My daughters and I started this blog so that we could have a place to put our thoughts and talk about how to live in the world, something akin to writing letters. Emails are too short, Facebook too public. I had changed my place in the family by leaving for a foreign country. No more Sunday dinner discussions, no impromptu bull sessions. I needed a place to think out loud. Over the past year of wondering about how to live in the world in this letter to my daughters, it has become clear to me just how difficult it can be.
All of the hubbub around the book and movie “The Hunger Games” has pointed out that we and most especially young adults need a hero. It is particularly satisfying that the hero has a female face. Katniss Everdeen stands on moral ground in that story, in a world driven by style without substance, she is a hero.
So that is what I want to think about. How to stand on moral ground in a world driven by imperatives that are amoral at best, fraudulent at times and often just plain wrong. I suppose those politicians on the right would claim that their morality is self-evident and unquestionable, but I think not. Those on the left make the same claims. But I see a system that in its entirety chugs along on dollar bills and avarice. One man gives the birther movement a million dollars because he wants Israel to be able to continue building settlements and he doesn’t trust our current president to support that. Gun manufacturers fund legislative lobbyist to encourage laws that endanger people, but sell many, many guns. We carry on a violent and unsuccessful war on drugs and fund private prisons to hold offenders without thinking of a better way to tackle this problem. And a better way is to many of us so obvious. The war machine builds unbelievably costly jets that are already out dated and cuts funding to schools and the poor. It is easy to fall into thinking that there is nothing I can do. The wheels that turn are too big. The piles of money too high, the influence purchases peculiar solutions.
But 99% is a big number. It signifies millions of people who together have power. A friend of mine reminds me that it is well past time to begin living the life that we claim to want to live. In many ways we do live that life, eating local food, buying second hand or local products, making ethical choices where ever possible. And just now there are signs that the internet makes a difference. It gives power to our voices. Look how ALEC is being challenged, losing funding from Coca Cola, Pepsi, Mars candy and MacDonald’s. It seem like a drop in the proverbial bucket of corporate voodoo, but it is good news, all the same. It must have dawned on those corporations that the people who buy their products are the ones kicking up the fuss. I think , if we add daily life changes, not just the electronic and virtual ones, we will have the makings of a quiet revolution.
So what do I mean by daily life changes? Shift your thinking and you will change your behavior. Change your behavior and you will shift your thinking.
Here are some ideas about changes in thinking….and/or behavior..
Stop drinking coca cola, a non-food product that is reported to remove rust. Stop feeding it to your children.
So change your behavior, drink water or mineral water. Add lime or a little fruit juice. If you do that for a couple of months, the next time you have a coke, it will taste way too sweet and not even quench your thirst. I guarantee it.
Don’t eat anything that comes in a box. Buy fresh food and prepare it, including cereal. If you can’t make it or bake it, buy it from a local baker or restaurant. Who knows what is in the food tha comes in a box that never rots or molds or changes as nature intended it. You may find that you feel way better in two months’ time. Your body doesn’t need preservatives.
Even if you have a car, try to live as if you don’t. Now that I have been car free for five years, I have to say the only times I am late for class are when I have borrowed a car, I cut the time short to get there, because I can and then can’t find a place to park. I know how long it takes to walk or take the bus. There are glitches involved in not having a car. Things that are to heavy to carry, days that are too hot to walk far, but if most of us didn’t have cars, we would think up some pretty creative ways to deal with that. Walking is a pleasure, if the bus breaks down, it is not my problem. For the really luxurious days there are taxi cabs. No fuss no muss and a brand new person to talk to. Peace and exercise, what a concept.
Plant some food, somewhere, anywhere, on your roof in an empty lot near your home in your back yard, in a pot on the patio. Remember what a tomato tastes like? Whatever you want to savor…grow it. During the war 40% of the produce consumed in the US came from victory gardens. And you will remember what a miracle it all is. Tasty tomatoes, zucchini the size of a baseball bat and you cannot weigh or measure what is missing from the earth. We have forgotten that dirt and topsoil are very special and we need to be careful with them and we have not been careful with them. Evidence the reported perfectly safe roundup, turns out is not so safe.
So dirt. That brings up another topic. Composting and worms, a magnificent team. Your garbage, your fallen leaves, your grass clippings, pile them up, add some worms and you have good earth, brand new ready to go in a matter of months. No plastic bags needed. Just a big pile.
The really cool thing is that as the 99%, if we make a change, it is a big change;
99% of us walking or cycling to work, 99% of us growing half our own food, 99% of us not drinking coca cola. Imagine it, it is magnificent and sweeping and within our power.....
Saturday, April 28, 2012
Thursday, April 12, 2012
I love the sea and the sky and myself on a little spit of land between them. And I'm beautiful just like they are because I'm here and lucky and witness to a million miracles daily. Beautiful for my blood that smells like copper and space dust. Beautiful for having a heart that beats and breaks like waves for the shore, for my salt tears and my skin stretched like speckled canvas over the frame of my bones. For all the things that inhabit the cracks between my atoms. For all the things I can say and I can’t say. For every dream I’ve ever had. For my brain coiled like a snake in my skull. For my black bile and humors and the tiny twisting ladders that built me and gave me my history but can’t explain my memory. And so are you. You are so beautiful too.
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Just thought this N.Y. Times article was interesting . It's okay to be introverted.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/opinion/sunday/the-rise-of-the-new-groupthink.html
Monday, March 26, 2012
Monday, February 6, 2012
Ouch.
My little heart is shipwrecked, tangled in the reef of my ribs. I'm taking on so much water that I'm always seconds away from being overcome. No ebb in sight. So I only speak in specific tenses, trying to corral my unruly thoughts. I fastidiously avoid songs with certain chord progressions and refuse to look up each evening when the sky is that treacherous shade of blue that can break me. I'm not sure it's helping. It's strange to be so lonely yet know that everyone endures this from time to time, except perhaps the luckiest or the most cowardly. I try to remind myself it's not too heavy a price, even just for that one sun-drenched day. For that memory I am indebted, and will not shush my bleating heart. For that perfect early summer day I would pay it twice, or a hundred times.
 |
| This is that blue. |
Saturday, February 4, 2012
I found myself within spitting distance of my 65th birthday and for the first time or so it seemed, not able to believe in anything; not good government, not organized religion, not protest marches, not free market economies, not silent auctions, not the girl scouts or the apocalypse. It makes it a little tough to get out of bed in the morning. I spent 65 years getting up for some good reason or other and they had all deserted me. Marched right out of my life.
It all came tumbling down over a little dustup in a small library in the Yucatan. In this scale model of the larger world, I learned close up that the truth is fragile, public opinion is temporary and a hastily contrived perception satisfies most casual observers and by the way, most people are casual observers.
Extrapolate this little political fracas to the larger world of drones and assassinations, global warming and Planned Parenthood and you can pretty much guess my numb terror. How in the world could someone, anyone believe or verify anything. And so the only place for my thinking to go was the, I believe nothing place.
This did not solve my problem about getting out of bed in the morning or afternoon, or at all….I needed a cause, a skill, a razón de ser. Dogs only work for so long and then, being the kind spirits that they are, they decide that if sleep is what the lady wants, we’ll stay right here and sleep too, never mind that walk.
The first call to action came from the parrots. Many mornings a flotilla of parrots careens through my neighborhood and stops in the ceiba tree in my backyard to fuss. It sounds like complaint, of course it could be the news of the day. Without that tree, I would not have this, vocal and much needed, early morning call to action. Their noisiness certainly lends quality to my life, I get up. But a larger question invades my sleepy mind. How would those guys get from place to place without trees to make a path with rest stops. They are terrible fliers. They look like they might fall to the ground in a loud mess at any moment. I doubt they would make it across town, never mind that, how would we get from place to place without trees along the way. After all we breathe in air every seven seconds or so, last I counted, and we need trees to put oxygen into that air. Without it we are frankly dead.
So those two somewhat related thoughts got me from horizontal to vertical. Maybe here is a non-political- something to do that is; good for the world, good for me, and doesn’t lead to the inevitable disappointment of the naïve. Trees……
I point my pajama clad sadness to the computer, with a cup of coffee, (now declared good for you) and look it up. Naturally the internet delivers a handy list of fast facts. I keep searching to verify them, but they are repeated ad nauseum by many tree sites, leaving me wondering who originated them and how “true” they are. Don’t forget I am a newly minted cynic. But here they are with a promise that I will dig deeper in future.
In one year an acre of trees can absorb as much carbon as is produced by a car driven 8,700 miles. Hey handy way to reduce your carbon footprint…plant an acre of trees and drive 8, 500 miles that year…net gain. Other sites give much more generous mileage.
Shade and shelter of trees reduce heating and cooling costs an estimated 2.1 billion dollars. Wonder how they figured that one out.
One acre of trees creates sufficient oxygen for a year for 18 people. Do you know 18 people you want to put on virtual life support? The self-same acre removes 2.6 tons of CO2. And the shade from said trees can drop the temperature as much as 20 degrees…that would be Fahrenheit, I think. It takes ten years for a tree to reach its peak of doing all of the above….
Trees also cut noise pollution, stabilize soil erosion, improve water quality and provide shelter for wild life.
Trees take 90% of their nutrition from the atmosphere and only 10% from the soil. Think for a minute what a miracle of nature that is. What a gift. But there is more. Trees do not ever, yes never, die from old age. They are the longest living organisms on earth. They are only killed by insects, disease or PEOPLE…..
Trees can induce rainfall and cool the land. In one day one large tree can lift up 100 gallons of water out of the ground and discharge it into the air, an acre of maples, 20,000 gallons in one day. Needless to say this has an enormous effect how peacefully water moves around our planet. An as of 2011, there are 81.5 million acres ( other sources say 1.4 billion acres) of trees in the Amazon Basin. Do the math. It is stunning. Some people estimate that this represents ½ of the planets trees and 20% of our oxygen. Certainly it forms some of our weather patterns. There are estimates that we are losing 1 and ½ acres of the rainforest every second and that by 2030 55% of the Amazon Basin rainforest will be gone. This is a huge topic for another day, but it rivals in my mind the melting ice as a harbinger for dramatically different conditions on earth. (Oh yea and it is definitely political.)
Back to happier facts. Trees have been shown to have a psychological benefit reducing both blood pressure and muscle tension when people are shown or placed in a tree environment. There is evidence that hospital patients recover faster and prisoners are healthier when they can see trees from their confinement. Police believe that adding trees to a community reduces crime.
Finally, even when a tree succumbs to disease insects or human activity, it continues its nurturing ways. At the very least it replenishes the soil as it decays. But otherwise, it becomes your house, your chair, your casket, your violin. That’s some last act.
So…
“The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now.” Anonymous
There you have it. I have my reason to be; trees and a hero, Johnny Appleseed, my guides, the parrots. I can plan and plant trees, one by one, no politics, no organization, no fundraising needed. And it will work for a while, until I know too much and study too much and want to crowd source funds to save the rainforest or something similar and then the politics begin again, but for today a kind of beautiful simplicity prevails. I think I will enjoy it.
“Keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps a singing bird will come.”
Chinese Proverb
PS. This was written yesterday. Today I am happy to say that The Komen Foundation capitulated in one day and restored funding to Planned Parenthood, based on the force of public outrage, pressure and persuasion. Way to go everyone who lifted a finger and noted their disgust. This lifts my spirits about the power of the everyday right thinking person to see the truth of a political situation and reject it.
The future will be full of the unruly wonderfulness of flash mobs and crowd sourcing and we are going to use it for the benefit of all. Come on people, we do have a voice. (Don’t forget boycotting, that works too.)
It all came tumbling down over a little dustup in a small library in the Yucatan. In this scale model of the larger world, I learned close up that the truth is fragile, public opinion is temporary and a hastily contrived perception satisfies most casual observers and by the way, most people are casual observers.
Extrapolate this little political fracas to the larger world of drones and assassinations, global warming and Planned Parenthood and you can pretty much guess my numb terror. How in the world could someone, anyone believe or verify anything. And so the only place for my thinking to go was the, I believe nothing place.
This did not solve my problem about getting out of bed in the morning or afternoon, or at all….I needed a cause, a skill, a razón de ser. Dogs only work for so long and then, being the kind spirits that they are, they decide that if sleep is what the lady wants, we’ll stay right here and sleep too, never mind that walk.
The first call to action came from the parrots. Many mornings a flotilla of parrots careens through my neighborhood and stops in the ceiba tree in my backyard to fuss. It sounds like complaint, of course it could be the news of the day. Without that tree, I would not have this, vocal and much needed, early morning call to action. Their noisiness certainly lends quality to my life, I get up. But a larger question invades my sleepy mind. How would those guys get from place to place without trees to make a path with rest stops. They are terrible fliers. They look like they might fall to the ground in a loud mess at any moment. I doubt they would make it across town, never mind that, how would we get from place to place without trees along the way. After all we breathe in air every seven seconds or so, last I counted, and we need trees to put oxygen into that air. Without it we are frankly dead.
So those two somewhat related thoughts got me from horizontal to vertical. Maybe here is a non-political- something to do that is; good for the world, good for me, and doesn’t lead to the inevitable disappointment of the naïve. Trees……
I point my pajama clad sadness to the computer, with a cup of coffee, (now declared good for you) and look it up. Naturally the internet delivers a handy list of fast facts. I keep searching to verify them, but they are repeated ad nauseum by many tree sites, leaving me wondering who originated them and how “true” they are. Don’t forget I am a newly minted cynic. But here they are with a promise that I will dig deeper in future.
In one year an acre of trees can absorb as much carbon as is produced by a car driven 8,700 miles. Hey handy way to reduce your carbon footprint…plant an acre of trees and drive 8, 500 miles that year…net gain. Other sites give much more generous mileage.
Shade and shelter of trees reduce heating and cooling costs an estimated 2.1 billion dollars. Wonder how they figured that one out.
One acre of trees creates sufficient oxygen for a year for 18 people. Do you know 18 people you want to put on virtual life support? The self-same acre removes 2.6 tons of CO2. And the shade from said trees can drop the temperature as much as 20 degrees…that would be Fahrenheit, I think. It takes ten years for a tree to reach its peak of doing all of the above….
Trees also cut noise pollution, stabilize soil erosion, improve water quality and provide shelter for wild life.
Trees take 90% of their nutrition from the atmosphere and only 10% from the soil. Think for a minute what a miracle of nature that is. What a gift. But there is more. Trees do not ever, yes never, die from old age. They are the longest living organisms on earth. They are only killed by insects, disease or PEOPLE…..
Trees can induce rainfall and cool the land. In one day one large tree can lift up 100 gallons of water out of the ground and discharge it into the air, an acre of maples, 20,000 gallons in one day. Needless to say this has an enormous effect how peacefully water moves around our planet. An as of 2011, there are 81.5 million acres ( other sources say 1.4 billion acres) of trees in the Amazon Basin. Do the math. It is stunning. Some people estimate that this represents ½ of the planets trees and 20% of our oxygen. Certainly it forms some of our weather patterns. There are estimates that we are losing 1 and ½ acres of the rainforest every second and that by 2030 55% of the Amazon Basin rainforest will be gone. This is a huge topic for another day, but it rivals in my mind the melting ice as a harbinger for dramatically different conditions on earth. (Oh yea and it is definitely political.)
Back to happier facts. Trees have been shown to have a psychological benefit reducing both blood pressure and muscle tension when people are shown or placed in a tree environment. There is evidence that hospital patients recover faster and prisoners are healthier when they can see trees from their confinement. Police believe that adding trees to a community reduces crime.
Finally, even when a tree succumbs to disease insects or human activity, it continues its nurturing ways. At the very least it replenishes the soil as it decays. But otherwise, it becomes your house, your chair, your casket, your violin. That’s some last act.
So…
“The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now.” Anonymous
There you have it. I have my reason to be; trees and a hero, Johnny Appleseed, my guides, the parrots. I can plan and plant trees, one by one, no politics, no organization, no fundraising needed. And it will work for a while, until I know too much and study too much and want to crowd source funds to save the rainforest or something similar and then the politics begin again, but for today a kind of beautiful simplicity prevails. I think I will enjoy it.
“Keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps a singing bird will come.”
Chinese Proverb
PS. This was written yesterday. Today I am happy to say that The Komen Foundation capitulated in one day and restored funding to Planned Parenthood, based on the force of public outrage, pressure and persuasion. Way to go everyone who lifted a finger and noted their disgust. This lifts my spirits about the power of the everyday right thinking person to see the truth of a political situation and reject it.
The future will be full of the unruly wonderfulness of flash mobs and crowd sourcing and we are going to use it for the benefit of all. Come on people, we do have a voice. (Don’t forget boycotting, that works too.)
Sunday, December 11, 2011
Rats
Erin posted this quote from an NPR story on Facebook, this morning.
“Not only will rats frantically work to free their trapped cage mate; they will do so even when there’s a tempting pile of chocolate chips nearby, the study reveals. Instead of leaving their pal in the trap and gobbling the candy all by themselves, rats will free their cage mate and share the chocolate.”
To which she added, “Rats can do this people. Come On!
Patty Mason designed this experiment to study the evolutionary roots of empathy and wrote up her conclusions in the journal, Science.
Maybe Patty Mason, the scientist at The University of Chicago watched the “Secret of NIHM” too many times when she was young. Maybe rats don’t have a vivid memory of what chocolate tastes like and it is easy for them to ignore a pile of chocolate. Maybe in fact that is a good and noble rat.
Most of my thinking has revolved around the question of how such an anthropomorphically despised animal could be so ethical, and we so apparently lacking. Maybe our folk lore is all wrong, the rat as noble beast, the human not so much. But wait a minute. If we humans saw another human being caught in a trap, surely we would work to extricate that person, before reaching for a snack. That is given a visible tangible trap that can be mechanically sprung. Heck yah! I would be there and working hard at getting any person out of it, not just my cage mate. Of course there is the odd time or two I have driven by an accident. Granted others had stopped and I reasoned that I was not a nurse, doctor or otherwise in any way skilled to assist. Rats can’t rationalize.
But, truly, people are often in much more complicated and even invisible traps. And that is where it gets tricky and time and chocolate are often very helpful. Helpful because it takes patience and understanding; first to even recognize the trap that another person is in and then to slowly, cautiously proceed. Chocolate needed just on general principles.
I remember giving a 13th birthday party for a young man who had just come out of one of Virginia’s mental institutions into therapeutic foster care… not because he was mentally ill, but that’s another story. He threw the presents in my face and stomped out of the room. My first lesson in how truly there is no simple or glib answer to complicated human traps. I offered to take him back to the store to return the presents and get whatever he wanted. No, that wouldn’t work, he wasn’t allowed in the store because he had been caught shoplifting there.
Five years later on his 18th birthday, he had learned how to be happy and I knew just what to get him for his birthday. I held my breath and sent him off on a train to New Mexico to visit his Mom. It was a journey of immense proportions. The trap was sprung. It took a lot of time, a lot of patience and mostly in Jerzy Kosinski’s words “being there.” He was lucky, he had the heart to make it, others did not. My daughter found his picture on Facebook. In the photo, the is sitting with his son, a huge and genuine smile on his face. I haven’t contacted him, it would only be one of those glib momentary things, how could it be otherwise after all these years. I think of him often and hope his life is what he wants it to be.
And then there is the question, what if you are the person in the trap. That’s a different puzzle, because first you have to see that it is there, or allow someone else to point it out to you. Not easy. Only then the hard work of finding a way out can begin. There are ways to get help, twelve step programs, psychoanalysts, good friends who will abide with you. The you tube video of a the cage mate frantically searching for the trap door, which is what these rats did, while a pile of chocolate chips waits to be shared puts the level of difficulty of the two separate tasks in stark perspective. A trap door is a relatively straightforward task. Still it is worth noting that these rats would free the captive, even if the rat was released into another cage and they did not get to do the rat dance of joy and play with their mate. It is also interesting that they learned how to free their mates and eventually became masters of quicker releases.
Many of us have that altruistic disposition. But just now, I think we have entered a world of sharp and nearly violent differences of opinion and some of us just don’t seem to care what happens to the less fortunate. Some of us just don’t get that we, here on this small and increasingly fragile planet, are all cage mates. This calloused attitude will inevitably affect the poor of the world first. They are undefended against the changes that will erupt in the climate, in food supplies, politics and the like. Sooner or later it will affect everyone. Even the rats will find their efforts in vain. What good does it do to spring a trap when the world you escape into is no longer habitable? The rats will hardly notice and carry on as long as there is air to breathe and something to eat. They do have that beautiful single-mindedness of purpose. They proceed without question with what is necessary for their survival. Nature does that, much like the ants that Congo-line into the kitchen directly without fail to the spot of raspberry jam on the counter. How do they do that?
Stephen Hawking has announced that we had better ready the space ships; he thinks we have maybe 100 years left on this planet. He wasn’t clear on what exactly would be the instrument of our demise, our aggressive nature perhaps, or a final despoiling of this planet. My question is not, how we are going to get to another planet. I am relatively certain humankind can find a technological answer to space travel. It is not a problem, for us humans, trap springing of a certain kind. After all, “no matter where you go, there you are.”
“Not only will rats frantically work to free their trapped cage mate; they will do so even when there’s a tempting pile of chocolate chips nearby, the study reveals. Instead of leaving their pal in the trap and gobbling the candy all by themselves, rats will free their cage mate and share the chocolate.”
To which she added, “Rats can do this people. Come On!
Patty Mason designed this experiment to study the evolutionary roots of empathy and wrote up her conclusions in the journal, Science.
Maybe Patty Mason, the scientist at The University of Chicago watched the “Secret of NIHM” too many times when she was young. Maybe rats don’t have a vivid memory of what chocolate tastes like and it is easy for them to ignore a pile of chocolate. Maybe in fact that is a good and noble rat.
Most of my thinking has revolved around the question of how such an anthropomorphically despised animal could be so ethical, and we so apparently lacking. Maybe our folk lore is all wrong, the rat as noble beast, the human not so much. But wait a minute. If we humans saw another human being caught in a trap, surely we would work to extricate that person, before reaching for a snack. That is given a visible tangible trap that can be mechanically sprung. Heck yah! I would be there and working hard at getting any person out of it, not just my cage mate. Of course there is the odd time or two I have driven by an accident. Granted others had stopped and I reasoned that I was not a nurse, doctor or otherwise in any way skilled to assist. Rats can’t rationalize.
But, truly, people are often in much more complicated and even invisible traps. And that is where it gets tricky and time and chocolate are often very helpful. Helpful because it takes patience and understanding; first to even recognize the trap that another person is in and then to slowly, cautiously proceed. Chocolate needed just on general principles.
I remember giving a 13th birthday party for a young man who had just come out of one of Virginia’s mental institutions into therapeutic foster care… not because he was mentally ill, but that’s another story. He threw the presents in my face and stomped out of the room. My first lesson in how truly there is no simple or glib answer to complicated human traps. I offered to take him back to the store to return the presents and get whatever he wanted. No, that wouldn’t work, he wasn’t allowed in the store because he had been caught shoplifting there.
Five years later on his 18th birthday, he had learned how to be happy and I knew just what to get him for his birthday. I held my breath and sent him off on a train to New Mexico to visit his Mom. It was a journey of immense proportions. The trap was sprung. It took a lot of time, a lot of patience and mostly in Jerzy Kosinski’s words “being there.” He was lucky, he had the heart to make it, others did not. My daughter found his picture on Facebook. In the photo, the is sitting with his son, a huge and genuine smile on his face. I haven’t contacted him, it would only be one of those glib momentary things, how could it be otherwise after all these years. I think of him often and hope his life is what he wants it to be.
And then there is the question, what if you are the person in the trap. That’s a different puzzle, because first you have to see that it is there, or allow someone else to point it out to you. Not easy. Only then the hard work of finding a way out can begin. There are ways to get help, twelve step programs, psychoanalysts, good friends who will abide with you. The you tube video of a the cage mate frantically searching for the trap door, which is what these rats did, while a pile of chocolate chips waits to be shared puts the level of difficulty of the two separate tasks in stark perspective. A trap door is a relatively straightforward task. Still it is worth noting that these rats would free the captive, even if the rat was released into another cage and they did not get to do the rat dance of joy and play with their mate. It is also interesting that they learned how to free their mates and eventually became masters of quicker releases.
Many of us have that altruistic disposition. But just now, I think we have entered a world of sharp and nearly violent differences of opinion and some of us just don’t seem to care what happens to the less fortunate. Some of us just don’t get that we, here on this small and increasingly fragile planet, are all cage mates. This calloused attitude will inevitably affect the poor of the world first. They are undefended against the changes that will erupt in the climate, in food supplies, politics and the like. Sooner or later it will affect everyone. Even the rats will find their efforts in vain. What good does it do to spring a trap when the world you escape into is no longer habitable? The rats will hardly notice and carry on as long as there is air to breathe and something to eat. They do have that beautiful single-mindedness of purpose. They proceed without question with what is necessary for their survival. Nature does that, much like the ants that Congo-line into the kitchen directly without fail to the spot of raspberry jam on the counter. How do they do that?
Stephen Hawking has announced that we had better ready the space ships; he thinks we have maybe 100 years left on this planet. He wasn’t clear on what exactly would be the instrument of our demise, our aggressive nature perhaps, or a final despoiling of this planet. My question is not, how we are going to get to another planet. I am relatively certain humankind can find a technological answer to space travel. It is not a problem, for us humans, trap springing of a certain kind. After all, “no matter where you go, there you are.”
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