A Day In The Life Of The Earth: Introduction

A Day in the Life of the Planet in the Gregorian calendar year of 2008
By the Chinese calendar it is 4705 and the year of the Rat
In the Hijri calendar it is 1429
The Hindu and Buddhist calendars are just too complicated to get into.



Perhaps this entire endeavor is simple-minded and banal, as well as rather self-centered. It could turn out to be all of those things and less. I actually don’t know. But, it's my hobby horse, as Tristram Shandy would say, and I'll ride anyway. Much of the information in this blog can be found in the newspapers or on TV as well as downloaded from the internet. It will, however, be fragmented and piecemeal. ‘News’ about the environment is certainly available and accessible, BUT it seems to me that no one is actually encouraging you to put it into any personal context.

Remember the mantra: Think Globally, Act Locally. It’s succinct and punchy. But before you act locally, you also have to think locally, in fact, very locally. You connect with the world through your own body and mind, so start there; it is the most local you can get.

I encourage you to begin looking at a day in the life of the planet, and your own in relation to it, not as a series of isolated events, but as an ongoing accumulation of events and processes. As you do that, you may realize that you are rediscovering information that you probably got back in grade school or maybe a little later.I know there's a lot of stuff I don't recall from then. How about you? If you already know all this stuff, and actually remember it, you get an A for data retention. But here's the important question: does any of it still turn you on? I hope so. It sure as hell should, because hell is what we’re busy creating and it will only get worse if we don’t start taking seriously what we already know.

Do you remember getting excited when you turned over a rock and some salamander strolled out? How about the time you noticed the red-tailed hawk hovering in the sky? What about when you planted a seed and it actually came up? As we ‘transition’ into ‘adulthood’ we are pretty much told that we should ignore all of that cool stuff. We’re admonished to “suck it up,” and “get with the program” ---- get a job, settle down, and above all, “shut up!” Following those rules may work to keep the $$$$$ flowing, but when we do that, we’re killing our planet. And we're not killing softly or slowly.

I hope I can tweak you, however briefly, back into paying attention to the world around you, the world that isn’t just inside the metal can you drive around in or inside the walls that make up your house. The point of this piece is to draw together intriguing and sometimes surprising information into a backdrop for the daily swirl of your activities on this green earth. After all, you do live here, don’t you? Having this information can serve as a context that might, just might, affect how you look at the world around you once again. AND as it twinkles there in the back of your mind it just might influence at least one or two of the multitude of daily decisions you make in how you live your life.

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Back in 1983 a small publishing company out of London, Bellew and Higton, issued a slim volume entitled A DAY IN THE LIFE OF THE WORLD . It was written by Andrew Bailey and illustrated by Janet Nunn. The book was distributed in the U. S. by Doubleday. I think I picked it up because it was unusual. For one thing, it wasn’t rectangular, it was circular in shape. It was a little bit larger in diameter than a CD, a thing that didn’t exist back then. If you thumbed through it, you might have thought you were looking at a graphic novel; there were line drawings, sketches, charts or diagrams on almost every page. But what you were holding in your hand was an incisive but inclusive primer of how humans interact with the planet, even the universe, on a daily basis. I thought then, and I think now, that it is a pretty nifty piece of work that simplifies a whole lot of information and makes it accessible in a way that is smart and not dumbed down.

Maybe no one took A Day In The Life of The World seriously because it seemed more like a comic book than a volume chock full of critical, useful information. The book was concise, less than 130 pages long, and the text was straight-forward. The prose style may not have been lyrical, but it wasn’t littered with clods of academic prose or sticky scientific jargon either. The graphics were lean and clever; they enhanced the text, giving it a clarity and power that it didn’t have by itself.



I think the publishers were optimistic that their simple and no nonsense presentation would be a good seller if not a best-seller. But A Day In The Life of The World made very little impression on the market or Bellew and Higton's bottom line. Why didn’t it catch on? I suspect that most people felt that the entire endeavor was just too elementary and that the graphics were too cute, too simplistic to appear in any ‘serious’ work. Too bad. They were wrong.

It’s been 25 years since the publication of A Day In the Life Of The World (ADLW), I for one think it’s time to update the information and give their idea another go. With the web at our beck and call maybe now we have a chance to reach the audience the publishers were originally seeking. When Andrew Bailey’s book was published in 1983, there were about 'only' 4 billion people living on the globe. Pollution was becoming increasingly important as both a tangible issue and a political one. The Soviet Union was still intact and the “cold war” was alive and well. The European Union didn’t exist. India and China were still considered to be backwater nations despite their huge populations. Global climate change, which was barely on anyone’s list of environmental problems, was still considered by many to be merely a wild-eyed, nearly science fiction-like theory. Crude oil sold for between $25 and $27 per barrel. Gasoline was around $1.25 to $1.30 per gallon. In the USofA, Ronald Reagan was President and it was “morning in America.”

Today, worldwide there are more than 6.6 billion humans. Pollution has become a planetary problem of gigantic proportions, affecting the soil, the water and the air of our planet. There is an island of garbage and trash, mostly plastic, twice the size of Texas, floating in the Pacific. The Soviet Union is now a dis-union; Europe has gone in the other direction, creating a common economic union and common currency. China has emerged as a leading global power and India isn’t far behind. And in terms of population, every other person on the planet is either Chinese or Indian. Crude oil is now selling for between $106 and $109 per barrel; gasoline is already more than $3.35 per gallon and may well reach $4.00 per gallon by the end of 2008. And oh yes, Global climate change has become the most pressing environmental issue for the planet. And George W. Bush is the President of the USofA. Indeed, things have changed!

IMAGE(s) NEEDED !!

Every now and then I am going to list some websites to check out for factual backup or other informational purposes. Usually they will be obviously related to the text they follow; sometimes the relationship will not be so apparent. Only a handful, no more than 6 and usually less, will be listed, since the links provided at each site will lead you wherever you choose to go. Occasionally books will also be listed.

Some websites to check out are listed below. Their position on the list means nothing about preference.
www.cosmosmith.com/population_clock.htm
www.earthtimes.org/
www.facingthefuture.org/
www-popexpo.ined.fr/english.html
www.desip.igc.org/populationmaps.


Though Americans may feel as though they are bombarded by environmental news hour after hour, they really are not. I believe they are a saturated with news reports about ‘global warming’, which get a lot of hype and attention even though much of it sketchy and even inaccurate; I think they are also swamped by the recent tidal surge in advertising for ‘green products’, such as florescent light bulbs and hybrid cars. The advertising in particular is ubiquitous. After a while it begins to feel scolding or guilt-inducing.

ADLW tried to set the context of who we are and where we are. The book explored not a just a series of isolated events or circumstances occurring in a vacuum but presented the accumulating aggregate of events and activities that are on-going day after day after day. It’s time to bring this information up to date in the same simple, easy style and format. Let’s face it, most of us are never going to read the summary of the 2007 IPCC report on global climate change let alone the entire report. Nor are we likely to read even a single page of GEO4 (Global Environmental Outlook) report, a 500+ page document on the environment issued recently by the United Nations. In fact, most of us have never heard of the latter.

I intend to follow Andrew Bailey’s template in this re-creation of his work. I’ll use his chapter order for the most part, but my text will be a bit more rambling. Sadly, I won’t always be able to come up with slick graphics, but I’ll do the best I can.

Thinking of you and me, Barack

While fixing coffee, feeding Chloe, wiping away a small trail of mouse poops, and laying out the morning doses of various medications, I listened to, though didn’t really watch, the morning ‘news.’ According to the latest reports: the reason that the Pentagon, or whoever makes these decisions, didn’t send the improved and more heavily armored personnel carriers to Iraq was because someone made a cost/benefit analysis and determined that they cost too much. The well-greased finger of fate gets shoved up our asses once again: Money rules. As a result, of course, there have been dozens of unnecessary deaths (not that any death there on either side has been ‘necessary’) as well as hundreds if not thousands of unnecessary injuries and maimings. I guess the Pentagon is still suffering from Rummy-itis and trying to operate the military as though it is a kind of Wal-Mart, or maybe it really doesn’t want to be fighting over there either, but only because it costs too much. That concern hasn’t seemed to bother Dubbya much. He continues to cheerfully lead, well not lead actually, a Congress and much of the nation off the cliff of morality and into a bog of national insolvency. Meanwhile my local chattering heads on TV laugh together at dopey jokes and chirp on about family stabbings, steroid use by fat ball players, and the rise in the number of home foreclosures. All of it is delivered with a smile and sense of self-satisfaction that says nothing is really wrong at the core, there are just these minor, and occasionally interesting, unpleasant aberrations in an otherwise OK way of life here in the USofA. Cut to commercial, to commercial, to commercial, to commercial, to commercial, to comm........There is no way I can scream loudly enough! Where O where is V???

So without V, I, and hundreds of thousands of similarly disaffected souls in this nation are left to fend for ourselves. We are left to howl in less and less wilderness and more and more suburban sprawl, to scream from the center of median strips and strip malls, to scrawl on the sides of walls and subway cars, and to rant into the ethersphere on the internet. Just like this!

A brief opinionated digression: in some ways the internet has hindered the physical expression of outrage that accompanied opposition to the Vietnam War. It has allowed for widespread vocalization and superior organizing of opinion, but somehow, in an odd and ironic way it has dissipated physical expression; it has not encouraged tangible, in-the-streets, in-your-face confrontation. It is also true that the business of business has dominated more and more of our nation’s social as well as moral life since the 60's and 70's. Business as usual has gotten truly huge and reaching its ever hungry fingers into our pockets and under our shorts with greater skill and tenacity than ever before. That fact coupled with these facts: [1] the major media are controlled and owned by a small cabal of plutocrats (there is no other word to describe them) and [2] the superior tactical capacities of the policing forces in the country, have worked to hold down the appearance as well as the actuality of physical confrontation. Back to my message in a serendipitous way.

Some of us sense that some new smell is in the air. Maybe it’s just the onset of Spring, but maybe not. In many ways it feels as though we have been colluding as a populace in creating an onerous system, a system that is not, in fact, too different from that of the nation of Hungary under the Soviet Union. That huge crowds that have turned out for Barack Obama seems to have surprised, and baffled most media commentators. It has certainly blown the pins out from under Hillary and toppled her from her throne of inevitability.

So why are we all getting high on Barack? I think it is the combination of Obama’s undeniable charisma and the inchoate longing of the majority of the people of the nation that has ignited this phenomenon. Just because fewer and fewer Americans have bothered to vote in the last several Presidential elections isn’t a measure of lack of caring. Perhaps on the contrary, it is the expression of a nation’s outrage, disappointment, and disaffection. In many ways the nation is still one filled with dreamers and idealists --- whether those dreams are realistic or not is beside the point. Right now it is the feeling that is firing the movement. On some level, the people of the nation, despite the cynicism of the media and the constant barrage of bullshit and crap they spew at us, see that the country has failed to live up to its own professed ideals. They seem willing to take a leap of faith and slough off the entrenched hypocrisy that has dominated politics for the past 20 years or more. They look at the packaged and prim, cynical and self-serving Clintons and ask themselves: “Do we really want them back running things?” People who vote for Hillary are voting primarily, I believe, out of fear. It’s also the same thing that keeps them from questioning the system as a whole.

Obama brings hope, not a promise. And right now maybe that’s enough. He talks about change without clearly defining that change. Though that’s a somewhat duplicitous strategy, it is a wise one. The real difficulties are going to come when we, not only on a personal level but on a national level as well, face up to the realities that many of the dreams, particularly on the lifestyle, physical level are going to have to change. This will un-nerve and piss off a great many people. BUT this is precisely when and where a President’s political skills are going to have to be brought to a hot but gentle focus. FDR managed things reasonably well, and we’re going to need that kind of deft touch and resolute toughness again. Handling the changes as we evolve toward a new reality is going to have to come from a political leader as well as from us, the political followers. Obama keeps reminding us that change starts from the bottom up, not from the top down. Yes and no. IT takes two to tango and it will be a neat dance if we can pull it off. What remains to be seen is if we can not only swallow but ultimately embrace the inevitable changes, the changes that will arrive with or without the participation of a new President or a nervous population.

I hope we haven’t forgotten how to be revolutionaries as we have grown fat and subservient. We not only hope things could be different, we know they’re going to be different, whether we like it or not. We will eventually be living a lot less high on the hog. Only if we can get our fat doughy asses off the cushy couches of convenience and entitlement can we actively help shape the changes and fit them into a new and happier reality. Otherwise we’ll have to take whatever “Corporate” decides to shove down out throats. Somebody has to issue the call to action, and it sure looks like Barack is doing just that. And so for now, even though I'm an old curmudgeon, I'll hold on to my hope, thank you.