Obligatory decadal post

It is now 2020 at Otowi Bridge, and true to the saying "a lot of water has passed under the bridge" while I have ignored this journal.

Most notably, the infamous NY Real Estate bankrupt billionaire Donalt Trump has been the US President for most of 4 years and is possibly on the verge of starting a major if not world-scale war with Iran.  He seemed more than a little surprised when he won the election (by the gerrymandered nature of out Electoral College while the popular vote went against him by a small percentage, much like the 2000 race between Gore and Bush II).

And perhaps *more* notably (how can one have more than most?) is the increased awareness of the impending disasters afoot in the world, roughly recognized as "Climate Change".  While there is still a modest contingent of "deniers" (probably well correlated with "flat earthers" and "intelligent designers") and a significant contingent of "deer in the headlights", there are more and more people across all generations trying hard to take the impending (already unfolding) crisis seriously.

I prefer to refer to it as "the End of the Anthropocene" which reflects the significant likelihood that one of the key consequences of our having "grown too big for our britches" is that we might well extinct ourselves along with many other species.   The Anthropocene nominally started when humans began to shape their environment significantly.   Some suggest 50,000 years ago as Homo Sapiens displaced/outcompeted/extincted other extant Homo species (Neanderthalensis, Denisovan) and began to radically change the local landscape through the hypercompetition with other apex predators, leading to the extinction of many megafauna, predator and prey alike.   Others start the clock of the Anthropocene with the advent of agriculture and city building around 10,000 BCE, and yet others don't consider our presence in the geologic record to be significant until the beginning of the industrial revolution when we began to spike the CO2 in the atmosphere with our abrupt and significant adoption of fossil fuels.  Finally, others consider the date to align with the first test of nuclear weapons when the geologic record will show wide distribution of radionuclides not to be generated by any other terrestrial source. 

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists coined a "Doomsday Clock" in 1947 to represent their best estimate of how much time we have left "in the grand scheme" before total self-annihillation.  In 1947 it was set to 7 minutes before midnight. In 19523, with the first tests of Fusion weapons, it was set to 2 minutes.  It was downgraded to 17 minutes in 1991 after the end of the cold war.  With the acknowledgement of Climate Change and President Trump's belligerent style on the world stage, it was back down to 2 minutes by 2018 and remains there to this day.

There are multiple Endogneous Existential Threats to consider, of which Climate Change (Crisis?) is but the most obsessed with publicly currently.   Nuclear war continues to be a major threat.   Species Extinction may be even more fundamental than Climate Change, but the two are inextricably linked.  General Environmental destruction (pollution, habitat loss, ecosystem collapse) is also directly related to the former  two.   The global rise of fascist governments is another direct risk to humanity and seems to be a driver for (and consequence of?) these challenges to the biosphere (rampant industrialism, deregulation, subsequent climate/political/environmental refugee migration).   And lastly (or not, and maybe not leastly) is the threat of Artificial Intelligence which might be on a continuum with Industrial Automation and even "the technological singularity" and "transhumanism".

It is hard to pick one of these issues to focus on these days which leaves many stuck in variations on denial, anger, bargaining, depression.   It is essential that we *act* now, but at the same time to remain deeply grounded and self-aware in our actions.   I believe that we "got where we are" by a combination of "willful ignorance" and "ignorant willfulness" in the guise of "action".   Trading out the classic players of the willfulness and ignorance for a new caste playing at the same game in the name of "saving the planet" may be a little too much like the myriad other "movements" in history which ended or peaked in events like "the Inquisition", "Colonisation", "Manic Hypercapitalism", etc.

Fortuately there are somewhat sane minds and voices responding to this unique moment in history (near the end of the Anthropocene if NOT history itself).   Bill McKibben, Rebecca Solnit, Joanna Macy, and Elizabeth are but a few of the most notable.

Many are rallying to the defense of their favorite, most dear, or just most notable cause right now.   It may be Climate Change, or a specific species (humpback whale or spotted owl), or a habitat (old growth forest, Great Coral Reef,  Arctic, etc.) or a specific subculture (LBGTQ, LatinX, Muslim, African-American, Native Peoples, etc.) or the Democracy Worldwide (or just the US Democrat Party?) or something else.   But my hope lies in an emergent awareness of the synergistic relations among *all* of these issues. 

A recent summit on Climate and Complexity that I attended in Stockholm Sweden helped to give me hope that this is on the minds of many and that many already embrace Systems Thinking and apply systems approaches to trying to understand *their* smaller piece of the bigger puzzle that is this "Impending End of the Anthropocene".

I too, am a bit of a "deer in the headlights", sitting here in my comfortable home, typing on my coal-powered laptop (most of the electricity provided at my location is generated by burning coal) connected to a coal-powered (or at least fossil-fuel) internet, thinking about eating some highly processed food (Red Pepper Soup from Trader Joe's) and going swimming at an olympic sized swimming pool whose water is heavily treated with industrial chlorine and heated by the burning of natural gas derived most likely from fracked wells near the same place the coal is extracted to make the electricity I will use in my (nominally) Electric Vehicle (Chevy Volt).

In self-defense, I may spend a few minutes or even hours working toward changing some of those things to reduce the impact on the planet that first worlders have (roughly 10x that of third-worlders and 110x the basal metabolism rate of other mammals our size).

Maybe I will post again this year/decade/geologic era...