JPF Home Page Forums Lyric and MP3 Feedback MP3 Feedback Forum The Giant Ain't Sleeping Anymore

Good topic for our times.
When Threatening Change, capital T, capital C, came to the planet Earth of the time of the dinosaurs, they enacted tactics in a strategy of Adaptive Response. Their Adaptive Response was too-little/too-late to compete with Threatening Change coming too-much/too-soon.
The Human Phenomenon will have to find Leadership Decision-Makers in commerce and government possessed of the requisite intellect and integrity to enact tactics in a strategy of Adaptive Response to Threatening Change if living things, including The Human Phenomenon, are to survive.
The Human Phenomenon is a recent factor in the closed eco-system of planet Earth, but is Causing Effects of such significance that the period 1850 to 2020 qualifies as a new geologic epoch; The Anthropocene.
Homo Sapiens, 'Knowing Man', did NOT 'know' that his Industrial Revolution was actually an Industrial-Scale Burning Revolution, and that byproducts of his burning of mountains, mountain ranges of coal over the last 170 years, rivers of oil, great swaths of forests, animal fat, animal dung, anything that will burn, would go up in the atmosphere and form a heat-trapping bubble. Homo Sapiens, 'Knowing Man', had become Homo Ignitius, 'Burning Man'.
Another factor was Homo Plasticius, 'Plastic Man', producing plastic, designed to last 'forever', yet used for the most temporary of purposes, getting a product from seller to consumer, and then thrown 'away'. Every piece of plastic ever made is out there, somewhere, because, in the closed system of planet Earth, there is no 'away'.
Burning Man, Plastic Man, Concrete and Asphalt Man, The Human Phenomenon is complex with its "Mine! All mine!" attitude toward planet Earth's resources. We pave over the surface so no other creature, flora or fauna, can use it. We pave highways to lay there until we want to use them. We cut whole forests down, denuding the land beneath. Agroforester people can harvest 200 tons of food and fiber and materiel from an acre of Amazon Rainforest in a year, and again next year, as long as that Rainforest is left in its Natural state. But other people cut it down, put up fences, plant grass, and raise cattle. In a couple years the soil is exhausted and the grass is no good, so the cattle can't graze, and these people cut down another swath of Rainforest to stay in the cattle business. Or palm oil. Or coca leaves. Anything but the Natural abundance of the original forest,planet Earth's 'lungs', inhaling carbon dioxide, exhaling oxygen.
Now the heat escaping from Earth's molten core, through the land, the sea, into the atmosphere, and solar radiation are melting polar ice. What happens to a spinning object when trillions of tons melt off the poles and flow into the oceans?
The oceans are warmer, with high concentration of The Industrial-Scale Burning Revolution's carbon dioxide, acidified, globally, not just the 70% surface of planet Earth's oceans, but deep into the seas. Every plant and animal living there lives in an acidic bath, constantly. Cancer grows in the absence of oxygen, and acid chases oxygen out of living tissues. Temperature is a factor in breeding, breathing, hatching, migration, feeding. Warmer air makes warmer oceans. Warmer oceans make warmer air. Warmer water evaporates. Micro-particles of man-made plastic evaporate and fall as rain. Acid rain acidifies lakes, streams, soils. Acid rain eats away stone, buildings, statuary.
There were 1 billion Humans all alive, all at the same time in 1850. In just 75 years (1925) there were 2 billion, a doubling. In 37 years (1962) there were 3 billion of us, burning, throwing plastic 'away', burning anything that would burn. We burn things just to get them out of our sight. In 14 years (1976) there were 4 billion. In 10 years, 5 billion. The exponential increase of the population factor of The Human Phenomenon seems to have been interrupted, with 7.7 of us in 2019. Why? Birth control? Cancer from the ubiquitous pollution of petrochemicals used to make plastic and contaminating food and water and air on a planetary scale? Republican wars for fun and profit? Something.
But exponential increase in burning and plastic production has not stopped. Coal trains have rolled for 170 years. They're rolling today, delivering fossil fuel to places of burning. Oil has flowed, rivers, great lakes, oceans of oil, to places of burning, since John D. Rockefeller drilled in 1859, and became the richest Human in The Human Phenomenon on planet Earth supplying the Industrial-Scale demand for things to burn. Rather than stopping burning people who make their money selling things to burn are looking for new things to burn, corn converted to ethanol, hemp, hydrogen gas.
Meanwhile alternative energy sources are neglected. There's geothermal energy in the ground at your feet. The Sunstar has done the nuclear burning a safe 93 million miles away. Mother Nature moves her wind and water, doing all the work. All YOU have to do is capture that energy.
An Adaptive Response to Threatening Change, converting to these Natural energy sources where you can, would preserve fossil fuels to supply demands you can't Adapt away from readily, serving The Human Phenomenon further into the future. Ironically, the people who make their money in the old energy supply ways are the best equipped and financed to make the Adaptive Response, but their Leadership Decision-Makers are determined to keep going until planet Earth is uninhabitable, or they run out of things to burn.
If The Human Phenomenon is to survive, it has to leave the 'sitting duck' of planet Earth, which is subject to destruction in the chaos of the universe. First we have to go into cities in orbit around Earth, the Moon, other planets and moons in the solar system. Eventually, if we don't kill them first, we may find Leadership Decision-Makers to devise technology to go on an interstellar migration to another Sunstar, to colonize another planet, perpetuating The Human Phenomenon to live at large in the universe. Or, we may keep letting them mislead us into war against each other, destroying the brains that could make these Star-Trekky imaginings come true.
I hope The Human Phenomenon can find those rare combinations of intellect and integrity, and elevate them to Leadership Decision-Making positions in commerce and government. Such a marvelous creature should not come so far, only to go extinct. Good luck, Humans.