spooky) behind the cut:

( Books Again )

The lease for the apartment in Providence arrived this ayem. Thank you, Deneise and Kurt. Also, my thanks to whoever answered my wish and purchased the copy of Soderburgh's Solaris for me yesterday, and to Steven Spector for a copy of Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian.

Last night we stopped by Videodrome after dinner, because I had an urge to see Robert Harmon's They (2002) again. It's not a Very Good movie, but it has its moments, and the creature design and SFX are quite effective. It all works much better with the alternate ending, by the way. And that was yesterday, and now there must be coffee. And, also now, all I need are five or six or seven or eight really good ideas for vignettes for the next few issue of Sirenia Digest.

Current Mood: lacking gumption
Current Location: Avalonia
Current Music: The Decemberists, "Summersong"

Yesterday, we drove to Athens to visit an old friend I'd not seen in many years. Lately, it occurred to me how very odd it is that I've lived in Atlanta more more than five years and not once made the hour+ drive east and north to Athens. Yesterday, I found out why. Too many memories there, of one sort or another. A memory minefield, and I absolutely do not need those. As many good memories as bad, but that doesn't make much difference. Ghosts everywhere I look. Francis Phelan coming home to Albany. Every street corner and vacant lot was haunted with significance. But the visit with David was good. These days, he's an NPR dj and writes a very popular political blog as "TRex" over at Fire Dog Lake. That means we had to think about things to talk about that were not politics. He has not yet abandoned hope for this system, and I fear that I have, so political discussions are dicey.

But he played a couple of Tori Amos albums for me. I admit I tuned out after To Venus and Back (1999), so Scarlet's Walk and American Doll Posse were new to me. I was pleased to find that I liked most of what I heard. Oh, and he also introduced us to Télépopmusic, with whom Spooky and I are now smitten. We left Athens at sunset.

Athens hasn't changed a great deal since I moved away in August '97, though a number of my most beloved institutions are deceased (Blue Sky coffee, the original Jittery Joe's location, etc.). But the route to and fro has changed quite a lot. We drove in on 316 and back to Atlanta on 78, and both are now squalid monuments to sprawl and corporate saturation. And crazy Jesus billboards. The crazy Jesus billboards are something else new, and reason enough to stay inside the Perimeter of Atlanta (though I already had lots of good reasons). I should have made a list of all the billboards. I can only recall a few: COMING SOON! JESUS; Stop Hilary Now!; some crazy creationist shit; and so on. And on. And on. Howard Hughes will stay here in her overpriced, godsforsaken, queer-friendly ghetto, thank you and please

We made it home in time for a late dinner (11 p.m.), and then more Planet Earth ("Seasonal Forests" and "Caves"). And then my nightly share of insomnia.

Regarding my Earth Day post, I received these comments:

melodican wrote:

I will continue to think of myself as an earthling first, a human second, and all other categorizations a distant third. And for what it's worth, I will continue flying James Cadle's flag and trying to live by Fred Rogers' words: "Our world hangs like a magnificent jewel in the vastness of space. Every one of us is a part of that jewel, a facet of that jewel. And in the perspective of infinity, our differences are infinitesimal. We are intimately related. May we never even pretend that we are not."

One problem, of course, is that most humans do pretend they are not and so will not acknowledge that kinship, even among their closest relations — other primates. Or if they do acknowledge a kinship, they see themselves as somehow favoured above all the other inhabitants of the planet, not as fellow travelers but "stewards" or "masters."

This comment from

corucia was especially appreciated, though I suspect he's just trying to cheer me up:

Our intelligence has given us the power to ignore the usual boundaries set on other species, boundaries that act to limit the expansion of a species. However, our intelligence hasn't done a single thing to negate the drive to expand that is inherent in all species. It's buried too deep for most people to even comprehend that it is there, let alone do anything constructive about it. Unfortunately for the human species, we didn't eliminate all of the boundaries, merely sidestepped the more common ones. Our drive to expand eventually will cause us to come up against a boundary that we can't think our way around, and our expansion will stop. In all likelihood, that will mean that our population levels will implode, as our current numbers are only supported by expansion, and not by maintenance, as you point out. If model organism population studies actually do provide a reasonable overview of likely outcomes, we could be looking at a drop of more than two to three orders of magnitude, leaving Earth with a human population of five to fifty million, or less. I would expect the technologically based groups to be the most affected. Once again, if model organism studies can be used as an indicator, the rapidity of the descent could be measured in years, not decades. It depends on how far out over the abyss we are when we finally hit the triggering event.

Sorry to be all somber and gloomy, but today is Earth Day, and not Human Day. The good news is that Earth, and life in general, will not have too much problem picking up and continuing, after the humans have effectively killed themselves off.

Also, my thanks to

jtglover for the link to this article, which boldly, sensibly states why yesterday should be the last Earth Day. I do not agree with its authors' optimism, but they're dead-on about the corporate co-opting of Earth Day and the irrelevance of individual gestures in the face of environmental collapse. If you're the sort who looks at the two choices now before humanity — a) radical, immediate change or b) business as usual, leading to unspeakable misery and possibly human extinction — and chooses "a," then you should read the article.

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Today needs to be spent polishing the "Yellow House" story for Sirenia Digest #17. There's so much else waiting to be done.

This would be a fine day for comments...

Current Mood: awake
Current Location: Jamuna
Current Music: Tori Amos, "Amber Waves"

Yesterday, I wrote 1,215 words and finished the new "Yellow House" story for Sirenia Digest #17. But I still do not have a title that I'm happy with. The total word count came to 7,165.

The headache only slowed me down a little bit.

But I didn't leave the house yesterday.

Sometimes, like now, it feels as though I am destined for some sort of atrophy, all parts of my person not directly involved in the act of writing gradually withering away. In the end, I shall require a different sort of chair, more a cradle. Only three or four fingers are necessary, and I could likely get by with just my right index finger. The brain must remain, of course. I'm already down to one eye. With rewired digestive and endocrinal systems, I can lose everything below the mid-thoracic region. There's certainly no need for a mouth and two nostrils.

In my cradle, I will dream unlikely things, and with my shrunken hand, I will tap it all down.

Surely, I can make do with a single ear.

Last night, we finally saw Roman Polanski's The Pianist (2002), a brilliant film in every sense a film may ever be brilliant.

And today is Earth Day. As of 16:03 GMT (EST+5) Apr 22, 2007, the human population, worldwide, stands at 6,590,429,167. The population of the US stands at 301,670,353. Something like 27 wars are currently being waged. The rate of species extinction worldwide is somewhere between 100 and 1,000 times greater than normal. And today is Earth Day. And it seems to me that people are more concerned with finding "green" solutions that will permit business as usual, and continuing technological escalation, rather than drastically scaling back this runaway civilization, which is the only truly "green" solution. The only solution at all. I might as well be asking for world peace, and I know that. Humans hate. Human breed. Humans consume. Humans spoil. There are other things that humans do, and some of them are wonderful, but the global effects of these wonderful capabilities pale by comparison with all the hating, breeding, consumption, and spoilage. I do not hate humans, and I don't want to give that impression, but I see no point in denying that today, on this Earth Day, I'm rooting for the other team.

Current Mood: awake
Current Location: Abus Vallis
Current Music: Peter Gabriel, "Games Without Frontiers"

The sun just came out. But everything's still damp from the rain. The trees are sparkling. The brown thrasher is in the rain gutter next door, flinging dead leaves about in search of bugs. Oh, we had baby mockingbird drama yesterday. Three chicks and a very distressed and weary mother mockingbird. I think it's all been sorted out now. But there's a photo, thanks to Spooky. It's not the best photo anyone ever took of a distraught baby mockingbird, but it gets the point across:

I had in mind some sort of Earth Day entry loaded with statistics on global warming, overpopulation, mass extinction, and the like, something along the lines of last year. But I'm beginning to think the numbers don't impact people the way they should, so instead I'm going to post a link to this very informative ecological footprint quiz. I scored a 15. Given that the average for the US is 24, I figure the score a) shows I'm making an effort, but b) there's still a lot of room for improvement. I will also repost the links I posted last year, four groups trying to make things less wrong:

World Wildlife Foundation

The Nature Conservancy

Greenpeace

World Land Trust

Also, I'm given to understand that today has been declared "Blog Against Heteronormativity Day". Sounds good to me.

Yesterday was spent writing and rewriting and rerewriting cover copy for Daughter of Hounds. By four p.m., I had something which managed to convey the gist of the plot, something that focused on Emmie and Soldier. Something that didn't make we want to roll my eyes or wretch. Which is to say, something better than what Penguin had done. Still, any attempt to distill the book down to 150 words (or not much more) is doomed to failure. Synopses are, by necessity, fictions, even when they are synopses of fiction. But all yesterday afternoon I was sitting here thinking, What are the magic words that will sell 10,000 more books than Murder of Angels sold. It's a stupid, petty trap. There are no magical words. Or, if there are, I surely don't know them. My "magical" words will be between the covers. The text itself is the reason the book should be read. Anyway, I have no idea how much of what I wrote will be used, if any of it will be used, but at least I've done my best. Which is all I can ever do.

Today, I go back to work on "Highway 97." Which, after yesterday, seems like Heaven.

A good Kid Night last night. We had slices at Fellini's in Candler Park, then rented two Disney DVDs: Mulan and The Watcher in the Woods. I had no idea that I'd never seen the original ending of The Watcher in the Woods. There are two alternate ending on the DVD, and the second alternate ending is the original from the 1980 test release. It's much better and much darker than the safer ending Disney shot almost a year later before the official release in 1981.

And there were wonderful thunderstorms all evening.

Okay. Gotta go. The platypus wails. Do something good for the planet today. And tomorrow. And day after tomorrow. And, well, that'll be a start...

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Location: Argyre Basin
Current Music: The Dresden Dolls, "Shores of California"