Celebrate and then leave.

#3025

Is any kind of soft landing possible given rising temperatures? It’s hard to say yes. The best news is the number of communities that are preparing to go it alone, experimenting with local crops and experimental living and governance. This is in the direction of Gardenworld and is welcome but will not reduce the amount of co2 already in the atmosphere, nor will it stop but only reduce the amount of new co2 being produced.

The human story is being rapidly modified.  No longer just Greece, Rome, Renaissance, and Enlightenment, We are living on a dynamic planet that became fertile for life slowly emerging. Early humans, benefitted from other species, copying homes and attitudes  (Camile Paglia* wrote that cats taught grace to the Egyptian who passed it on to Western civilization). Graeber and Wengrow* have written that early humans were able to experiment with different forms of governance Tec tonic plates colliding, crashing like a child's rubber ducks in the bathtub, a Sun that will go out. We live in a special period that we will be unlikely to hold on to. We have benefited, indeed made possible, by this transitory time. Can we learn to celebrate this party,  and then go "home"?

(Elon Musk's and Jeff Bezos's efforts to get to other planets may, but possibly not,  benefit humans not yet living, but meanwhile is taking up wealth and hope that distracts us from improving our celebratory party here).

*See the essential text Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies,

*Camile Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

*David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Sawn of Everythn?