we are like wave-watchers along the California coast having to run for it as climate effects materialize
# 4029
Many people standing behind the wall feeling secure watching the waves and then one comes, leaps the wall and everyone has to run, the water filled with all the parts of private lives. Passive forced into activity.
This imagery serves only to reinforce my resistance to going further than page 297 in Kim Robinson's "The Ministry of the Future" book which develops Poe's "Masque of the Red Death Syndrome" in the face of an uncomfortable reality.
We probably passed the tipping point for uncontrollable atmospheric carbon release around the time the Club of Rome released it's "Limits to Growth" manuscript in the early 'seventies and our collective discomfort continues to grow larger by the day.
And. following the Red Death Syndrome a bit further, our base carbon releases to date are paving the way for an incredible new release of methane gas from the quickly-melting Siberian permafrost areas for which our Seven League Boots may be of little, or no, use to us.
Could humankind survive in the face of that, I wonder?
More or less, I agree. Watching waves, whether along an ocean shore or along a mighty river entrances by lifting spirits. Watching the capitalism world implode, not so much (as they say). Thanks for the essay, Douglass. BB