Resurrection: Hippitus Hoppitus

Baseline Forest Carbon Map of the U.S. for the Year 2000

Easter is a Christian holiday celebrating the resurrection of its nominal founder from death by Italian crucifiction. Resurrection means, of course, the resurgence or revitalization or revival of something. It's a Spring thing here in the good old Northern Hemisphere. There's a lot dour pessimism about the state of our world—with good reason; to wit: we're running out of energy to fuel our civilization, and what fuel we're using is destroying our climate and our environment. But there're also signs of hope. Resurrection of humanity.

Don't mess with Texas: it's on fire. The worst in recorded history. And it's running out of water. Don't most of the global warming deniers come from Texas, anyway?

A hole in the Antarctic ozone has desiccated Australia.

The more I learn about natural gas, the costlier it seem to get.

As if we didn't know it already, the era of cheap energy is over. Conventional sources, that is.

Though it seems even the trusty old spark plugs may soon go the route of the buggy whip or dinosaur (that's 'Jesus pony' to you fundamentalists) thanks to "lasers".

There are alternatives, though. And they seem to be proliferating. Algae, for instance. And all that wind kicking up those fires in Texas? Not a problem, a solution.

Some suggest that there may be a Moore's law governing the efficiency of solar cells. And that soon we might be using solar cells as conventional windows.

Nuclear fission reactors, one hopes after Fukushima Daiichi, are toast. It's way too soon to rule out fusion, however. Creative problem solving, no? Archaeology of knowledge: wasn't that a title by Foucault?

[Anticipating a Randal Gravesian response to the foregoing, I humbly proffer the following:

]

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In case you were wondering, Easter eggs are the devil's testicles. And here's the story of how the Easter Bunny and painted eggs play in to the overall scheme of Christ's resurrection from the dead: the Hare Club for men. Not here or here.

More of the Same

See? This is just the kind of thing I've been talking about. MIT scientist Daniel Nocera, founder of Sun Catalytix, has discovered how to generate energy from water. "[T]his process splits hydrogen from the two oxygen molecules in water to create power from the sun. One and a half bottles of water, including wastewater, can power a small house, and a swimming pool filled with water refreshed once a day will generate enough energy to run a plant." If I had fifty or a hundred thou to throw around, I'd love to invest in something like this. To my mind it could be like getting in on MicroSoft or Apple REAL early. (Or Compuserve).

My only question is whether the technology works with sea water. Whenever power and industry compete with the poor for a single resource such as potable water, the folks who need it for mere subsistence tend to lose out. Ethanol, anyone?



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Hey, what about a bacterium that craps petroleum?

Slide Show: World on Edge

Aiming for a full 4/4 [Canary (in a coal mine), weathervane (any way the wind blows), Cassandra (Somebody, please listen), fool (nothing's ever gonna' change)], I re-present:

Summary Presentation for World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse

View more presentations from Earth Policy Institute

Yet Another Crude Argument from Yours Truly

Like it or not, market forces control our economic destiny. I'm a realist, not a revolutionary. Hell, even the Marxists are having trouble identifying and identifying with revolution-like events in places like Libya and now Syria, because right now they seem to be shapeless, and they don't involve Western-type bourgeois States: "Do we support U.N./Obama imperialist interventions or not? Ewww."

If, like me, you were anywhere around a college in the 1970s, you probably had a friend or an acquaintance who was a computer freak. What a dweeb, you probably thought, as he obsessed about "getting computer time." Meanwhile, if that guy didn't drop out and become pretty wealthy very fast, he graduated and pretty much did the same thing. Because of the age of my own kids now, I have the opportunity to meet a bunch of HS- and college-age kids. The one thing I keep hammering home to them is that things like environmental sciences and sustainable engineering and desalination technologies and food sciences are the new computers. If they want to do very well and, at the same time, do good, they should pursue a career in these and similar areas. If you are an investor, a {ahem} capitalist, you could do a helluva lot worse than investing in such green type industries and funds.

And it won't just be a bubble. Real estate, for example, was a predictable bubble based solely on demographic realities. The baby boomers (not just a marketing term) needed places to live as they formed familial units. There were millions and millions of them. And as they got richer on the benefits they gleaned from the Space Age and the Information Age, they demanded bigger and better places than their parents. But, with that wealth, came a decline in reproduction—apparently that's an entirely predictable economic fact. The generation that followed them did not generate nearly as much wealth and was not nearly so populous. Ergo there was less demand for housing. Market forces.

Sustainability, it should be readily apparent, has to be integral to the on-going life of our species and its civilization. Its bubble, if you will, is tied to our own survival.

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Some more links on the subject of true costs of energy:

Scientists have found a way to work around the costs of platinum in solar fuel cells using carbon nanotubes. Costs of solar energy should decrease exponentially over the next few years. Remember Moore's Law?

The defense industry is joined at the hip with the nuclear industry.

More uncounted oil costs. [NYTimes paywall alert: Headline reads: "Oil Spill in South Atlantic Threatens Endangered Penguins"]. Here's another link.

One of my greatest joys in scuba diving is encountering sea turtles. This article documents the amount of plastic found in one juvenile sea turtlerecently. Here's the pic:

Oh, and more on the fraud of fracking.

Welcome to Toxipedia.

Netflix of  "Crude" (2009), if you do. Trailer:

Free Market Truth in Pricing

Some quick research turned up the following from Ch. 13 of World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse by Lester R. Brown:

"The failure of the market to reflect total costs can readily be seen with gasoline. The most detailed analysis available of gasoline’s indirect costs is by the International Center for Technology Assessment. When added together, the many indirect costs to society—including climate change, oil industry tax breaks, military protection of the oil supply, oil industry subsidies, oil spills, and treatment of auto exhaust-related respiratory illnesses—total roughly $12 per gallon. If this external cost is added to the roughly $3 per gallon price of gasoline in the United States, gas would cost $15 a gallon. These are real costs. Someone bears them. If not us, our children. n.2



If we can get the market to tell the truth, to have market prices that reflect the full cost of burning gasoline or coal, of deforestation, of overpumping aquifers, and of overfishing, then we can begin to create a rational economy. If we can create an honest market, then market forces will rapidly restructure the world energy economy. Phasing in full-cost pricing will quickly reduce oil and coal use. Suddenly wind, solar, and geothermal will become much cheaper than climate-disrupting fossil fuels.

We are economic decisionmakers, whether as corporate planners, government policymakers, investment bankers, or consumers. And we rely on the market for price signals to guide our behavior. But if the market gives us bad information, we make bad decisions, and that is exactly what has been happening.

We are being blindsided by a faulty accounting system, one that will lead to bankruptcy. As Øystein Dahle, former Vice President of Exxon for Norway and the North Sea, has observed: “Socialism collapsed because it did not allow the market to tell the economic truth. Capitalism may collapse because it does not allow the market to tell the ecological truth.” n.3 



If we leave costs off the books, we risk bankruptcy. A decade ago, a phenomenally successful company named Enron was frequently on the covers of business magazines. It was, at one point, the seventh most valuable corporation in the United States. But when some investors began raising questions, Enron’s books were audited by outside accountants. Their audit showed that Enron was bankrupt—worthless. Its stock that had been trading for over $90 a share was suddenly trading for pennies. n.4 



Enron had devised some ingenious techniques for leaving costs off the books. We are doing exactly the same thing, but on a global scale. If we continue with this practice, we too will face bankruptcy.

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n.2. International Center for Technology Assessment (ICTA), The Real Cost of Gasoline: An Analysis of the Hidden External Costs Consumers Pay to Fuel Their Automobiles (Washington, DC: 1998); ICTA, Gasoline Cost Externalities Associated with Global Climate Change (Washington, DC: September 2004); ICTA, Gasoline Cost Externalities: Security and Protection Services (Washington, DC: January 2005); Terry Tamminen, Lives Per Gallon: The True Cost of Our Oil Addiction (Washington,  DC: IslandPress, 2006), p. 60, adjusted to 2007 dollars with Bureau of Economic Analysis, “Table 3—Price Indices for Gross Domestic Product and Gross Domestic Purchases,” GDP and Other Major Series, 1929–2007 (Washington, DC: August 2007); BP, BP Statistical Review of World Energy (London:  June 2007); U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Energy Information Administration (EIA), “Total Crude Oil and Petroleum Products,” at tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_cons_psup_dc_nus_mbbl_a.htm, updated 26 November 2007; This Week in Petroleum (Washington, DC: various issues); DOE, EIA, “US Weekly Retail,” Retail Gasoline Historical Prices (Washington, DC: 4 October 2010).

3. Øystein Dahle, discussion with author, State of the World Conference, Aspen, CO, 22 July 2001. 



4. Eric Pfanner, “Failure Brings Call for Tougher Standards: Accounting for Enron: Global Ripple Effects,” International Herald Tribune, 17 January 2002; share price data from www.Marketocracy.com, viewed 9 August 2007."

Price Discovery

This is a quick follow-up to my previous post. The main argument used by traditional industry apologists/lobbyists (oil, gas, nuclear [fission], coal, etc.) is an economic argument; to wit: these status quo forms of energy currently deliver more kilowatts per dollar than alternative forms of energy (solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, fusion, etc.) currently are capable of delivering.

In the current climate of public argument—policy and political and PR—this passes for authoritative and conclusive. In a free market situation, the cheapest, most efficient producer wins.

The standard response is that traditional forms of energy have been entrenched for so long that they are therefore cheaper and more efficient. Alternative fuel sources are only just beginning to achieve the sorts of economies of scale that these older industries have been able to capitalize on. This is weak.

The second response is that the traditional industries receive vastly greater amounts of funding from public sources—tax payer subsidies, utility company vertical integration, lax and favorable regulation, etc. Both arguments nip at the heels of the real issue, especially the second because it gets closer to the real knock-out punch.

The second point raises the issue of price discovery. In a so-called free market economy, market forces are in a constant tussle to set price points at an equitable, agreeable amount for both producers and consumers. Government subsidies and regulations act as impediments to this process.

Now, traditional energy industries are at the forefront in opposing government regulation—whether it be in the environmental or antitrust or consumer protection areas. They are the first to shout when government seeks to intervene on behalf of consumers or the environment. However, they fight like hell to defend their subsidies—whether it's in the form of tax breaks or regulatory indifference. And, what's more, they don't include those subsidies in their cost calculation.

A further cost they refuse to include—and this is the kicker—is the environmental and climatic costs of their business-as-usual practices. For example, the environmental costs of mountain-top removal are not factored into the price of a kilowatt of coal. The costs—spread over the entire industry—of Three Mile Island or Chernobyl or Fukushima-type situations are not entered on the cost side of their ledgers; the public assumes these and all future risks (though by all actuarial right they are estimably calculable). Neither are the costs of global insecurity due to the by-product of this form of energy: the threat of nuclear war. The costs of increased global warming due to, e.g., ozone depletion caused by pollution from all these forms of energy production can hardly be calculated, though early efforts in the form of carbon taxes are currently being floated. Neither can the costs of global instability caused by the political inequities of propping up oil-friendly, authoritarian regimes in such places as Iraq, Libya, Saudi Arabia, etc. All non-humanitarian foreign aid to these countries should show up on the ledgers of the oil companies. The impact on the health of people who work in these industries and who are effected by them due, e.g., to their proximity to their production facilities also needs to be monetized and charged to their accounts. Why, similarly, are the costs of cleaning up, e.g., Prince William Sound and the Gulf of Mexico not factored into the costs of a barrel of oil? Because the free market mechanism of price discovery is not efficient. Knowledge is not yet perfect. And these industries are in a battle to the death to prevent it from ever becoming so.

Unless and until there is true price discovery, because the ideology of the free market is regnant in American and thus global politics, these traditional energy industries will continue to win the argument and thus the day, and there will never be a level playing field for renewable and sustainable energy industries.

Here's a good general primer on the issue. Here's a piece on the hidden costs of nuclear energy. And here's one on the costs of fossil fuels.

Compassion, Energy, and the Japanese Disaster (with Linkage)

Taking a break from my series of posts about fiction and its self-awareness of its remove from the "real world" to talk about what's going on in the real world:

They say the Buddha is infinitely compassionate. It's times like these that make me wonder whether compassion is enough. Japanese people are suffering from the after-effects of one of the most powerful earthquakes in recorded history, a tsunami of almost unimaginable proportions, and a potential nuclear meltdown nightmare. Beyond our prayers, here's one way we all can help:

"The best way for local residents to help these people, according to relief organizations, is to donate cash to organizations such as the American Red Cross or the Salvation Army.

Representatives from both organizations said Monday that money is the biggest need and donating supplies is not an efficient solution.

“Logistically, it becomes too difficult to store, sort and then ship the items,” said Randall Thomas, spokesman for the Salvation Army of Greater Philadelphia. “We can be much more efficient with cash donations.”

For many people, the easiest way to donate is by text messaging. To make a one-time, $10 donation to the Salvation Army, people can text “Japan” to 80888. The donation will be added to the person’s cell phone bill.

The American Red Cross is doing likewise, allowing people to make $10 donations by texting “redcross” to 9099."

In our world, sometimes money means compassion. How broken is your heart? May the Buddha's compassion never be exhausted.

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One does not need to be a genius at inductive reasoning to recognize the obvious: the risks/costs entailed by continuing to rely on our traditional forms of energy production outweigh the rewards/benefits. To wit:

• Nuclear energy can never be perfectly safe. E.g., Fukushima, Japan, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island.
• Fossil fuel energy production is not without enormous societal costs. E.g., Iraq, Deepwater Horizon Gulf of Mexico.
• Coal is dirty and dangerous. E.g., Upper Big Branch and Sago, West Virginia, strip mining, mountain-top removal.
• Natural gas extraction, i.e., frac'ing, is not without it own set of perils. E.g., Arkansas earthquakes.

Do you get the sense that Mother Nature is trying to tell us something? And we're not even beginning to address the global climatic repercussions.

Fact is, we're running out of energy. It's the ultimate root cause of our lackluster global economies. This is the age of exhaustion.

To read about how some really smart, imaginative people have proposed solutions that seek to preserve not only humanity and civilization but our planetary environment, I urge you to read my series of posts entitled "Parameters of the Last Ark" on this issue.

Articles of Faith: Parameters of the Last Ark — Pt. 3

(cont'd from previous posts)

Imagine this: You are a youngish person in, say, the prime of your life. Your doctor informs you that, through some mysterious, though infallible process he has determined that you have exactly two years to live—no more, no less. This is your certain destiny. There is no escaping this fate. What do you do?

End of life counselors might tell you: (1) to put your affairs in order; (2) to go to your loved ones and ask their forgiveness for whatever indiscretions you might have committed; (3) then to so forgive them; (4) to tell them you love them: (5) to thank them; and (6) to say 'good-bye'. Something like that. All well and good.

Your friends might tell you to come up with some sort of 'bucket list' of things you want to do before you die. Your own personal bucket list might include things like parachuting or climbing Mt. Everest or bedding a supermodel or tracking down and killing bin Laden or reading Proust or making sure your progeny are in good hands.

But beyond that, wouldn't you want to use the time you had left to come up with some sort of project? Something concrete to accomplish before the end arrives?

For example, you might pour your remaining time into finding a remedy for whatever it is that is going to kill you so that others might not suffer the same fate—on the off chance that you might, if successful, find some way of escaping your fate and possibly even save yourself.

It needn't be a positive project either. You might also opt to destroy all your belongings or go on a crime spree or seek revenge against people who've slighted you or create problems that make the lives of your loved ones worse or even devise some fiendish way to destroy your own life sooner.

It depends on who you are.

These are all 'projects', things you might want to do before you croak, but by no means an exhaustive list. Of course, you wouldn't necessarily have to have some sort of 'to do' list. You could just sit around and weep and moan about how unfortunate you are or turn inward and attempt to contemplate the meaning(-lessness) of it all. You could even pretend that you didn't have such a death sentence hanging over your head and just go on living your life the way you always have—purposeless and desperate, as if you're going to live forever. In denial. That wouldn't forestall things—and at some deep level you would know that.

Understanding that this is everyone's predicament, at some level, is what it means to be human. At some level we all know this; we all realize we are each of us mortal and, presumably, our animal friends do not. The attempt to deal with this realization and its accompanying sense of loss—the profound, existential sadness that comes with this blunt realization—was, if you'll recall, the theme I emphasized in my series of literary readings: Ur-story. In fact, it gave us a workable definition for getting at the essence of the works we were examining.

But more than that—more, that is, than the fate of each of us as individuals—this is the predicament of humanity and of life on Earth as we know it. (This was the notion I explored in the earlier posts in this series.)

That leaves us with the question: Do the same rules apply? How do we, as a species, cope with having to say goodbye to life and all that? Is there a 'bucket list' for us as a species? For life itself, for that matter? Something we need to accomplish? Something we were meant to accomplish? Something we want to leave as a legacy? A mark we can make in the vastness of the universe?

Shouldn't there be?

(to be continued)

A Nest of Bunnies

Keeping with the Earth Day theme, while gardening this week we discovered the above nest of adorable bunnies in a bed of ivy. We called our Vet to ask whether we should rescue them or move them or just leave them be. The doctor told us not to touch them. The momma bunny would come by every evening to feed them. Rabbit milk, apparently, is very rich, and they only need to be fed once a day. They have been growing each day, their burrow hidden from preying hawk eyes by the ivy and the Bradford Pear tree in the side yard.

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Source: Hubblesite.org
This week marks the 20th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope. This has been one of the great and marvelous successes of the human race. We are privileged to have lived during this remarkable period of discovery. Hubble can peer back nearly to the beginning of the first appearance of starlight in the universe, some 13.1 billion years ago. Unfathomable. And yet there's so much we do not know about our universe.

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Following up on an earlier set of posts, Parameters of the Last Ark, I found this quote from Sir Stephen Hawking, widely viewed as one of the smartest men who ever lived: “If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the native Americans.”

Such an encounter need not be a replay of Roland Emmerich's Independence Day or James Cameron's Avatar. Certainly, if a migratory alien civilization discovered us in our little Earthen bunny nest anytime in the near future, we would be as vulnerable to them as those little bunnies are to us human gardeners, for they will have mastered interstellar, if not intergalactic, travel. Much would depend, then, on the aliens' motives for travel: survival, discovery, conquest, colonization, predation, etc., and their own resourcefulness.

One of the arguments I attempted to make in my "Parameters of the Last Ark" posts was that at some point life as we know it is going to have to evacuate Spaceship Earth, whether as a result of natural disaster or to avoid one. Depletion of resources, death of our star, meteor collision, nuclear winter, etc. If, I pointed out, we had attained such an advanced degree of civilization as to be able to escape en masse—i.e., we had become a Type 1 or Type 2 civilization, that is to say we could harness the entire energy of a planet or a star (or even a galaxy) to fuel our escape—we could surely produce self-sufficient means of transportation, perhaps even movable planets. We might not necessarily need to destroy another civilization to survive. Certainly, a planetary home would be nice, but not absolutely necessary.

The same, it seems to me, would apply to aliens on the move.

The only question would be whether we'd be able to take the bunnies with us.

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UPDATE: By popular demand, here's some more bunny cuteness—feel free to click and download:

Articles of Faith: Parameters of the Last Ark — Pt. 2

(cont'd from previous post)

In his book Physics of the Impossible (2008), Michio Kaku (no, not the book reviewer for the New York Times) refers to Nikolai Kardashev's theory of the stages of civilization.

"If we look at the rise of our own civilization over the past 100,000 years, since modern humans emerged in Africa, it can be seen a the story of rising energy consumption. Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev has conjectured that the stages in the development of extraterrestrial civilizations in the universe could also be ranked by energy consumption. Using the laws of physics, he grouped the possible civilizations into three types:

1. Type I civilizations: those that harvest planetary power, utilizing all the sunlight that strikes their planet. They can, perhaps, harness the power of volcanoes, manipulate the weather, control earthquakes, and build cities on the ocean. All planetary power is within their control.

2. Type II civilizations: those that can utilize the entire power of their sun, making them 10 billion times more powerful than a Type I civilization. ... A Type II civilization, in a sense, is immortal; nothing known to science, such as ice ages, meteor impacts, or even supernovae, can destroy it. (In case their mother star is about to explode, these beings can move to another star system, or perhaps even move their home planet.)

3. Type III civilizations: those that can utilize the power of an entire galaxy. They are 10 billion times more powerful than a Type II civilization. ... They have colonized billions of star systems and can exploit the power of the black hole at the center of their galaxy. They freely roam the space lanes of the galaxy." (145-46)

I'm not interested in science fiction or extraterrestrial civilizations; such creatures may have developed efficiencies that render the Kardashev typology obsolete or, interestingly, not chosen such a materialistic path. This typology can, however, help us understand our own situation because it is based on the model of our own civilization's progress, i.e., energy consumption.

Based on this scale, Kaku and others have postulated that we Earthlings are still a Type 0 civilization—0.72, to be exact. In his earlier book Hyperspace (1994), Kaku states:

our Type 0 civilization is "one that is just beginning to tap planetary resources, but does not have the technology and resources to control them. A Type 0 civilization like ours derives its energy from fossil fuels like oil and coal and, in much of the Third World, from raw human labor. Our largest computers cannot even predict the weather, let alone control it. Viewed from this larger perspective, we as a civilization are like a newborn infant. ... [Yet] [g]iven the rate at which our civilization is growing, we might expect to reach Type I status within a few centuries. ... Our technology is so primitive that we can unleash the power of hydrogen fusion only by detonating a bomb, rather than controlling it in a power generator. However, a simple hurricane generates the power of hundreds of hydrogen bombs. Thus weather control, which is one feature of Type I civilizations, is at least a century away from today's technology." (278)

However, the progress of human civilization is by no means a given. For example, our own nature might be our worst enemy. As a species, human beings may ultimately have a suicidal bent, allowing our fears and prejudices to paralyze us in our struggle for life. As a Type 0 civilization

"we use dead plants, oil and coal, to fuel our machines. We utilize only a tiny fraction of the sun's energy that falls on our planet. ... [But our civilization is] still wracked with the sectarianism, fundamentalism, and racism that typified its rise, and it is not clear whether or not these tribal and religious passions will overwhelm the transition [to a higher order civilization]." (PI 146)

{This raises an interesting question—one I hope to address at some point down the road—as to whether Life itself is necessarily wedded to homo sapiens sapiens or whether we are only a stepping stone for Life to evolve/create a more advanced form of itself. Life, I suspect, has no need of us; we, however, are utterly and abjectly dependent on Life and should constantly bear this in mind.}

Now I am sure that President Obama has weighed the costs and benefits, the risks and rewards of his newly announced policy to allow some off-shore drilling for oil and natural gas—environmental, economic, political, etc.—and made the judgment that the upsides ultimately outweigh the downsides. I do not pretend to be privy to these deliberations nor to the weights assigned to any of the factors that entered into his decision. Nor do I claim to understand his strategic thinking. I feel reasonably safe, though, in assuming that his calculations, unlike those of his predecessor, gave greater consideration to the costs and risks to the coastal and oceanic environments: maybe not as much as I would have wanted, but certainly more than Bush. At least I would hope that it did and that his ultimate goal is to move us toward a more sustainable energy basis, toward an even grander environmental goal.

Solar, tidal, wind, geothermal: these are stepping-stone forms of energy that, when tapped, could raise the present state of our civilization to a higher order. Their prevalence would render obsolete the sorts of destructive resource wars that have plagued us throughout our history. Their abundance would fuel intellectual, creative, and peaceful progress—potentially even evolutionary advances as we find ourselves overcoming some of the struggles for mere survival that have made us so bellicose to begin with. Their cheapness would make such projects as desalination of sea water feasible (even now corporate and state actors are moving to privatize and control potentially potable water resources; there was even a rumor that the Bush family [alongside, apparently, the Sun-Yung Moon enterprise], inveterate oil resource hogs, has bought up 100,000 acres of land in Paraguay on top of the central aquifer for all of the South American continent).

I have long advised my teen-aged children that they are entering a new era, an era where focus on green, sustainable energy technologies will be the path to job security and financial well-being in the future—as well as making this world a better place. My sense is that, as with personal computers in the late '70s, we are at the starting line for an entrepreneurial boom in this area that will not so readily go bust.

The Anthropocene epoch arrives perhaps too soon. The paradox of human nature is as yet unresolved. I worry we have not yet shaken off the existential insecurities that accompanied the rise of our civilization over the last 10,000 years. And with those insecurities come the sorts of fears and animosities that drove us into the global wars and genocides and environmental disasters that reached near apotheosis in the last century.

We have to ask whether humanity is essentially Life-affirming, or whether its dark undercurrents will once again surface in this new epoch. I hope and, at base, believe that, though it is not inevitable given human nature, we as a race will ultimately stumble into a solution that works to preserve our environment, ourselves, and, thus, Life itself.

Articles of Faith: Parameters of the Last Ark—Pt. 1

"Geologists from the University of Leicester are among four scientists—including a Nobel prize-winner—who suggest that Earth has entered a new age of geological time. The Age of Aquarius? Not quite.—It's the Anthropocene Epoch, say the scientists writing in the journal Environmental Science & Technology ... [T]he Anthropocene represents a new phase in the history of both humankind and of the Earth, when natural forces and human forces became intertwined, so that the fate of one determines the fate of the other. Geologically, this is a remarkable episode in the history of this planet."

We teeter, it seems, on a precipice: will this purported new era issue in a new round of environmental degradation and species extinctions (resulting, ultimately, possibly in our own) or is this the necessary next step in the advancement of our civilization and the evolution of life on this planet? Is the glass half-empty or half-full? Much, it would seem, depends on us: How attuned are we to environmental concerns? Are we truly pro-Life (with a capital 'L') or, as a species, self-destructive?

One assumption I make is that human life is the expression of something—let's call it DNA, or better Life itself—to survive in the face of an indifferent universe. Do we, as the human race, have the same will to survive or have we been been untrue to our nature?

The jury is out, but I firmly believe it is a question worth asking.

Another way of looking at things: Life itself is part of a complex entropic cooling process. In its simplest form, as sunlight pure heat reaches the earth where it is processed through photosynthesis, the consumption of plants by animals (including us), and the subsequent fertilization of plants by animal waste. Plants and bacteria convert the sun's light into energy, absorbing carbon dioxide and emitting oxygen and water in the process

Byproducts of this complex cooling process include the carbon dioxide we exhale and methane gasses in our excrescence. These reheat the atmosphere, but not perfectly. Life serves to cool the planet, converting heat energy into inter alia fecal matter and decaying bodies.

Civilization, on one view, resulted as human beings banded together to make the process of Life more efficient. However, it takes energy to fuel the process of civilization. At this stage of human civilization, we fuel this process mostly through the burning of cellulose- (e.g., wood) and carbon-based (oil, natural gas, etc.) forms of biomass—which, according to the vast majority of reputable scientists, is releasing all stored-up carbon dioxide from the photosynthetic process back into the atmosphere and causing the planet to heat up more than it should.

In other words, we are acting against our human nature—heating the planet instead of cooling it. If the Anthropocene hypothesis is accurate, this is a problem.

Other problems arise, of course, because there is only a finite quantity of biomass, and we will certainly someday run out, thus threatening our civilization and, possibly, life itself with an energy crisis of cosmic proportions.

Today, President Obama announced the U.S. would open up "vast expanses of water along the Atlantic coastline, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the north coast of Alaska to oil and natural gas drilling."

This move addresses a pressing concern: U.S. dependency on oil from the politically unstable and repressive region of the Middle East as the West seeks to convert its economy to a more sustainable energy basis—assuming, of course, this is not simply some short-sighted "Drill, Baby, Drill" political move to placate the entrenched oil industry powers that brought us the last eight nightmarish years of war and global economic collapse and environmental degradation under those inveterate oilmen George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and their close friends amongst the Saudi royalty.

There must be a delicate balancing act here, and, in this, we must hold this government's feet to the fire. There can be no doubt that in the long run we must look to more sustainable forms of energy to preserve our civilization, our environment, and, indeed, Life itself. In the short term, however, if we continue to let the anti-democratic forces of the corporate and totalitarian oil industry maintain a chokehold on global economic growth and development, we stand to lose even more of our freedoms and wealth. And, to be sure, no one whose power ultimately rests on a platform of controlling the flow of fossil fuels to hopelessly dependent customers is going to willingly allow a sustainable energy industry to take root and grow into a competing factor. It will strangle it in the cradle, so to speak.

So, is Obama's move an attempt to buy time and cover so we in the West can innovate and develop a sustainable energy industry (as he's promised) or merely a caving to entrenched oil interests that have had their grip on power lo these many years? Is this Obama's attempt at a grand strategic solution to the same set of problems that G.W. Bush and his father sought to answer by foolishly and misguidedly invading Iraq? No one can say for sure now; the real political battle is just beginning. But it is the crucial—nay, it is the existential question to ask.

(to be continued)