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.
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