When astronomers use a new telescope for the first time, they call the event “First Light”. This then is “First Light “for this blog. With luck, it will run for many years.
Please be patient if you are an early reader. I expect it to be uneven and sparse for a few weeks as I get the various areas up and populated.
This blog will have a central theme and the following text gives a good sense of what that theme will be:
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We will focus on a gathering storm of problems confronting mankind and the planet’s other biological inhabitants. The thread common to all of these problems is humanity itself. Mankind’s evolution of higher intelligence has freed it from the checks and balances which have tended to preserve order in the natural world since biological evolution first began on Earth.
Each of the subjects discussed in this column illustrates the fact that while humanity has developed higher intelligence, it has not developed the commensurate level of wisdom to balance it.
These are stories of the overuse of natural resources without consideration of what we’re going to do when they run out.
These are stories of humanity’s destructive impact on the integrity of the physical and biological systems around us in the world – systems upon which we are deeply dependent.
These are stories of how humanity’s greed and shortsightedness, both individual and collective, repeatedly lead to severe inbalances in the distribution of essentials like food, water, shelter, education and information. And these imbalances, in turn, lead to problems like overpopulation and fundamentalism.
And, finally, it is a meta-story about how the problems mankind is causing are potentiating and empowering each other to create a ‘perfect storm’ of consequences. Consequences which are going to fundamentally alter the physical and biological systems of the planet and degrading the kind of environment we will be leaving to our children for hundreds, if not thousands, of generations.
The following are some of the subjects which we will consider:
Peak Oil, Global Warming, Falling Water Tables, Rising Ocean Levels, Biodiversity Loss, Over Population, Failing Fisheries, Pollution, Rich vs. Poor Gap, Fundamentalism, Globalism, Post-Modernism, Women’s Literacy, Food Shortages, Fresh Water Shortages, Terrorism, Pandemics, Desertification, Corporate Power, Bubble Economics, The Gulf Stream Conveyor, and the Marginalization of Science.
This is an incomplete list and other subjects will be added.
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In addition to the general theme of impending disasters, as described above, we will wander into a number of other areas which are of interest to me (and hopefully to you). These will include poetry, philosophy, books, spiritualism, science and history among others.
Stay tuned.