A sense of scale.

What does scale mean? Human scale is that we can comprehend. That beyond our scale is almost by definition beyond human. I was involved yesterday in a discussion of literature of energy. Just the fact that such a course can exist in this world is inspiring, but that's not what this is about.

We were disucssing what is the appropriate use of energy and how we can find the right balance between use and abuse. In that discussion we were considering small, personal photovoltaic systems (like Big Thunder's) to a huge commercial powerplant. The solar PV is human scale. Each element can be picked up and handled by a one person. In comparison, even a small powerplant (coal, gas, geothermal) is so much bigger and incomprehensible. Scale allows us to see our own level and to reach beyond to larger dimensions, to carry us beyond our limiations.

Sunshine and Beauty. The cycles of Life

What a day. Went up early to the hills to pick up a load of firewood I had cut a few weeks before. Back then the trees were at what I'm pretty sure was the peak of color. It was an amazing to see those trees and to be up there working in the clear cool air and enjoying it. Driving down in the afternoon light was truly stunning. This morning I returned to the spot to pick up the wood and I saw on a number of the trees the leaves had gone to brown and were falling. A not so subtle rmeinder of the cycles of life. The leaves will fall and then grow again.

I spent the afternoon stacking the wood I had collected and then cutting and cleaning up the plants in the courtyard. Again I am reminded of that cycle of life and that these plants I just cut to almost nothing will be back up in the spring.

Whether or not it's part of the same, today we got called out look for a lost 4x4 up by Peavine. I got there just about in time to find out he had gotten home and we were cleared. I was driving back and again began thinking of Erin. I still miss my little pup, my trusted friend and companion for 12 years. I know, like the leaves that must fall, she too could only live for some time. I miss her. I miss her funny little dances she would do when happy.  I still can't quite let go of her.

In defence of extreme opinions.

Does it mean I agree with them? Not necessarily. But Kurt Vonnegut once wrote: "It is not so much that we ask americans merely not to be sensors, but that they run the risk of being deeply hurt in order that all ideas may be free."

So I do think that we must be able to speak or write what we want.

More later.

Back to Abbey:

"A world without huge regions of total wilderness would be a cage; a world without lions and tigers adn vultures and snakes and elk and bison would be -- will be -- a human zoo. A high-tech slum."

  What exactly does that mean? Well I think he is saying unless we have the chance to take our place back in the wilderness, we will place ourselves in the equivalent of a human zoo. A zoo is the antithesis of wilderness. It is a totally artificial visual representation of something that may once have been but has since been made functionless. Zoo animals cannot interact as they should.

  So in this human zoo, we too cannot interact as we should. We evolved in the "wilderness" and I think coded somewhere in our DNA (or possibly in our micochondrial RNA, never can be sure) is an immutable need to be part of that wilderness even in small ways. E.O. Wilson calls it "biophilia", but I think it goes a bit beyond that. We need to be scared. We need to have the shit scared out of us. We need sometimes to be in a place where we are what all animals are: sometimes predator, sometimes prey. It's the very real possibility that you could be some cougars's dinner that makes us alive. That's not to suggest we should dangerously risk our lives, that's to say we should experience those wild places and let ourselves be scared to remind us what to be human truly is.

So I'm back to quoting Ed Abbey:

"The ugliest thing in America is greed, the lust for power and domination, the lunatic ideology of perpetual Growth -- with a capital G. "Progress" in our nation has for too long been confused with "Growth"; I see the two as different, almost incompatible, since progress means, or should mean, change for the better -- toward social justice, a livable and open world, equal opportunity and affirmative action for all forms of life. And I mean all forms, not merely the human. The grizzly, the wolf, the rattlesnake, the condor, the coyote, the crocodile, whatever, each and every species has as much right to be here as we do. "

I have to agree with that, and at three hundred million and growing how can the US ever get to a society of true progress: Environmental, Economic and Social. Abbey is right, without the social progress and justice we are no where, not better, not progressing, just here. How much can we say we have "progressed" beyond our very earliest ancestors. What did Neanderthals do for fuel? They extracted resources from their environment and burned it. They found down wood or took wood from trees and burned it. Where do we get our fuel? We extract oil from the ground and burn it. Progress? No, not in the abstract, as a "technology", we are not at all advanced.

So, it's time for true progress. To live within our means. That means living on current net solar income. That means providing for our people, that means do the right thing by us, by the coyote, and the desert tortoise. All of us are not only a part, but we are all critical to all our survival. Isn't that what we all want?