Not a good idea . . .

Normally I try not to get too upset by what the media brings me, figuring that most of the fuss, as all human endeavor, will soon blow over and that in the end it makes little difference anyway how some people in Florida vote. Eventually we all turn to compost and the talk and the issues and the hubristic granfalloons of humankind will not matter at all. But I read something yesterday that REALLY bothered me. In a recent Time magazine there was a list of 10 “Ideas That Are Changing the World” or some damn thing (Time has a second-grader’s fascination with counting things). One of the ideas “slowly emerging as an option . . .” is supposedly “Geo-engineering” and this insane scheme (which I thought had been soundly laughed out the window a few years ago) to inject millions of pounds of sulphur particles into the air, Mount Pinatubo to the nth degree, to alleviate global warming and counteract the greenhouse affect. Kind of like shade cloth on your too-hot solarium. Of course, Time pontificated, the best solution would be to cut back carbon emissions, but as that is proving difficult and is liable to be very costly, this plan might be feasible and cheaper. CHEAPER??!! I screamed in my claustrophobic little mind—cheaper than what? Than losing all agriculture on Earth when the cooling effect gets out of control? Cheaper than finding out the hard way how plants and animals will react to a constant rain of sulphur entering their metabolism? Cheaper than the next techno-fix that you guys have to think of when this thing goes horribly awry?

I can take the thought that human life on this planet might be on its way out the side door, that like any infestation that eats its way out of resources, it will die out. That may be our karma, we are in the midst of finding that out right now. So be it—the Universe will not weep, we deserved it. But if we also must take out every other living thing on the planet as we go, if instead of intelligent cockroaches of the future unearthing the pitiful fossils of our chloresterolized arteries entombed in strange boxes of ferric oxide with rubber wheels, what if we manage to strip Gaia of her atmosphere, reduce the earth to a flat blasted plain of bare rock, take it back to the Archaean Era before there was an atmosphere or life? There quite possibly might not be enough time before Sol goes to a white dwarf for life to evolve again. We might be more powerful than we think—we could by this one act, this one decision made by a bunch of guys with pocket calculators around a table, have the power to absolutely and without second chances, end all life in this solar system. And if this Life, as some say, is unique, if there actually are not any other systems in the universe where life could evolve, then we are indeed truly powerful and truly dangerous.

Hubris was invented by a Man--men are jealous of forces more powerful than they. Men love the way the wind feels on their testicles as they set out across the spring tundra looking for mammoths. No plans, no talk, let things happen, got the balls and the quick strength and the nice new spears to deal with anything that comes our way, we’ll protect the camp, we’ll feed the children, trust us! Time for that stuff to phase out. Stop trying to engineer things! When the plaster starts falling in the soup, you don’t just issue hardhats and soup bowl covers, you fix the damn ceiling. When you learn to think beyond, way beyond, the cost of things as measured by a spreadsheet and a computer simulation, you will maybe start to think like a Woman, in a more wholistic, nurturing way, accepting that some things are far larger than you.

I have applied for permission to become an Honorary Woman, my wife has forwarded the application to Gaia and all her cohorts, and it is pending.