Slow morning at the bookstore

Yeah, it’s raining out, and, besides, Sunday morning is usually slow for the first two hours or so. Knowing that it was most likely going to be not busy, I snuck a couple magazines behind the counter to fill in the empty minutes. The first one I opened was March's copy of National Geographic Magazine.

Now, I love National Geographic. It has been a staple in my life since I first learned how to read. But, this issue depressed me. One of the center-piece articles as about the “Age of Man”, and how we are shaping the planet in ways similar to major geologic events such as asteroid strikes. The gist of the story is that we are burning through the planet’s resources at a prodigious rate. There is a three page foldout picture of one of the California oil fields which produces about 32 million barrels of oil per year. The story notes that this is about 9 hours of the world’s consumption of oil.

I think of my well-loved granddaughter, and I seriously worry for her future. I’ll be dead and gone when the oil wells dry up in fifty years (mol), but she, and her children, will have to deal with this reality. So, what all this is telling me is that we, as a species, have to get off this planet in the near future (next 25-30 years) and in a very big way (in the tens…hundreds of millions.) We have to bring the population of the planet back down to a sustainable level and we have only a little time to do ourselves. Otherwise, dear old Mother Nature will do the culling, and, dear and sweet as she is, Mother Nature’s methods tend to be very…painful for both those culled and  those left standing. If we don’t get off this planet, we are dooming both our species and our planet to a very dark future.

Leaving National Geographic, I picked up the current copy of Newsweek and began to read. I Didn’t have to get very far into it before I came across the following, “…from an American perspective, the revolutions transforming the Middle East are also deeply sad. They’re sad because they underscore what a terrible waste the last decade of American foreign policy has been.” We have poured over a trillion dollars and thousands of American lives wasted for no good reason. Once again we are presented with clear evidence that George Bush (the younger) was arguably the worst president of all time. As a result of his presidency we are left with a crushing debt load, a weak economy and an increasingly isolationist, selfish and fearful national psyche.