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Planet Split Over Plan to Support Human Life

In the category of parallel universes, consensus continues to jell around the idea that measures to counter catastrophic climate change are really a bothersome nuisance thinking people would be better off ignoring. And while there is some psychological credence to accepting this plan, the downsides are also a tad unsettling.

How should one navigate this quagmire of conflicted opinion? With an automatic locking rear differential and an EPA est. 15/21 city/hwy? By contracting a conglomerate’s Greek Letter-plated consulting arm in order to reduce your company’s energy and water waste? Or how about an individual bubble all your own to ride out all those frosty Inland mornings when the tide washes in over the Handy-mart parking lot and you can’t find your crocs in time to leap over the puddles for your first Burp-y of the day? Okay… went a little too far with that last one, but for a Sunday we’re really putting our best cognitive dissonance on display.

While we’re putting our commercial proclivities to such good use, we might imagine a few ways to distract ourselves with causes that matter. Or the gymnastic possibility (nimble, strong) exists that we might not be able to this on our own. In tribute to an equality of possibilities, where no great consequence may outweigh another, where time is a mere illusion, a subtle question rests: when is a distraction not a distraction?

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walking, working

Here’s a follow-up to the smallholder farms I mentioned yesterday. Microfinance and it effects on the environment.

I was walking back from doing a radio interview earlier, thinking about some of the conversation. I often talk about walking or biking to work, and it’s become a little bit of a cudgel in some ways. And in some ways, it should be.

But I can walk to work because I live in the small town where my job is. I was thinking about an article I saw recently, about the ever-crowded planet and the difficulty of doing something about over-population without crafting laws that are inhuman. There’s something to that, related to my ‘walking to work’ idea that “we can’t tell people where to live.”

But isn’t that what we’ve been doing anyway? Encouraging people to live in certain places, and selling them houses and cars without including the prices of the negative externalities of living/driving there. That’s how they could live there. Otherwise – and now many are realizing this – they couldn’t live there.

Anyway. As you were.