Category Archives: State of the planet

At the waters edge

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Saturday and Sunday were bright and sunny, and glorious in the color spectrum of the landscape around my home in Delta, British Columbia, about ten miles north of the US border.
Coming from India, I do not recollect being overly concerned about the presence of absence of clouds in the sky. Nature had been spectacular throughout the year and in all seasons. But that was then. I remember asking permission from my mother, as a young kid, to take a shower in the shower – meaning, go out bare bodied and bare feet out into the field behind our home, wearing only a pair of shorts, in the middle of a rain shower, and get thoroughly drenched. This allowed me to roll in the grass and generally have a great time while rain splattered on my face. I am not sure if it washed all the dirt off, since I was maintaining a sort of balance – letting the rain wash old dirt off, while accumulating new dirt by rolling on the grass.
I even remember stray dogs coming up and joining the fun with me – howling into the rain and rolling around, all in good fun.
But that was then. Today, the area were I grew up has no open field behind – it is chock full of cramped houses with serpentine narrow lanes, plastic and garbage collected at every corner. The area has a bleak apeparance, and has gotten dangerous because of petty crime, which I have no doubt, will mature into more serious crime down the line.
The grass, the sky, and the roll in the rain – is a distant memory.
But here, in British Columbia, the temperature is usually a lot lower than in India of my childhood. If I went out to bathe in the rain when the water is at 4 degree Celsius, I am likely to shiver and catch pneumonia. Besides, I am no more an 8 year old kid, not yet spoiled by the act of growing up and getting civilized.
Here in British Columbia, weather is a big thing. It rains a lot and the sky is often overcast. A cloudy day is warmer, in winter, but the gloomy appearance and the rain in the urban areas appear depressing, mainly because it is no fun going out in the rain when it is also cold and damp.
Clear sunny days are spectacularly bright, and also a lot colder. Temperature often drops many degrees when the sky clears up. This is a proof that moisture or water vapor is a greenhouse gas too. While the total amount of water remains the same with climate change, less ice and more liquid water on the oceans, and higher temperatures usually means more evaporation, more clouds and more green-house effect.
But, meanwhile, I spent the weekend roaming the country side around my home, carrying a heavy camera/lens/tripod over my shoulders, wearing a sort of hiking boot that was also thermally insulated, and wearing a parka and a pair of woolen gloves.
I walked and I walked. I stood still at some places, with the tripod on the ground, for long stretches, watching and counting birds at times, and looking for some bird that is rare in these areas. I have stamped my foot and watched as the tide runs out of the shallow ocean front at Boundary Bay, overlooking the coast of Washington state in USA.
And then I have walked through marshes, reed beds, sandy or pebbled land, through bushes and over dust patches and mud banks, just soaking in the atmosphere and marveling at the fantastic variations of nature.

Here I stopped for a moment, watching the near sights of trees. They sported different shades of color as spring came upon us. The northern snow tolerant trees that have needle shaped leaves, that do not shed all their leaves at the same time in the winter, and can be called evergreen, stand up as green outlines.
The tall leafy trees that went bare in winter, are showing signs of small buds sprouting all over their high branches. Some of these would be new leaves, and some would be flowers.
And then there are the low bushes, still bare of leaves. They show up as reddish brown. They are still waiting for a trigger. It would be a while before they too become leafy and green.
But beyond the tree line, there were the mountains. Vancouver and surround area are on a river estuary, which is land created by silt deposits of a large river. It is therefore flat and almost at the sea level. But the river itself broke out of a long and wide range of mountains. As a result, all around us, there are mountains and more mountains. Some would shed their snow completely in the summer, while some would retain a snow cap throughout summer.

I might have walked twenty or thirty miles in these two days, carrying heavy camera and most of the time by myself. Sometimes a guy or a small group would join up and we would cover a track together. But mostly, it was my own interaction, with the planet as I see it.
Yes, my aging body aches after two days of walking about morning to evening. Yes I would feel hungry at the end of the day since I had not stopped to find lunch at noon. Yes, my legs would feel tired. And yes, I would have deep sleeps at night when I hit the bed.
But, this was my way of interacting with the rest of the world.
I did not really feel lonely at all.
Given a choice, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

When you are right and wrong at the same time

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“That is the greatest tragedy of today. Brilliant people are pulling us in different directions with regard to how to save the world, the economy, the environment, whatever. And you know what is the tragedy?” Neil asked.

Mabel looked through her binocular. The black crowned night heron remained perched on the tree branch, its neck bent in a U-turn and face tucked inside the feathers on her belly. It offered a compact curled up indistinct image to the viewer. Mabel wished it would look up, so she could see if the bird really had red eyes.
“Whats the tragedy?” She asked.
Neil was standing nearby with the tripod mounted camera on his right shoulder, its lens several times larger than the camera. He held a second camera in his left hand. He had a baseball cap on his head. Over that, he had drawn the hood of is parka and tied it with the string under his chin. The wind was strong, coming in gusts. It was cold. Neil was trying to keep himself warm. He had a pair of blue woolen gloves on his hand, but he would often pull off the right hand glove with his teeth, and take a picture using bare fingers, still holding the glove in his teeth.


He was unlike anyone else Mabel knew personally, with or without his camera gear.
“The tragedy is”, Neil shuffled his feet, attempting to stamp out the cold from his toes. He wanted to get moving. The night herons were unlikely to budge. They had curled themselves into a ball to preserve body heat. They might not know solid state geometry, but they would instinctively curl into a ball when it was too cold, because a sphere offered the least surface area through which a body could lose heat. It did not make sense for them to look up and watch the world when they were not threatened by eagles. They were perched in branches with sufficient cover over and around them. This made it difficult for a hawk or an eagle to try something funny. They were surrounded by smaller perching birds who would raise alarm calls if a hawk ventured near. Long stay in this general area, in proximity of a lot of raptors, has helped them to learn what was safe and what was not.
Even Saw-whet owls dozed in day time in view of people, because they searched a well protected niche where bigger owls or hawks just cold not get in.
“The tragedy is”, Neil repeated, “that these guys are mostly correct – but they do not speak the whole truth. And since they are proposing things that are sometimes contradictory to one another, the public can be thoroughly confused. What is the truth about climate change and what is the right course of action ? People need simple, straight forward solutions. Unfortunately, the experts are not fond of simplifying anything. They merely add more and more noodles into the the soup.”
Mabel smiled. “Noodle soup of climate change ?”
Neil smiled, straightened and tugged her hand. “Lets move on to the fresh water pond ahead. I want to see if there are Mergansers preening like before.”
A year ago, Mabel did not know of the name merganser. She called it a sea-duck, and did not know there were many kinds. But, a year ago, she had not started hanging out with Neil.
Now she knew three kinds – the common merganser, the red breasted one, and the hooded one. And each of them had distinctly different males and females. That made six visually different mergansers one could see around Vancouver, at different times of the year.
She hung the binocular from her neck and took his hand, walking along the wooden rail towards the fresh water pond. There were large fish there that hanged around at the shallows, their tails and upper body visible at times. They were most likely carps. But Neil was interested to check if he could catch any preening merganser. He was in the mood of capturing some of these scenes in HD movies. His recently acquired cameras could take reasonably good movie clips along with still shots. Considering the time he spent looking at birds and nature, it was perhaps natural for him to record as much of it as possible.
It was not convenient to carry separate cameras for still and movies, if you are going to be the only one filming the scene. Besides, the movie cameras did not have the range of high telephoto that his digital SLR and SLT cameras did.
“So what are the main contradictions?” Mabel asked, to keep the conversation going. Its not that she was not interested in the topic. She was. But she had an interest in keeping Neil engaged in issues he liked to ponder on. Neil was a well read man, covering a range of subjects that she found almost mind boggling. In fact, that was one of the reasons she had a crush on him so long ago. The very first time she saw him, at her uncle’s place, he was talking about the Toba super-volcanic explosion that nearly succeeded in causing a total extinction of the human race, at a time when the anatomically modern man was just beginning to step out of east Africa, say seventy odd thousand years ago. Mabel was hooked from that point on.
Neil was the only person he knew, that had actually sent his tissue samples for lab analysis to trace his genetic ancestry, independently through his father’s side and his mothers side. Mabel did not know anybody else who did things like this.
“Well, take folks such as Charles Darwin, Richard Dawkins, Bertrand Russel, Isaac Asimov, Gandhi, Tagore, Copernicus, Galileo, Michael Faraday, Benjamin Franklin, Aryabhatta, James Lovelock, Vandana Shiva, Dalai Lama – take your pick and read these great people. They all are declaring facts of life, and its ebbs and flows, some in stark language, others philosophically – it would appear. And yet, they all are not unified in their thinking or voice, as to what is the best way to deal with difficult issues facing us. Not all of them even identify man as the main agent of climatic deterioration. Take Dalai Lama. He seems to indicate to us that the answer to all ills of the planet as perceptible to man lies within us. We should calm down and contemplate. Then we shall not only find the answer, but also find ourselves to be a lot more at peace with it.”
Mabel watching his frowning face and almost giggled. He looked so engrossed and concentrated. “Anything wrong with that?”
They had reached the side of a longish fresh water pond. Neil put down his tripod on the ground and watched the scene in front of them through the viewfinder of this camera.
“There are external changes coming to this planet earth which is going to be devastating to a lot of living creatures. Closing eyes and lowering out metabolism can help us stay calm, but it is not expected to out trillions of tons of carbon back underground and refreeze the ice caps and recreate the glaciers.“
Neil scanned the water and the bushes at the edge of the water. With some luck, her might get to see a muskrat or a mink. Once he had even seen a family of river otters, though that was at a different pond.
“Hmm, well, God is supposed to have created Man after his own image.” Mabel said, half jokingly. “But of course, you do not believe in that, and most feminists of today might even dispute that God was strictly a male.”
Neil chuckled. “Yes I am a non-believer. But I can borrow God time to time, if it makes a good slogan. For example : God created man. Man created junk. How do you like that ?” He chuckled.
Mabel widened her eyes in mock horror. “Its like saying God created junk indirectly. I think my grandma would have been very disappointed in you.”
“Well, I would perhaps had managed to win her over somehow, except for one thing though. My skin is not white.” Neil laughed.
Mabel laughed too. It was a kind of a joke with them. Her Grandma, all those years ago, had apparently almost fallen in love with an Italian helper who reportedly had a darker or burnished skin. She was not allowed to marry him, or even see him, once her distant romance got to me known. The reason for the disapproval had less to do with the man’s standing in society, and more to do with the fact that he was a bit too dark to be purely European. They suspected him to have Arab or African or some other contaminated blood. She did not care, but her folks did, and that was that.
“My grandmother would have approved of your skin, but not your lack of religion, I think.”
Neil smiled. His eyes went back to the mallards that were flying fast overhead heading out to the far field across the pond. A pair of wood ducks floated lazily on the water far from them. He wished they’d swim closer.
Canada was far to the north, and also had a lot of land and a lot of water. Canada was likely to be relatively less affected by a hotter climate. He wondered if there still would be wood ducks and mergansers around in these areas, if the earth temperature rose by several degrees and the ocean currents carried a lot less nutrient along the seabed between the mainland and Vancouver island.
“What are you meditating about?” Mabel nudged him. “Don’t worry, I am not going to tell Grandma that you are an atheist. I wont even tell you are a Hindu by berth.”
“Ohh I am not worried about that. I was thinking if I meet up with Dalai Lama some day, I should be able to have a good chat with him. He is quite a clever chap, you know?”
“I can guess, though I haven’t read his books”.
“Well, even so, there are things we just cannot solve by merely meditating. However, it is possible that deep introspection helps find the answer to difficult problems. Those answers, I am afraid, are all rather ugly. I might tell Dalai Lama that evading unpleasant answers is same as telling a lie, indirectly. The world has crossed the threshold on climate change. We are past the point were answers could be pretty.  And yet, we are in denial of the crisis at hand. We only wish to paint a rosy picture and a market oriented solution to everyting. Americans like to call that a win-win situation.”
There were a pair of hooded mergansers. No, there were two pairs. But they were a bit far away, swimming in their general direction though.
“Its not going to be a win-win, right ?”
“Uhh huhh. I feel pretty certain it will look more like a lose-lose, no matter how one looks at it. But the world hates lose-lose solutions. It ranks of defeatism.”
Mabel picked her binocular up. There were a handful of Canada geese honking like crazy in the distance. She cold also see a few common merganser in the distance. And then there were at least a pair of wood ducks in the water. Neil had seen them too, and was clicking off a shot or two using his camera with the long lens.
“I don’t like defeatism either.”
Neil smiled. “Nobody likes it. Thats one of the problems though. A very major problem. The world remains in denial. As a result, instead of taking steps to soften the damage and prepare ourselves so the survivors can better face the challenges of the future, we are still engaged in day dreams that the threat of damage can be eliminated completely, or that there is no threat in the first place.”
Mabel nodded. Whatever the fate of the planet might come to in a generation or two, she felt happy to be with Neil. Hopefully, that would last long enough for them.
Neil pointed up. High up on a spruce tree, a solitary adult bald eagle was surveying his domain. It was at the top most branch, with an unobstructed view all around. It was typical of bald eagles to sit high up and in plain view. They had no natural enemy up there.
The wind was strong, and cold. Mabel focussed her binocular on the bird. The wind was parting the feathers at the back of its neck. It still looked so regal, with its snow white head and deep yellow large hooked beak.


And as she watched, the bird turned its head skyward, opened up its beak and let out a series of high pitch trills. It was distinctly different from the low frequency and louder quacks of the ducks in the water. The bird repeated the act, turning its head in all directions, and letting out its shrill call.
Mabel was mesmerized. She had seen bald eagles before, but had not ever heard it call out.
“Did you hear that ?” She hushed excitedly.
“Shhhh” Neil whispered back “I am filming it”

They stood side by side, she looking at the bird through her binocular, and he looking at it through his camera. He had a swinging head Gimbal to connect the camera to the tripod. This allowed him to swing the camera around in all directions rapidly and still have the camera more or less balanced through the centre of the tripod. This allowed the camera to hold its position at any angle without the need for tightening screws to lock the camera at each setting. Neil was happy with it, and was taking a video of the eagle.
Seconds passed by, then minutes. Apart from the quack of the ducks and the occasional shrill call of the eagle, the only other noise was of the wind buffeting them and swaying the tree branches around.
It was a few minutes before they decided that would be enough, and turned their attention elsewhere. The eagle maintained its tree top vigil.
“You know, I looked up Dyer’s Climate Wars. I might end up buying it.”
Neil looked her her. She seemed serious. “Its a very good book. Its also quite stark in its prediction. Gwynne Dyer does not mince words. Thats one reason I like his analysis. Not everyone had stomach to read what appears unpleasant. Thats the reason some folks avoid James Lovelock too. You should read that book. I can loan you my iPad so you can read it there without having to buy a copy. He is good.”
“I know. I read a few pages from your iPad that day. In that scenario, Dyer was talking about what happens to Russia, in 2019.”
Neil nodded, walking on.
“I mean, it was a hypothetical scene, I think. Was it not ?”
“Of course. Any prediction of the future has to be hypothetical. There are any number of things that could happen and alter the course of history.”
“Yes. Anyhow, I found those pages really worrisome. A little scary even. I mean, 2019 is only seven years into the future. Do you think the polar ice cap is going to disappear by then?”
Neil frowned as he considered the question. “I don’t know. There are some that predict the arctic ice cap to vanish in five years, at least in summer. Five or ten years – whats the difference? The damage is done. It took 35 million years for the polar ice cap to reach its pre-industrial maximum size. It took us a few hundred years to kill it. But the arctic sea ice is not the only worry. The same thing is happening to the Antarctic ice sheet too, though not as rapidly as the arctic one. This is a hard fact that is not being told properly to the masses.”
Mabel remembered Green Peace activists that were based in british Columbia. The movement had started from Vancouver. It was a pity, she felt, that Canada was rejecting ideas of carbon emission control, merely to promote the relatively dirty industry of extracting oil from the tar sands of Alberta.
“It makes you skeptical of our leaders, no?” She asked
Neil nodded and snaked his arms around her waist. Mabel was not exactly skinny. He liked her fleshy hips and the way his palm could rest on her curves. He liked the muscle and tissue mass of her upper torso, the curve of her breasts and the arc of her neck. He had come to like her slightly roundish face that appeared full of blood. She is not a freckled red head, but close to one. He wondered if she had any Irish blood in her.
He leaned over and kissed her cheek, then got conscious of being in the open, though there was nobody around other than a bunch of birds. If the birds noticed their display of affection, they showed no sign of it.
“This is one reason I tend to be skeptical of most leaders as well as most climate scientists and sustainable living gurus. Some of them just don’t know enough and yet chose to talk. Some have sold themselves to the devil, and hence talk through forked tongue. But there are some scientists that know the truth, and yet will not talk about it because it is too bitter a pill. I particularly dislike them. They are afraid to call a spade a spade because it might upset the crowd and shake the public out of its complacency.” Neil spread his hands in frustration.
They had walking along the agricultural field, a vast stretch of land plowed in parallel lines, circle by rows of trees and their periphery. They could see groups of Canada Geese flying over the trees to settle on a field half a mile away from them.
A small group of trumpeter swans went flying across their view, in single file, their long necks stretched forward, their nosy calls alerting the world about their passage.
Neil stopped, put his tripod on the ground, turned his camera, focussed and clicked a few stills of the group of swans in against the grey sky.
“These are all adults, I think. I have seen them with juveniles before. The young ones have a shade of grey on them.”
Mabel too watched them through her binocular, till they disappeared over the tree tops.
The walkway came to a fork. To the left were miles of reeds leading to the pacific ocean. To the right was a wooden shed that served as a blind for watching water birds.
They turned left and headed towards the edge of the reeds overlooking the ocean. They could hear faint calls of the snow geese. A female northern harrier went on its rounds circling low over the reeds, the ponds and the fields, often banking this way or that, swooping low and then rising back up. It passed over head. Neil turned his camera up and followed the bird, clicking a few successful shots of the bird and then exclaimed in frustration as it ventured too close and its rapid movement cause Neil to lose the bird from his high power telephoto lens. He had to take his eyes off the camera and search the sky to locate the bird, and train his camera again.
Mabel watched him, and the bird, by naked eyes. She too had a problem following this bird with a binocular, especially when it gets close.
The bird, apparently oblivious to the pair of humans, eventually swerved further and further away at the edge of the ocean. Neil shut off the camera for now, and lifted the contraption again on his shoulder. His second camera hung off his neck.
Mabel joined him, pulling his hands back on her waist, and walking hip to hip. It might be a bit childish, but she still had it in her, and he was, perhaps belatedly, enjoying a bit of it.
“My brothers are in denial about the change of climate” Mabel commented. “They know it is happening, but do not believe it will be something we need to worry about for many centuries. They both like the idea of developing oil and gas industries in Canada. More jobs, you know ?”
Neil nodded. He knew. Perception of more jobs was one of the root causes of the trouble, in his mind. But then, he did not have any easy solution either. No solution appeared easy to him. This was in fact part of the reason the issue was left untouched by leaders.
“I know. Even pundits are biased.”
“Pundits?”
“Sure. Pundits are no better than you and me.” Neil retorted, only half in jest.

They noticed the coot and stopped. An American coot cut across their path and headed for the shallow fresh water pond on the other side, its head bobbing as it stepped its way purposefully over the short grass, its roundish black body surprisingly agile. It even let out a few clicking sounds, perhaps to tell Mabel and Neil that it was keeping an eye on them, so better not get any closer.

The sun dipped another notch over the western sky, towards the low hills sticking out of the ocean, and the layers of clouds overing around the mountain tops – those famous low clouds of March that hung around the horizon to turn an average sunset into a spectacular one.

Eocene thermal maximum in a bowl of soup.

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“How much time?”
Neil was looking at the clips of movies he had taken recently, mostly of wild ducks. In one clip, a couple of hooded mergansers were bathing and cleaning themselves vigorously, one in the water and the other standing on a floating log. Neil loved it. He decided to use it later, to make a home movie. That was one of his hobbies.
Mabel sat next to him, watching. She was not there when he took the video, but religiously saw all the still shots, of which there were a few hundred, as well as all the video clips, some half a dozen.
The conversation had moved on to the Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock. Neil had just finished his latest book – The Vanishing Face of Gaia. Some of the points raised by Lovelock went against even his own earlier belief, and that of many of his environmentally conscious friends, he could not brush them off. A large part of what Lovelock said, made sense.
It was in that context that Neil had mentioned that the planet had crossed a significant threshold – a point of no return. Earth was almost certainly going to heat up to a level where large swaths of its landmass would be unsuitable for human habitation as we know it today. In that sense, the planet to a large extent is doomed, and modern industrial man was largely responsible for it – except for one wild card in the game, Gaia. The question was no more if, but when the planet was going to deteriorate rapidly and what Gaia might do in response.
Neil turned to Mabel.
She had been working today. They were not supposed to meet. He himself had just gotten home from work. Tomorrow was also a working day.
But, it felt good to spend time together. He had often thought of asking Mabel to move in with him, but could not bring himself to do that just yet. Mabel, meanwhile, would usually call him up once a day or so, and drop in at his place every few days after work. Neil had only been to her place once, for a few minutes. She had a small one room apartment on a multi-story building. He felt a bit out of place there. Mabel never asked him to spend the night there. Perhaps she sensed he was not comfortable. It was she that usually spend the night at his place, whenever that happened. Her white jeep parked in front of his house was a sort of familiar feature in the neighborhood by now.
He was still adjusting to the fact that Mabel might be a bit young for him, and could not shake off the thought that she might eventually tire of him and move on to someone closer to her age. He was aware that although Mabel was an adult now, she nourished a six year long teenage crush on him ever since she first saw him as a sixteen year old high school girl. He was already twenty eight at the time, and was not even aware that she liked him. That was a long time ago. Today, he was a bachelor of thirty four and she was a mere twenty two. Apart from years, he also felt a generation apart both culturally and mentally. And yet, they seemed to gel well. She brought warmth and a freshness into his life, apart from being in totally in synch with his interests and hobbies and thoughts. She was good for his ego, Neil decided. But perhaps he was not the best thing for her life. This was one thought he could not rid himself off. Being a somewhat private person, he found it difficult to discuss these issues with her face to face. He was also worried that he might hurt her by questioning their affair.
It was a mess, but hopefully, would end in a good outcome for both of them.
“How long?” She asked. She had such a fresh face and a calming appearance – it tugged at Neil’s heart.
He held her face and kissed her on her mouth. She closed her eyes. Her mouth softened. She had full, pliant lips. It can be addictive – Neil thought.
Mabel opened her eyes at the end of it, and gave him a small peck on his lips in return. “How long?”
“How long do we have on this planet ?”
She nodded.
“Well, I hope it would be longer than it takes for us to kiss a little.” He chuckled, teasing her.
She cuffed him. “No, seriously.”
“Well, opinion is divided on it. If you ask many of the western Governments, including Canada and USA, global warming is a myth or at best an unproven theory. Therefore, these Governments do not any more feel the need to do anything significant singly or collectively, to address this issue. Some are blaming China of today or India of the near future, for being responsible for the mess. China of course is blaming the west for adding all the carbon di-oxide for the last few centuries through dirty industrialization in the first place. So, we are in a blame game right now.”
“Never mind China, Canada or USA and the blame game. How much time does a man in Tahiti have?”
“Man in Tahiti ?” Neil scratched his head. “I don’t believe I know that man, in tahiti.” He said in mock seriousness.
She cuffed him again.
“Well, if you ask me, we have crossed the point of no return already. How long the earth will take to make it hell for humans, is something no one can correctly predict. But a few decades to a century is the time span when the serious deterioration begins to hit us. So, you and I are likely to see the beginning of it. In fact we are already seeing the beginning of it for a long time, just did not wish to acknowledge it for what it is. But more than you and me, it is the next generation kids, and the next, that will really see the crap hit the fan, so to speak.”
Mabel contemplated the issue. “Why is it that so many scientists cannot tell us when this will begin to get nasty and how to prevent a catastrophe? We are an advanced technology civilization, are we not?”
“Are we?” he asked back.
Mabel did not answer but widened her eyes at him. She did that, whenever confronted with a question that could have multiple answers.
“There are not too many independent pure scientists left in the world, Mabel.” Neil opined. “What we have is truck-loads of quasi-scientists that are funded by selfish organizations that pollute science and destroy neutral analysis. They want theories to come out protecting the business as usual model. Everything must relate to making a profit. Even curbing green house gas emission must be designed such that folks would trade on carbon credits and make money. Its disgusting to even think how little the world really cares of the future. We have bankers, politicians, corporate moguls and media pundits, animal right activists, sustainable living advocates, bleeding heart liberals and right wing conservatives – all pushing their own partial agenda on the table and making everything bewilderingly complex. Any debate on the issue stops being rational and scientific and descends into a cacophony of noise.”
“Hmm.. We need some clear thinking persons that can talk – right ?”
“Right. Dalai Lama is one clear thinking person. I do not know if he has read James Lovelock though. I know he is technically savvy and quite aware of many things. I read a book by him titled The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality”. He is certainly wiser and more balanced than any other living religious guru that I know of. He is aware of global warming, but he is not the right person to think outside the box on this particular issue. It needs a scientists that is unfettered by interest groups.”
“James Lovelock is that person?”
“Well, he is among a handful that are not speaking on behalf of a lobby. Also, he has a clearer way to seeing things that I admire. This includes his views on nuclear energy, which he supports. Many environmentalist I know vehemently opposes nuclear power plants. That is an important issue, but not the main one any more. The train has left the station when it comes to preventing global warming, you know? Developping emission free energy is going to be important, but a far more challenging necessity is facing us – that of turning our idea of modern civilization as well as man’s place on this planet on its head. But it is too late to think we can prevent catastrophic global warming.”
“You are saying it is too late to do anything, therefore do nothing ? That sounds defeatist. Not like you.” She looked at him.
“Thats not what Lovelock is saying. As to me, I have a more resigned view at it – perhaps similar to Dalai Lama. I have decided not to get excited and accept a few hard facts.”
Mabel contemplated that. “What are those hard facts?”
Neil counted them in his finger – “A) a human being is an accidental evolutionary outcome that is neither chosen by god, nor permanent, and therefore, if man survives or not is not so interesting for the planet”
Mabel nodded. “And B)?”
Neil cleared his throat. “B) whatever happens, was perhaps going to happen anyway. If man was destined to damage its own environment and cause mass extinction of species including his own, well that was perhaps how things were to happen anyway.”
“Thats all?”
“There is more. C) man is not unique in changing the earth biosphere. Other creatures have been doing it a long time before man came. In fact, if other organisms did not alter the atmosphere, higher oxygen breathing mammals, birds, fish and reptiles would not even have evolved. So, nothing particularly earth shattering to know that man is responsible for bringing massive change to the planets atmosphere, and gaia will react to it like it has done in the past. The only difference is, Man did what he did so fast, that Gaia is likely to kick back equally fast, and many of the living creatures may not have enough time to adjust to it.”
“And that includes man, right?”
“Yes. It particularly affects man.”
“So is Lovelock saying there is no need to do anything?”
“Thats not what he is saying. I think his point is – stop trying to engage in superficial efforts and lip service to climate change issues. Stop promoting bogus technologies just to make money, in the name of alternative energy source. Stop pretending the planet can sustain eight billion people and their pets and domestic animals without damaging the environment irreversibly. And finally, accept that damage is irreversible, and instead of attempting to stop it, change your civilization, redraw it from scratch, and take steps now, so that even a smaller number of humans at least have a chance to survive the climatic onslaught that is facing us.”
“Thats sounds like a doomsday warning.”
Neil nodded. “Lovelock is a scientist that worked in the Jet Propulsion Lab in California many years ago. He is a known scientist, albeit long retired, with a theory that the planet earth is not a passive element, where all changes in its climate is a response to external conditions. It is a dynamic entity, Gaia, which also triggers internal reorganization as a response to external stimuli. Scientists almost always miss-calculate earths degrading climate because its computer models are flawed and because it cannot understand that the planet is not passive, but active. According to Lovelock, man has damaged this bio-system enough to prevent the planet from self-controlling its atmosphere, and we have entered a phase of runaway climate change, like it happened 55 million years ago. But this time, it is expected to happen much more rapidly.”
Neil got up and moved to the kitchen. He was going to warm up some soup and vegetables. Mabel joined him, taking out cutlery and setting the small table inside the kitchen. Sometimes they sit down there and finish a meal. It feel more cozy than the large dining table in the next room.
“How fast or slow did the warming happen 55 million years ago. Since humans were not there, what caused it? What kind of creatures lived there at the time?”
“Too many questions. I don’t know all the answer. It happened at the onset of the Eocene era.”
“Whats Eocene ?”
“Well, you know about the age of the dinosaurs, right ?”
“Right.”
“They died out, in a phase of rapid mass extinction of many kinds of living creatures. That was the end of the Cretaceous period, about 65 million years ago. That opened up the field for diminutive mammals that were unable to gain stature under competition of the dinosaurs. So the next phase is often called the age of mammals. That started around 65 million years ago and continues till today. This phase has been broken into some segments. The first segment immediately after the dinosaurs is called Paleocene. That era ended at around 55 million years ago, and the next era started – Eocene. It is the boundary between Paleocene and Eocene when the earth suddenly warmed up with very high concentration of atmospheric carbon di-oxide comparable to today. Scientists think that the warming happened over a period of say twenty thousand years or so. That was slow enough for many of the animals and plants to move to relatively cooler regions and evolve to adopt the new environment. The planet would take almost twenty million years to come to a stage where ice sheets can again form on Antarctica, the land mass at South pole.”
Mabel tried to absorb that news and relate to it. She had never been outside of Canada. Antarctica was just a name. She could not remember any friend or relative ever talk about Antarctica seriously. Except perhaps Neil.
Neil continued, “But today, Lovelock believes the same sudden warming is likely to happen within a century or so, which will not be enough for most of the living creatures to adjust. Humans will have to take a very big hit.”
“Jesus”
“Yeah. I am not a very religious man. But a religious Hindu might say ‘Hai Ram’ which would be his way of expressing the same thing, in the name of a different God.”
Mabel smiled ruefully. “Its terrible. Does that warming up have a name, what happened at Paleocene-Eocene boundary?”
Neil tried cocking an eyebrow, and failed. Mabel was picking up terminology fast enough. She had a keen interest, which pleased as well as tickled him.
“I think it is called Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximus or something. In short – PETM. You can see it in the chart in Wikipedia – a sudden sharp spike in Atmospheric Co2 content and a long warming of the planet.”

PETM spike - Wikipedia

The microwave let out of small chime, indicating it had finished heating the food, having delivered the desired thermal maximum in their bowl of soup.

Storm Warning

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It was early Saturday morning when power went off. There was no sound, no indication of a storm, and no bang. But, the sudden silence woke him up. The brain perhaps gets used to tiny levels of continuous drone or repetitive low level noise, so that folks can sleep through them. The brain might even work like a noise canceling device that allows folks to sleep on a moving train, for example. They become part of the background noise.
But when the noise stops, there is a dead silence. Somehow this triggers the brain to recognize a change of status as an event of sufficient importance to wake one up.
He could sense that the entire neighborhood had gone silent, and rightly guessed it was a regional power cut. Calling up the local power supply company proved his suspicion. Several thousand homes were without power. There was a storm at night. Folks had identified the location where the trouble was. It was expected that power would be restored in about two hours.
He got up and looked at the time on his mobile phone. It was just after six in the morning. He had been planning to spend the weekend north of Vancouver into the mountains, if weather permitted. Weather was always a big thing in this season. It rained often in winter. It was not convenient to go hiking through the countryside if it was raining. But, the flip side of the argument was, it was perhaps better than it rained, instead of snowed, in winter. Iced up roads in a hilly land can be difficult for vehicular traffic. Accidents can be frequent.
He did not have an all-wheel drive vehicle. IT did not snow in the lower mainlands around Vancouver except of a few days in a year. And he did not take his own car for long trips into the mountains much. He preferred to rent a newer all wheel drive vehicle on his trips. A front wheel drive vehicle like his can get bogged in snow or mud. It had happened to him a few times already.
Mountain roads were often steep and with hairpin bends. Also, remote highways and roads were not plowed as regularly as roads with heavier traffic.
He had gotten himself a new SLT digital camera. SLT stood for single lens translucent – a new term. He loved the camera, partly because of its ability to shoot many still frames in a second, or high definition movies, though not both at the same time.
He had recently gotten a swinging Gimbal for his tripod mount, to handle heavy cameras. He loved it so far, though did not get enough chance to use it yet.
He was planning to go either to Boundary Bay area or to Westham Island or to the serpentine fen region early Sunday morning, if it did not rain. Miguel was going with him.
But meanwhile, this power cut made his work a bit difficult. He brushed his teeth. The tooth brush was powered, but with batteries. Same for his electric shaver. He used up what hot water was in the boiler, which was sufficient for him for now.
He dressed up using his flashlight to search for clothes in the closet. He woke Miguel up and explained the situation. Miguel took it with his customary sense of humor. Apparently this was common in his home country in Ecuador. While Miguel got himself ready, he got down and opened the garage door manually and took his car out into the drive way and closed the garage door down by hand again.
The roads appeared littered with small branches of conifers, indicating there had been a storm at night, which he apparently slept through.
He drove to the local Starbucks and sat down with a hot chocolate and a sandwich. Miguel duplicated the order. They had internet and a wall socket. He checked on the status of power supply and the local weather forecast. The overnight storm had abated, but the rain was there for the next several hours. He might find a dry sky with scattered clouds later in the afternoon.
Atmospheric storms were different than those caused by seismic activity at the seabed and below, that causes tsunami. The Asian tsunami of 2009 caused death of a quarter million people.
In contrast, the recent tsunami in Japan killed a few thousand. And the damage to Fukushima nuclear power plant as a result, has not killed a single Japanese, and is unlikely to kill anyone outside of Japan either.
“We are going to have a bigger meal a bit later Miguel, either at home or in a restaurant. I needed my morning coffee, and without power, I could not make it in our kitchen.”
Miguel nodded. “No problem. I enjoy myself any way. They have Starbucks here too!”
Neil nodded. They had that here too. Soon, there may be no significant difference between one country and another, wherever you go.
They sat down at a table at the back end of the place.
The coffee was hot and good. The sandwich was hot and tasty. Miguel went into it right away.
Neil sat back and contemplated the news coverage of the Asian Tsunami of 2009, Hurricane Aila a year later, and the smaller Tsunami of Japan the next year followed by the damage to the nuclear power plant there.
There is a lot more talk of the Fukushima plant and the dangers of accident at nuclear power plants, than deaths and destruction caused by the tsunami, and the danger of global warming, sea level rise and sinking of various islands and coastlines.
Bangladesh is one example of a densely populated low elevation country that is threatened by  rising sea level. Flat island nations around the world are threatened. Countries like India are going to lose a lot of coastal land with rising sea.
Even in Canada, the cities of Delta, where he lived, and Richmond, where barely above sea level, and are prone to tsunami on one side, and also earth quake prone.
But nations such as India and China are in grave threat of their own. While China might battle with scarcity of water and deterioration of agricultural land, India too will lose a lot of coastal land as well as great reduction of water in their rivers. India’s population density was already approaching 400 per square km. That was over 120 times that of Canada. Canada had room to move internal climate refugees. India did not.
Africa, on the other hand, was going to be cooked.
China might be tempted to invade Siberia, which would get increasingly habitable and fertile as the planet warms up.
There would be an unprecedented rush to colonize Antarctica, the last continent to be taken over by man.

He sipped a coffee and looked around. Through the glass wall facing the street, he saw Karen park her car and get out with her daughter.
She was a neighbor, though they don’t meet often. The last time he saw her was at the bog two weeks ago. That was when he clicked the barred owl.
They were walking towards Starbucks too. It was very likely that their home too was without power.
Karen swung the door open and let her daughter in. Neil was sitting at the back end of the coffee shop. Karen did not see him first. They stood in line at the counter. Mother and daughter discussed what they wanted to have. Karen moved up the line and placed her order. Then they moved to the near end of the counter to collect their choice of drink and a sandwich. That was when the little girl saw him. She stopped and pouted, then pointed at him with her finger.
Karen glanced at him, and smiled.
“Hello there, stranger. How are you?”
Neil smiled and nodded. “Good morning. Power cut at home for you too ?”
“Yep. No light. Decided to drop in for a coffee and a cookie”
“Join us?”
They had a small table, but there were four chairs to it. Karen nodded and looked down at her daughter. “We shall join Neil and his friend for our cookie and milk. Okay Kate?”
The little girl nodded, watching Miguel.
Neil remembered her name – it was Kate.

Neil introduced everyone, referring to Miguel as a friend from Miami, and Kate as his friend from the neighborhood, and Karen as Kate’s mother. The little girl liked it, smiled, and shook hands with Miguel formally.
As Miguel engaged Kate, Neil and Karen caught up with each other. Karen was what Neil thought of as a bleeding heart liberal. She spent a lot of her spare time on efforts geared towards getting the liberal party back in power. She had invited Neil once to protest the Harper Government in Ottawa on some issue perceived to be not too parliamentary. Neil did not understand the issue too well, but had joined the protest on a Sunday just to see and get a flavor of things. It was a good experience.
She had asked to be Neil’s friend on Facebook, and often sent her invitations to various events related to social justice. She had borrowed a book from Neil almost a year ago, and had not yet returned it. It was ‘Shock doctrine’ by Naomi Kline.
“So, how far have you gone with Shock Doctrine?”
Karen shook her head and smiled energetically. “I have read about half of it Neil. Its so true about the way disaster is used by corporations and governments to make money.”
Neil nodded. “There were two Naomis he had read. One is American – Naomi Wolf. The other is Naomi Kline. Both wrote interesting books.”
Karen shook his head at Neil. “You are such a well read person. I am not a fast reader. You should tell me something about her books too.”
“Well”, Neil finished his sandwich. “I have read her ‘Give me Liberty’. It was a reminder that encroachment into personal freedom and liberty by a Government in the name of national security can be a dangerous path for the people. She draws a lot of examples from Germany of the 1930s, and slowly, almost imperceptibly, the German democratic Government was turning into a monster, and the public went along with it, in a fever of excess nationalism.”
Karen nodded. “People cannot take democracy for granted. I have always felt one has to fight to keep their Governments from moving to a war mongering military industrial complex.”

Miguel was listening to all this, without comment. But he was watching Kate use her colored pencil on the picture of a bird, painting her wings blue.

Neil watched Kate and Miguel. “Did you like the picture I sent of the owl” he asked Kate. Kate looked up and nodded vigorously.
Karen piped in. “She loved the picture of the owl. The other picture was also so good, of Kate and her mother. Did you not like that one too, Kate baby “?
Kate nodded again. “I have them on my wall.”
Karen clapped her hands to show her support. “Yes. We printed the pictures and put up on the wall in her bedroom. They are so good. Thank Neil, Kate, for the pictures.”
Kate smiled back at Neil. “Thank you”.

Volcanic hotspots, from Geology of British Columbia, by Greystone Books

They finished their mini breakfast. Someone commented that power was going to come back in another hour.
“I have another book in my sight, of Naomi Wolf. Its called End of America. It was a best seller and a kind of indictment of the Bush presidency, more or less in the same line as her first book, I think. Thats why I haven’t bought it yet.”
Karen shook her head. “You are amazing.”
Neil smiled and flipped open his iPad. He had carried it with him. He had hoped to show Miguel some of the maps that explained British Columbian geography and geology. Karen watched as he brought the device to life and opened a page on a book. It showed colored picture of the Canadian west coast with lots of black circles on them.
“What is that ?”


“Its a map showing the seismic hot spots. As you can see the hottest region is at the end of the continental plate to the immediate west of Vancouver island. And then there are more on the shore line and a few more just inside the shore line. The various plates and sub-plates are grinding, colliding, or pulling away from each other there.”
“Wow. Where did you find this ?”
“Well, its available as an eBook free of charge online. I bought it to learn about British Columbian geology. It is very good. For example, look at this map of the early Devonian period. Can you identify future Canada here?”
Karen peered at the map, as did Miguel. Even Kate looked in and pointed her finger at a patch of grey on the map.
“Uh huhh, thats Gondwana. Thats not what will turn into North America.” Neil smiled and watched Karen as she scrutinized the map.
“I dont know. I can see Siberia mentioned as a ball. I cannot recognize the other names.”
“Well, yes, Siberia is there. But the clue is not so much in the names as in the shape or the contours of the fragmenting landmass. If you look closely, you can identify north America, with the future Husdon bay somewhere.” Neil said, giving a clue. He smiled and watched as Karen went over the pieces on the map again.
He flipped the page. A new map came up, from late Devonian – Mississippian phase, 350 million years ago. Karen’s eyes lit up. She had seen a name attached to a lump of land separated from the fragmenting chunks of Gondwana. That lump was south of the Siberian landmass, separated by an Uralian sea. This lump of land had a new name – Euamerica. She pointed at it – “There it is.”
Neil smiled back and nodded. “If you have a kindle or an iPad, you might consider getting this book. Wont cost you nothing.”
Karen nodded, continuing to look at the maps, as she flipped more pages. “Its amazing. You are an amazing person, Neil. You know so much.”
Neil felt embarrassed. It was not about him. It was about the geology of British Columbia that was so interesting, and same time so alarming with regard to chances of earth quakes and tsunami.
Karen stopped at a page showing the map of Pangaea. One could clearly make out Africa and South America fitting each other like a jig saw puzzle, and north America hovering nearby. She could even make out the Hudson bay, along with Green land floating above and some of the Canadian arctic islands. She felt like a school girl and clapped her hands.
Neil flipped the pages, and stage by stage, maps showed how the planet began to gradually looked identifiable with todays landmasses. Karen could see the breach between Africa and South America widen up, along with the gap between North America and Europe, thus widening the newborn Atlantic ocean, a that essentially continues till date.
Neil pointed out a small piece drifting in the ocean to the west of Africa. “Thats India. It travels on its own for a long while, moving north by north east for tens of millions of years, till it collides with Eurasia some forty million years ago.
“Wow” came the response.
Neil grinned and leaned back in his chair. Miguel too appeared interested. He had a way of widening his eyes in wonder.
“Let me ask you a trick question. This is a hint already – its a trick question. Which kind of dinosaurs drank water from the Ganges in India?”
Karen smiled and frowned in mock concentration. “Trick question ? There were no dinosaurs in India at all ?”
Neil shook his head. “Close, but not close enough. There surely were dinosaurs when India split from Africa. So, some of those dinosaurs separated from their African brothers, and evolved independently on India. Fossil evidence of that has been found.”
“Then whats the answer, and where is the trick?”
“The trick is not in the dinosaurs, but in the birth of river Ganges.”
“How ?”
“Well, India the island subcontinent had its own river system, but Ganges was not one of them. Ganges and a few other rivers of India was born as a result of the rising Himalayan mountain range. Himalaya rose only as a result of India’s collision with Eurasia. That collision happened 40 million years ago. But the dinosaurs all across the planet, including in India, went extinct at around 65 million years ago, a good 25 million years before India collided and more million of years before Ganges was born and became a big river. So, the dinosaurs were long extinct before Ganges had water for anybody to drink from.”
Karen clapped her hands. “Thats so cute. I must remember that trick question. Do you have any such for Canada?”
Neil’s face widened up in a broad smile. “Canada is full of geological tricks. Some day I might tell you about them. Do you know anything about Burgess Shale ?”
“Umm not much” Karen said.
“Then there is the issue of the moving hot spot that is currently under Yellowstone. And why Canada has so many fresh water lakes. Some day, we can talk about them.”
Kate listened to it and finally make a comment. “I have seen Pitt Lake”.
“There you go Kate. Some day, you can ask mom to show you Slave Lake and Mackenzie river. A bit cold at this time. But if you make it by April, you can also see the northern lights in Yellowknife”
Kate clapped her hands although she perhaps did not understand all of that.
“I have seen Northern lights, in in Kelowna, but that was sometime ago.”
Neil looked at his watch. “Well, the Easter holidays are coming. I was contemplating going somewhere. One idea is Winnipeg and on to Churchill, but I think that takes longer time. The other is only Winnipeg. The third is Yellowknife, for a second time. The fourth is White Horse, also a second time. Cannot figure out where, yet. Visiting WInnipeg or Whitehorse might be the cheapest, far as airfare goes. Whitehorse is unique in its own way. Winnipeg and Manitoba is a province I have never been to, so I guess I owe it to myself to go there, even if just for three days.”
“Wow. Are you going alone?”
“Well, yes. I often end up doing that. Involving friends can be tricky. Not everyone wishes to hang around in remote locations just to watch the sky or the river, rodents building a dam or a bird catching another bird”, Neil smiled.
Karen nodded. “I’d have loved to go with you some time. But with Kate, I cannot plan these things on the spur of the moment.”

“Of course. But you might consider widening her horizon. Not that you need to come with me, per se. Just visiting places and telling her about them is a good way to help a kid in her growing years, I’d guess. Thats education of a kind that one cannot duplicate in a class room. I am not particularly impressed by the school system in North America as such, you know. This is not to say that I am impressed by the school system anywhere. But I do not know much about it except that I have seen in India, Hong Kong, Singapore, USA and Canada, with a bit of indirect exposure to the system used in the old Soviet Union and in Great Britain.”
“Ohh wow. Neil, you know way too much already”. Karen widened her arms to emphasize how much she thought Neil knew. “What is wrong with the school education system, you think?”
Neil considered the question.
“I am not too articulate when it comes to this subject. I just feel that the curriculum based education system of today, like much else about our civilization, is heading down the wrong path. It is blinding the people from some aspects of knowledge and it is inundating the pupils on specifics that might prove counter productive down the line. Also, the schools are turning out to be mostly a bad influence in a child’s cognitive development and ability to think outside the box. Education, like most other things, is a business venture today, to make money. It tries to create mass produced zombies.”
Neil stopped. Perhaps she spoke a bit much. It can be annoying, or depressing, to someone like Karen, with a young child about to enter school age.
Karen nodded somberly. She too looked at her watch. It was getting time to leave. “You are right, Neil. It is so hard to get the right exposure for a child these days. And for a single mother like me, it is more difficult. We are always fighting for time. I know the best thing for her is to have more time with me and with close relatives. As it is, she does not have the company of her father.”
Neil did not comment. As such, he had no idea who the father of the kid was, and if Karen was married to the guy, or if she was till married or what.
Life, for single mothers in Canada, was a lot tougher than his own, Neil concluded. But then, just being a mother of a young child should be so much rewarding at a different plane. Neil could easily appreciate that fact.

Life was complex. That was for sure!

Miguel, the Everglades, and Lovelock’s warning

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“Everglades is one place I shall not forget. Miguel meanwhile might be my last human link with the place” Neil said.
They were walking out of the car park towards the arrival gate in Vancouver international airport, to receive Miguel. Neil explained how unique the everglades were in Florida, as a river that lost its way and meandered through a vast swamp of sawgrass. The water slowed down so much that it would travel a few miles every month, till it eventually reached the ocean. That vast swampland created an unique eco-system not to be duplicated anywhere.


“I have never been to Florida. I hear much about it though, as a vacation spots, and some friends who have been there in the winter.” Mabel commented ruefully.
“I know. Florida is a popular destination for folks living in the colder parts of USA and Canada and even Europe. It is also a hub for the cruise ship industry. I am not particularly fond of the tourist industry though. To me Florida is unique for the eco-system.”
Mabel snaked her arm around his waste. She was as tall as Neil and liked holding him while they walked. She apparently liked being seen in public with him. Neil was not too fond of public display of personal affection. He did not relish the thought of kissing, or being kissed, by anybody in a public place. He was more orthodox than Mabel, he guessed.
“What makes Florida special in your eyes ?” Mabel asked.
They crossed the street and walked into the airport building. A giant electronic screen flashed information on which aircraft had landed and which had not – in english and french. Neil glanced at it. It would be another five minutes before Miguel would land. It might take another half hour, depending on traffic lines at the customs, for him to collect his bags and walk out.
“Lets take a coffee while we wait”
They sat at the coffee shop adjacent to the passenger arrival gate, with two paper cups of coffee.
“It was corals that started it” he said, stretching his legs.
“Corals ? What ?”
“Corals that were the works of dying micro-organisms that deposited their skeleton on top of each other in the warm oceans of the US gulf. This process built slabs of coral from the shallow  seabed up to the surface, and then spread sideways like a table top of white porous slab of soft rock composed mostly of calcium and dirt, going miles and miles in all directions. That was the platform over which the mangrove trees with their unique root system created massive filters in the  shallow ocean. Passage of the moon around the planet and the resulting tides and ocean currents brought floating debris that would be caught by the sieve of the mangrove roots. Slowly, a thin layer of soil would form. As hundreds of thousands of years pass, the process allows local trees to find ways to encroach into this oceanside swampland, and miniature versions of the tree that could withstand brackish water begin to form a kind of watery forest.”
Neil took a sip of coffee. Mabel was listening. She nodded but did not interrupt.
“Fish, birds and animals adopt this specialized land. High rainfall and depressions in this newly created land makes for gigantic fresh water lakes. Resulting rivers that would drain the land and lead the run off to the sea gets trapped by high growth sawgrass. Over time  the dense sawgrass slows the flow of fresh water and turned it all into a gigantic fresh water marsh that grew like a long slice of land that connected up with the continental north America, and was once claimed by Spain and is today known as Florida, one of the states of USA.”
Neil said that in one breath, and with a touch of drama. This brought the customary smile in Mabel. She liked Neil explaining things, and was same time amused as the way he explained, almost like a school teacher. She should have known that Florida or many of the southern states were claimed by Spain, or France of Mexico, at some point or another. She did not know how Florida came to be a landmass though.
“Let’s go there sometime together. Forget the cruise ships, and lets spend time at the Everglades.” Mabel suggested. She had a way of tugging his shirt sleeve to emphasize her point.
Neil had not known much about Florida’s geologic or geographic history, when he first landed there as an immigrant. He considered himself to be a reasonably well read person with a reasonable curiosity about the planet. But he had no idea how curiously unique the state of Florida was, and how much of that uniqueness was already gone, thanks to modern human civilization. He had fallen in love with the Florida Everglades the first time he visited the place, within a week of his arrival at Miami. He remembered sitting amazed at a quiet spot by the water, watching the fallen logs and the shadow cast by the overhanging low branches, and fish occasionally leaping out of the water surface. The splash of its fall back would break the tranquility, alerting him that this was a living eco-system. He saw alligators catching fish and get their heads off the water, to eat the fish with relish. He could hear the crunch of their teeth crushing the bones of the fish.
He saw darters sunning themselves on low branches by the water and herons standing still like a statue. He saw nesting Ospreys. This was a world he would return to, again and again, during his seven year long stay in Florida.
He would see the great blue heron even here British Columbia, as well as white crowned night herons. He would see sandhill cranes. He would see plenty of Ospreys and a hundred times as many bald eagles as he saw in Florida.
But there were no alligators here in BC. Neither any ibis or darter. He did not see blue jays in Vancouver, although there were Steller’s jays, equally colorful. He even saw many hummingbirds, something he had a hard time spotting in Florida. He remembered the beautiful scissor-tailed flycatchers that he found even in Dade county within site of the urban developments.
Mabel tugged her hand. “You are lost in thought.” she said.
“Yes. Was thinking about scissor-tailed Flycatchers of Flroida.”
Mabel did not know what a Flycatcher was, but could guess it was  a bird and that it had a tail like scissors. In time, he would tell her about them, she was sure.
He looked at his Timex watch. It was sort of old fashioned and an inexpensive model. It had a conventional dial but with numbers for the hours, instead of the original style of writing them in Roman letters. The main reason he liked this watch, was that it showed day of week and date of month side by side. Most other watches, he had been presented with, some of them quite expensive, showed either only the date, or nothing more than the time. He liked to see the day of week. It had gotten to be a sort of habit for him. So, he preferred the inexpensive but functional watch more than the more fancy ones in his drawer. In fact, his other watches were all dysfunctional since he never even changed their battery, in the last two decades. Perhaps he should try selling them off in eBay or Craigslist.
It may be another fifteen minutes before Miguel emerged. They had a good view of the area and could see the trickle of travelers coming out, either meeting with loved ones or heading out for a taxi.
“I want to see them too, some day, and you are going to show me. Yes ?” Mabel responded, finishing her coffee.
“What?”
“Florida, and the Flycatchers”
“Ohh, OK. We can take a vacation sometime, say for two weeks. Its a long drive from here, so it’d be better to fly there and rent a car. The place is full of history – geologic, geographic, as well as in paleoanthropology, not to mention of recent human interactions of the post-Columbian era.”
Mabel looked at him with mock wide eyes and grinned. She had a wide mouth which opened up when she grinned.
“Yes, sir, professor Dusty.”
Neil laughed. “Did you know some of the terror birds of South America had actually crossed the land bridge and ended up in the southerns states including in Florida ? That was before the better evolved mammalian feline predators could push them back and enter the south American continent. South America did not have a killer cat till rather recent times, you know.”
“I did not know. Whats a terror bird?”
They got up, put the used cups into the trash and sauntered down to the arrival area. Soon, Miguel should arrive through the gate. He did have a cell phone but was not going to use it here because of roaming charges. So he would not be to announce his arrival to Neil. He had said so before leaving. Besides, he was a simple man and did not know how to send text messages through phones. He was also a poor man, relatively speaking. Apparently, his mobile phone was a gift from his grown up daughter, who wished to be able to check up on her dad time to time. The charges for the phone was being paid by his daughter.
How Neil came to know Miguel and befriend him, was itself a strange story. But, come to think of it, perhaps it was not that strange. Florida had been a melting pot of different kinds of people coming across each other for a long time. Everybody was a sort of visitor to the place. No one really was a native there. Neil came through legal and high end channels of immigration. Miguel came differently. Neil moved on. Miguel did not, or could not. Somehow, fate made them unlikely friends. And the friendship endured, even through the decade since Neil left Florida, never to return there again.
“A terror bird was a giant flightless bird in similar lines to the Rhea of south America, Ostrich of Africa or a Cassowary of Australia of today, or the now extinct Moa of New Zealand. The only difference is, that giant bird was a fast running ground hunter that liked chasing down early pigs and horses and swallow them limb by limb. It had a massive head and even more massive beak designed to tear limbs from animals. A terrifying creature. It became extinct as the ancestors of leopards and others of the killer cat family evolved and crossed the land bridge, and entered south America. It could not survive the feline competition.”

————————————-
I wrote this much, and stopped. It was Friday late evening. I had been checking on a few old VHS tapes that was converted to digital. Average rate of success was around 80%. This meant, out of every five tapes of home video I had shot twenty years ago, four were salvageable and one would be deteriorated beyond recovery. I had been peering at the latest batch, scene upon scene.
I remembered the large eared male African elephant standing tall in Ngorongoro crater, in Tanzania, back in January of 1991. I had not seen that scene on screen for so long. And now, it was there before me. I remember the night spent at Tree Tops, the famous spot in Kenya were you can see wild animals up close from the wooden house on top of a tree, while elephants, buffalo and even rhinoceros came to drink at the waterhole.
Tomorrow I had planned to go outdoors to photograph nature and wildlife as one can find in these parts of southern British Columbia. I had a new gimbal head for the long lenses for my camera. It was made by Manfrotto of Italy. It should help keep the heavy lens and camera assembly centered on my tripod as I swung the camera rapidly to follow a moving object, such as a bird in flight.
I wished to write about Miguel. But then, I wished to write about so many other things too. Miguel was an immigrant from Ecuador that worked as a caretaker in the office building where I worked in Miami so many years ago. He had been in Miami for almost twenty years when I first arrived. And yet, his world was small and he almost never went outside of town. He did not know about the existence of The Everglades. I found it hard to believe.
Okay, I too did not know much about it myself before I arrived. But my curiosity made me aware of the place within a few days. I realized that I enjoyed some privileges Miguel did not have. I had computer, and access to internet although internet itself was just a handful of years old in the public space. I had money in my pocket and interest enough to walk into book stores to look up travel books on Florida. I had a car and a driving license. I could go where I wanted. Miguel did not have any of that. Also, he was not very literate in English, although he could speak a little.
Finally, he did not have friends or associates that were excited about the Everglades, till he met me. So he did not learn about it from his usual friends. In that, we had a common theme. I too did not have a friend that was interested about the Everglades. I had lots of friends through my work, and I met more folks through them. My circle of friends and associates were wide and very different from that of Miguel. And yet, we both shared one theme – we did not learn about the Everglades from our friends.
But I had virtual friends already through internet bulletin boards. I was advised to check a few things as I went to Florida. The Everglades was one of them. I was privileged to have these sources available where Miguel was not.
And about British Columbia, are things much different?
Well, I know folks that have been here for thirty years and did not know about Reifel migratory bird sanctuary, or what makes British Columbia geographically unique. They did not know of the contribution of glaciation in carving the landscape of British Columbia, nor the phenomenal work that simple animals like beavers did to transform this landscape. They did not know how the salmon evolved itself to take advantage of a new niche as the glaciers retreated over newly exposed land. Nor did they know about the evolution of polar bears to take advantage of winter sea ice to hunt a protein rich diet – the thick blubber of fat on marine mammals out in the open arctic ocean. Many had never been into the arctic circle in Canada or knew about the issues of the warming oceans there. Most of my compatriots did not know about the snow geese arriving here from Siberia at the onset of each winter.
In some ways, Miguel in Miami and myself in Vancouver lived in compatible parallel worlds. We were surrounded by global villagers and residents of nowhere. It did not matter which continent or geographic region you lived in. There was a Pizza hut round the corner, a department store that sold the latest fashion imitation, a pub, a night club and MTV channel. What did it matter where you lived. It was all standardized by the globalized economy, did it not?

James Lovelock's portrait

But there are also other issues on my mind.
Take James Lovelock, the scientist that once worked in California’s Jet Propulsion Lab. Still alive at 90, he was one of the last free spirits of science, one that pursued the subject without being a representative or any institution, unlike the hordes of quasi-scientists of today that only work to bias public view towards whatever or whoever was paying them. The world today had a decreasing number of real politicians, real social reformers, real anthropologists, free thinkers or real scientists. Every one worked to promote either a their employers or their doctrine. Few were willing to think through issues from outside their proverbial box.
The issue of increasing population was one pet peeve. More I asked famous people, more I got disenchanted with their vague and evasive response.
Well, at least James Lovelock looked at issues straight on and without a tinted glass, except a few isolated issues of his nationality. He is a British. In his latest book he takes example of Winston Churchill as a great person worth quoting. I, on the other hand was born in India. I read through his by now well documented dislike of the Indian people. I knew of his derogatory comments regarding India and Indian people, as well as his actions and inactions during the Bengal famine that happened in his watch, killing about four million people. I knew how much of Indian national output and wealth Britain was sucking out of India right through the war years while it watched millions of Indians die out of a man made famine. All this was reasonably well documented today. To me, most all politicians are double faced, and Churchill is merely a great example of his class. But I forgive James Lovelock to be biased towards CHurchill. I guess I am biased a bit towards Gandhi and Tagore. Perhaps more than a bit.
Anyhow, I had read James Lovelock a few times and thought a lot about the Gaia hypotheses. I was aware of the fact that his notions were partially supported by different groups, while some of his notions were vehemently opposed by others. I found the notion very very intriguing and quite believable in a thoughtful way.
I had also read Gwynne Dyer a few times. It was interesting to note that Dyer mentioned Lovelock in one of his later books named “Climate Wars”. I found an electronic version of the book and bought it. I have gotten a bit wary of buying printed books which fill up my shelf and become a burden after I have read it once. Nobody else has an interest to read them anyway. Its such a waste of paper and resources. An audio book is my first preference. If that is not available, then an eBook that I can read through a reader such as iPad is the second choice. And so, I was reading “Climate Wars” by Dyer on my iPad. I was tickled to note Dyer mention James Lovelock and his books on the Gaia theory. I myself had read The Revenge of Gaia by Lovelock. Besides, his most recent book, as a final warning to mankind, had come out. It was called The Vanishing Face of Gaia – A final warning. I had that book too, in audio format. I was simultaneously reading both, sort of. I read Dyer at lunch time and time to time at home. I listened to Lovelock while driving to work or returning from work. It was normal for me to pursue two or three different books side by side in parallel rather than in series, through the course of a few weeks.
Thoughts covered in those books engaged me. In fact I bought those books because I share a common interest in those themes. So it was nice to find noted journalists such as Dyer mention James Lovelock and the notion of the earth acting as an organism. I too considered the planet in those terms, like a colony of mutually reactive organisms – like a Portuguese man-of-war, the famous poisonous colony of self cohabiting organisms that unsuspecting humans are known to mistake as a benign jelly fish. It is neither jelly, nor fish, nor jelly fish. It is not even an “it”. It is a colony of many creatures, and deadly for any human wanting to play with it.
Anyhow, I had a wish to write about this thing too. No, not about jelly fish or a Portuguese man-of-war, but about Gaia and how humans are spoiling the planet at a breakneck speed. Lovelock had written his previous book, Revenge of Gaiga, where  Gaiga, the living planet, takes revenge against humans for spoiling the planet. It makes human life miserable, and forces humans to die in large numbers or change their living habits totally. One way or another, Gaia was not the passive environment merely responding to changes imposed on it. Gaia was able to trigger unexpected reversals of climate and accelerate the process of change that fell outside of all the human engineered climate models on computers. Gaia was going to kick humans in the rear.
And then he wrote the next one, the most recent, which I was now reading. It was not inconsequential that a slowly growing number of scientists were beginning to look at Lovelock more seriously.
I was taken by his clear sightedness when he compared climate change through carbon emission, and the issue of generating power through alternative means. He cuts through a lot of bull – especially about the so called renewable energy debate, of bio-fuel coming from food crops, and wind farms. His views on nuclear energy is fundamentally different from proponents of green peace and sustainable living.
These issues deserved great deal of thinking and debate. The problem is, there were not many that I knew, who were even remotely concerned about the future which went past their individual lives.
Also, very few experts wished to look towards a solution to the climate crisis that did not provide a financial benefit to the promoter of the solution. Everything had to be profit oriented. Save the world and become a millionaire. Thats the only motto that the Governments, corporations, economists and the media understand.
I might write about my general frustration at people around me for being nonplussed, and for providing a lip service to various causes, and for being so disappointingly trivial and uncaring.
My dilemma was, like in this blog, to decide if I should write all this as a personal journal or as part of a series of short stories, or as a novel, or what.
But, having a bit of a stubborn streak in me, I am also tempted to write in ways that breaks conventional wisdom and challenge the reason why one should write anything.
Could it be a rant ?
Anyhow, I decided to keep the title of this blog unchanged – Miguel, the Everglades, and Lovelock’s warning.
The title had no place for Mabel.
But then, it had no place for me either.

India’s greedy social climbing brainy youths

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Debal Deb (https://www.facebook.com/debaldeb01) is a fantastic character. I can say that, although I never me the man. I came to know of him through Madhusree Mukherjee, who herself is no pushover.

I have been trying to find an opportunity to interview him on the phone for a podcast, but he is a busy man, and I am a working man and we are half a world apart in our clocks. So we have not managed it yet.

Meanwhile, I come to know of his posts as I befriended him in Facebook. One of the reasons I have not quit Facebook completely, is that people like Debal are not around, as far as I know, on google + or other places.

Anyhow, I find I share many of his views about the root of some of the social evils of our time, and share some of his frustration about the general apathy of India’s upwardly mobile youth. Living abroad for so long, I have also come to be frustrated by the same apathy that afflicts the earlier generation of expatriate Indians that have succeeded in finding a cozier niche for themselves in the west. At a professional level, they are all mostly successful and able to compete with the rest. But on the level of humanism, their apathy has been made glaringly clear to me in the past few years. I too was part of the scene myself. But, like all thinking people, we are apt to evolve with time, and be influenced occasionally by chance encounters that force us to peek outside of our comfort bubble.

I was influenced by a chance encounter with the daughter of a dead cousin brother. The cousin was from India. The wife was American. The daughter lived in a permaculture commune in California. She, her mother, and her baby came to spend a few days with us in Vancouver. That triggered a cascade of events. She linked me up with other Indians that were trying to do something meaningful in their spare time in helping out India through more sustainable projects as well as participating in many events that related not just to India, but to all people everywhere. She had a personality that was so different from the run of the mill Yuppy that it was like a breath of fresh air going through my house and my life. Anyhow, that link she provided helped me connect with a wider world of people. And so the story goes.

Now, back to Debal Deb – He wrote something that I found very apt and worth sharing, within Facebook. It attracted some good feedback, which resulted in more observations from people within my Facebook circle of friends. Debal Deb, in his busy life, managed to notice some of these points, and came back to respond.

The thread became important enough, in my mind, to deserve a more permanent spot.

I am going to copy it here, as a special blog post – including comments from others. I shall inform them of this decision within that thread itself.

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I wish our bloated Indian greedy youth, drunk with their corporate jobs, satisfied with their high salaries and perks, stop once to think about what their employer does to the farmers and the natural world, and consider doing something like this! That would be genuine patriotic act – more than watching Amir Khan on “Mangal Pandey” and “Lagaan”.
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Worth sharing.

Chirajyoti Deb, Chaitali Mitra and Nabanita Banerjee like this.

Ravi Dwivedi shared Debal Deb‘s status update.

Basu Tapas Very true indeed, they do not have the intelligence or far visions…

Sandeep Shukla One question: those Europeans who declined job offers from Dow etc..why did they. Even interview with those companies? The companies can’t be offering jobs unless they applied! Does that mean that they would have taken these job had better alternatives not come up?

Priyadarshi Datta It is not that. Sure money is great and making it is even better. Balance comes with old money. The next generation and so will the next. Hope it is not too late by then. Dwarakanath made money, son Debendranath spent it grandson, Rabindranath was the product of old money. So with the grandons of Rockefella. Hemendranath Datta lost it in one generation and the rest was struggle.

Tony Mitra

You have your unique way of looking at the world, Priyadarshi.
I might opine that the old money of Dwarkanath, or rather, of the early generations of the “Thakur” clan of Jorasanko area, were “new money” of the time when the British were establishing a permanent base in Bengal.
I would also suspect that this new money came at the expense of the poor Indians – in short, the new rich Indian class emerged as collaborators of the British, helping them establish a stronger foothold on the subcontinent.
Along with all that, came education and eventually, a sense of social justice. Thence, the generation of Dwarkanath Tagore, having been born into affluence and not having to spend all waking hours in a struggle to feed his family, those who were born in progressive families and with the right questioning mind could engage in issues of social relevance, and a sense of Bengali-ness – expanded as a part of Indian-ness, came up. Folks got engaged in raising awareness of the fact that they were not independent, and the British were, ultimately, unfair to the average Indian so that an Englishman on average to enjoy a higher lifestyle. It took a while to filter all this in, and eventually different people of the next generation addressed it in different ways – Meghnad Saha, or Surya Sen, or Gandhi, Tagore, or Aurobindo, Annie Bessant, Charles Andrews, or Subhash Bose – each of them addressed it in his own way, and not all of them were born Indians.
But, if you go further back – those that were rich and powerful even before the British arrived, themselves were collaborators of the ruling Mughal emperor, and were in turn selling the country for the benefit of the ruler, thus enriching himself in commission. The main difference might be that under the Mughal rule, a social mass consciousness of Indian-ness did not arise, perhaps because the Mughals were not filtering money out of India to enrich a foreign nation, which the British did. Or perhaps the reason was something else.Anyhow, Rabindranath Tagore was partly the genes and intellect he inherited, partly the influence he was under as a growing child in Jorasanko under intense nationalistic flavor of thetime and efforts at nation and society building efforts. Also, his world view was influenced by the extensive personal exchanges he had in his tours across the world in all continents, and his personal contact with the famous folks of the time, from writers and intellectuals, to politicians, religious heads, scientists and social reformers.
Rabindranath Tagore was influenced by many many factors.Todays upwardly mobile social climbers that came out of good colleges and, for example, work for exploitative corporations – are just a new version of the old “collaborator” class.The difference is – these kids grew up mostly in todays middle class families. These families, at least in India, got into the middle class slot only in the last two generations, more or less.
Goes to show – our middle class is probably an uncaring, selfish and blind class that helps nurture selfish individuals that will collaborate with institutions that hurt his nation – and yet live to brag about it.This topic is way too complex – but its good to air out views and think about it. I feel thankful that, just like lotus grows in filthy ponds, the earlier affluent generations did create Gandhi and Tagore and the rest of the reformers, same as this generation has created the Vandana Shiva, the Ravi Kuchimanchi and so many others, including Debal Deb.Whoops – long post.
Cheers.
Subin Das

Tonu, do you think you are going to influence present generation with your talks? If done; they are just going to turn around and say,” What about you all?” How and why did you do what you have done to achieve your goals? Now that all of you have settled to a comfortable life style with lots to spare, why ask us to sacrifice and rally for a cause which does not harm their means and ways to glory? Isn’t it we who should take some blame for such deplorable state which our younger generation have come to? Actually; it’s high time that we look back and think seriously what damages we have done to them, by our own activities.
Tony Mitra Subin.. I fault it not just to ourselves – but at our Bengali middle class mentality that started about a century ago.
Tony Mitra

A century ago, this was not perhaps a hot topic, but today, with awareness rising, there is not enough excuse for ignoring these issues. As to my generation – they are the biggest disappointment. There is one thing to say about the younger generation though – the older generation is going to die. The younger one will be left holding the basket. So, they will not have the luxury that their forefathers had, of kicking the can down the line. The shit is going to be falling on them.
Debal Deb

Tonu, you have very precisely painted the broad difference between the early middle class youth and today’s middle class. A significant section of the early middle-class youth was socially conscious, introspective, and participated, even took a lead role in, social reforms. In contrast, today’s “educated” and “enlightened” middle class don’t give a dam for the development refugees/ farmers’ suicides/ dowry deaths/ global warming/ industrial crimes … as long as their comfort level is not affected, and are only interested in new models of cell phones with 12 functions, of SUVs, of AC fittings in the flat, … and yes, skin creams to look fairer and fairer!
In response to Subin Das’s very apt point: Bribes and corruption were all the time – from the age of Mahabharata. But do we remember anyone of our generation who considered taking or giving bribes to ethically neutral? Those who gave or received bribes wanted to conceal the fact, in shame. Today, it’s a fact of life. I (and surely all of us) have seen many young men pressuring their parents to gather money in order to pay “facilitation money” to ensure his employment in a govt. job, and then preparing for “recovering” that money (and more) from the “clients” of the office, soon after getting the placement. “Kickbacks” and “facilitation money” are simple steps to one’s career building, and nobody cares to waste time in compunction or guilt. [Bribing is not confined to money alone, and may include renting out one’s girl friend, too, to please “the boss”.] In our generation people hated to marry their daughters to a policeman. Today matrimonial columns advertise “extra income” over salaries of the suitor.
In 2001, I was in California when 9/11 happened. I witnessed how thousands of American youth organised public seminars, rallies, demonstrations, street lectures, street shows etc. to denounce the Iraq war and accused the US govt for waging unjust wars in different parts of the world. University campuses at Berkeley, Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara, and Davis became hot with students’ protests, and many professors participated too. In 2009, I witnessed, in Berkeley and other campuses of UC, massive student protests against privatisation of education and fee hike. The govt had to back out. In both these years, there was hardly any noticeable protest on those (and other) issues from the youth in India – especially eastern India. Rather, a majority of the middle-class youth accepted the moral superiority of the US to attack Iraq. Coke and Monsanto, to them are angel saviours of Indian uncivilsation.
One of my good friend, Saptarshi Biswas once served in Monsanto Co., (left some 4 years back), but never cared to know about the company’s crimes in India and other countries. He immersed himself rather in poetry (which I am not belittling, of course) thoughout his tenure with the company. He represents a highly intelligent young man, well versed in literature and information technology, but why did he not feel interested to know the company’s deeds, while the anti-Monsanto movement was simmering all over the world, and posted regularly on the Net? That’s Zeitgeist.
Debal Deb

‎@Sandeep Shukla: The individuals I cited – all are very well accomplished biotechnologists. Three of them were offered job by Syngenta and Monsanto Co. Two more, from Italy, were interviewed and offered jobs, but when they discovered the company’s profile, relinquished the offer (with no “better alternatives” in sight). I also cited a technologist from USA who got placement at Strategic Defence Intiative (SDI) = “Star War” project, but quit soon after she leafrned the objective of the project.
I understand quitting job for Indians always implies shifting for a better opportunity – unrelated to ethics or ideals. When I myself did the same in 1996, most people believed (some still do) that I got a better job in terms of higher emoluments & perks. This is the mindset I was referring to, in contrast with the youth in the West, who stormed in Genoa, Seattle and Cancun; who rose against Monsanto in Germany and France; who demanded closure of all nuke plants in France and Italy; who gathered in Barcelona to demand economic DeGrowth; who have abandoned techno-urban comforts and built sustainable communities in US west coast, Italy, Spain, Greece, Mexico… And I am a first-hand witness to all these movements led primarily by the youth. As a concerned Indian citizen, I always wonder: When will WE ever learn?
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Tony Mitra ‎Debal Deb – reading posts like this makes my day.

Overload

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We are under attack – by information overload, material overload, trivia overload, sensory overload and ultimately – junk overload. Thinking about it could raise my level of stress, because I do not seem to have a suitable cure. This civilization does not recognize this state of affairs as an undesirable condition, and apparently does not, therefore, offer a relief. Equally frustratingly, this view is not shared by others. It is perhaps not even understood by folks that were close enough for me to discuss it with.
Take our personal emails. I get perhaps forty or fifty a day. With the best of the spam filters there still are a few advertisements that slip in – attempting to sell me cheap medicine, or connect me with young and lonely females that claim to live practically next door to me and are dying to meet me, even if they have no idea who I am. And then there are other advertisements that I have inadvertently allowed to come my way. These are offers to cheap airlines ticket that promises to take me to some far of place that I have no intension of visiting right now. There are messages from hotels that are offering economic rates, also in places that I do not wish to visit. There are streams of messages from unknown people that commented something in Facebook that has somehow a link with me which I was not careful enough to de-link.
The worst part of it is – out of a hundred emails that collect in our multiple email addresses, only one or two are actually from people we know, and addressed solely to me, on a subject that is personal. Few are from relatives or close friends. Folks call on phone rather than send email. Alternately they send messages embedded within social networking sites.
So, the junk overload accumulates if you are on a vacation or if you do not trash them regularly. They pile up into mountains of emails with not much value in any of them, increasing the temptation to junk the whole lot without reading any. This raises the risk of deleting something that might have been valuable, like a needle in a haystack.
Now, forget emails, and check physical mail. Everyday I receive some mail. A small portion of the weekly collection would be bills I need to pay. The rest are all advertisements I do not want to see and wish I did not receive. But receive them I have, and now must take the trouble of disposing in a sustainable way which increases my work, and might even cost me something. I and the planet would have been better off if those pamphlets, brochures, cards and envelops did not get printed and mailed out. Someone is paying for this wasted mail junk.
Whoever pays for them, is going to recover it back from someone else one way or another. Ultimately, the earth pays for it and has no one to complain to and nowhere to recover the loss from.
And then there are the junk phone calls, including from Mexico, informing me that I might have won some prize that allows me to have a fantastic vacation in Cancun or some place at a very reasonable price for a weekend for two, and they will right away confirm it all if I should give them my credit card details etc. And then there are unregistered callers that want donations for all kinds of great causes.
And then comes the electronic, metallic, plastic and other junk that we accumulate at an ever increasing rate.
Can I safely say that this civilization and the lifestyle has converted me into a junk producer or junk accumulator?
Where is the recourse, the exit plan, the relief from this vicious cycle ? The alternative is touted as digressing, retreating into backwardness, degenerating. We must continuously consume junk, produce junk and spread junk around ourselves.
That’s progress.


Meanwhile, we have no real friends that send us either a decent email or a decent letter. We have no real friends or relatives, not even one, with whom one could engage in intellectual exchanges. Nobody lives nearby anyway. And our interaction with those nearby are mostly at a trivial, or superfluous level. The entire human consciousness appears to be locked into superfluous pursuits of trivia. Everything is shallow and two dimensional. Depth is a concept alien to these two dimensional creatures.
We have created a virtual world for our spare time. Real world is only for the drudgery of earning money. The virtual world is where we must reside after work, and from which we must derive our pleasures of life. It is here that I do my writing, that some unfortunate people from different corners of the world might accidentally stumble upon and glance through. It is here that a clever widget someone designed as a plugin for my blog, lets me know how people from Delhi, Paris or San Jose, might have clicked on my page. And this knowledge, skimpy and insignificant as it might be, is expected to induce a sense of pleasure or satisfaction in me, so I can continue to generate more matter for more unknown persons to stumble upon from more corners of this planet.
And out of all those that stumble upon it, there surely must be folks that have no intension of reading my thoughts. There will be folks that do not share my views, particularly the negative or pessimistic ones, people who believe this world is fine and nothing is the matter with it. There will be those that could harbor a middle of the road approach – while things are not exactly ideal, it could have been worse, and in any case, there is not a lot one could do about it. Humans are creatures of habit. They get used to their surroundings. It is not natural, I guess, to step outside of our comfort zone and look at the world from afar.
Overload of insignificant trivia has become the foundation of our existence. That is the platform on which we base our culture, civilization, and modern life.
Why am I complaining ? Whats the matter with me ?

What about our thumbs ?

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Man is an animal. That much even I know. But a social animal? Well, so it would seem if one checks the evolutionary changes that has happened to the creature ever since it decided to try an opposable thumb to grasp things better a long time ago. It started the creature down a path separate from the rest of them, a path that eventually prompted cerebral evolution on a social front in a massive way. The animal and its relatives survive through combined efforts of groups of individuals held together by a social glue. Their lifestyle has evolved such that unattached individuals living outside of society might find the going a lot tougher.

Social behavior has evolved in species without an opposable thumb also. In fact it has evolved in creatures without a thumb altogether. It is hard to imagine a bee surviving and perpetuating its species without its colony and its queen bee. This is just one example of many, to confuse the heck out of a blog theme.

Anyhow, human social evolution has a long history and was highly complex long before the invention of the transistor, the tv the computer and the internet. During the times of Napoleon Bonaparte, or Ramses the first in Egypt, the glue for the society worked differently and had nothing to do with binary signals traveling around at the speed of light in wires or optical cables from point to point. It is indeed doubtful if people even had a clear concept about speed of light. If you were an actor, you travelled a bit, looked for rich patrons, and performed on stage in big cities, or small towns, or village squares, more or less daily. You probably did not have a fan club except in big cities and that too of a different kind than today’s. In today’s world, Shakespeare would have been coaxed by his agents and managers to either wear a wig, or have a hair transplant, and work on his speech delivery style, even if he was only a playwright and not an actor himself. In fact, even Einstein, if he was a celebrity today, would have likely been forced to change his hair style.

Anyhow, we are here and today, and not there and at that time. We are not in the court of Gengis Khan, thank goodness. So what kind of social animals are we, of the electronic age? Just for the sake of argument, could we be judged by our past society as anti-social animals rather than social? Or could it be that we are a bunch of pseudo-socials that wear a sociable face, but harbor some perplexing unsocial thoughts? In other words, are we pretending to be elites, or intellectuals, or just “me too” clansmen ?

What is the meaning of being a social animal in today’s world ? What should it mean and what does it mean instead?

To further complicate matters, a twist of the word has produced an offshoot – socialism, as against capitalism. Capital has created that opposing offshoot of capitalism. But why capital should oppose social, I have no idea and whatever the definition of capitalism is, or socialism should be – I am sure God does not know, and neither do I. One gets to hear quite a bit of talks on this undefined issue of Obama’s socialism against some of his opponents capitalism during this campaign season for the US presidential race. I am beginning to doubt if Obama himself is clear about the definitions and what they might mean.
But, I shall leave the Obamas, Camerons, Harpers and Singhs to their world. Perhaps in their world gravity is not a function of geometry and space is not curved around objects. What is curved instead is the atmosphere of spin, and it spins like crazy round Washington, London and Delhi, among other places.

For now, the target of this writing is not the social black holes in the capital cities of the world, both Capitalist and Socialist worlds, where matter can pass through, but truth goes into an endless spin and can never re-emerge. What does emerge, is various spins of it. No, that world of eternal angular momentum is not the intended target of this blog.
And frankly, I am not really too involved with theory of the evolution of opposing thumbs either, though I do have them. I have thought of them in different ways. Early in my life I noted how infants would suck their thumb as a reflect action that replaces suckling their mothers breast for milk. But later in life, as folks develop lactose intolerance and grow up to do different things with their thumb including using it as a visual expression of particular thoughts. This display of the thumb starts to carry a meaning, a gesture, an expression. And the meaning can be different to different folks in different societies.
Back in Bengal, where I grew up, showing an extended thumb was a sort of an impolite sign. It also has a name – showing the banana. I guess banana is used here because the extended thumb is usually curved, like a banana. Showing someone the banana is like tossing the banana peel on his path and having a hearty guffaw when he slips and sprawls on the road.
But the same gesture, in the US usually means all is Good. But, for all to be good, the thumb should be pointing up on a closed fist. Point the thumb downward, and the gesture means the opposite – it sucks. What about thumbs extended sideways? I guess that, accompanied with the owner of the thumb standing roadside, usually means the person is looking to hitch a ride. Either way, up, down or horizontal, it means quite a different set of things, than showing the banana in Bengal.

Nonetheless, I was not going to write about showing the thumb to Obama, Ron Paul or Mitt Romney. I was not even contemplating writing about our own evolution, or what an extended thumb might have meant to a Neanderthal.

The original notion was to think through this phenomenon of internet based social networking sites, and how it might help or hinder the natural growth as a human being that has learned the art of charm, spin and of political correctness.

I’d say this newfangled social media is a mixed bag. You win some and lose some, thumbs up on a few counts and down on a great many more.

Everyone is on the internet social bandwagon. Before I knew it, my friends circle had bloated to a ridiculous number of many hundreds, a majority of whom I had never met. Suddenly, I was confronted with an unending stream of trivia notes forcing themselves on me informing me that someone likes to pet her dog, or someone else likes the fact that his friend likes someone else’s comments. Matters begin to get ridiculous, so much so, that I had to go to war on the list of friends, and decimated the parasitic growth of friends without friendliness.

My experience here, is of a jungle of faceless humans, a vast majority of whom are like passing flotsam drifting in the stream. Its nice to be moving with the water. But I find it unattractive to be social in that sense, just drifting together, barely aware of each others existence beyond the fact that we are floating, and not yet underwater.

So, how much of a social animal are we?

More you get to know people, more you learn of their behavior. Just like a biologist studying animal behavior, you could, at a distance, try to figure out what it is that makes people tick on the electronic social media. I have, and have come to some heartwarming as well as heart wrenching conclusions.
First the good news. There are a lot of people that are inspirational and do amazing things with their lives. But, many of them are low key and work with people that are not in the limelight. They are a sharp contrast with people in the limelight, and in a fair comparison, they, those silent inspirations, would win hands down. But the world is not fair. Without a platform that sort of leveled the playing field, these folks would never get to be known beyond their village or town. So, internet has helped enormously, for persons like me, to seek real inspirations and not phony stage managed ones from religious headquarters like the Vatican, or political Headquarters like Washington, or cultural headquarters like Hollywood.

But what about the bad news? Well, the heart wrenching part comes later as you come to realize that folks you knew for a long time, folks you consider your friends, your kin, your loved ones, have not lived up to your expectations, and have betrayed your trust in them.

Its not personal. You were not expecting them to line up with you just because you were a friend. You however expected them to line up on the side of truth and speak up as responsible social animals. But, with the chips down, all you noticed was their silence. You saw injustice being done to individuals, to groups, to communities, to entire nations, and your friends chose to remain silent and selfish and sitting on the fence. Actually, they behave as if they live on the fence.

You yourself might have spoken out at times, and tried to seek support from others. But all those people you held in high regard, and considered to be giants, were actually pigmies. They would prefer that you do not notice them, or ask them or expect them to be fair and impartial and just. They wish to be silent, non-committal, and selfish. They do not care, where you thought that they should.

But instead of those fallen giants and dear one’s, you do notice a small trickle, one out of a hundred, that you did not know that well and did not think much of, have proven you wrong and have come up and surpassed your expectations.

This is the most heart wrenching and heartwarming aspect of growing up. You recognize that, while you might be a social animal, your cozy world has been an illusion.  People you expected to stand up for principles, were actually mice looking for a larger hole.

Social animal ? Well ….

Tonu

State of our lives

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So, whats up with this planet and how is it fairing in this new year of the lord 2012?

Well, firstly, it makes not enough sense to number this year after any Lord. Besides, it appears kind of silly, to follow a calendar starting from the death of Christ, as if there was nothing before that. And since there was quite  a few historical events before that, there is this mathematical anomaly of a missing zero. I mean, there is year 1, and the year previous to that is year -1. The year zero is missing – a mathematical impossibility.

Apart from that, ideally the year should have been representing the age of the planet, and if we wish to avoid a lot of zeros after the number 4, we could have found a way to do that, just like the number 12 represents the year 2012 today.

This is not to criticize the life or efforts of Jesus Christ, or against the Christian faith system. It is just a view that, for the world to follow a calendar, the death of Christ appears to be an inappropriate datum line for either the planet, or the history of human presence on this planet.

It is easy to guess that hardcore believers of other religions also wishing that the calendar be shifted to the times of Budhha, or Mohammed or Krishna or Zoroastra of Cyrus the great. And while we are at it, why not Gengis Khan or Confucius or Tut Ankh Amen for that matter ?

Anyhow, this issue is not going to be resolved by tonu rambling on a blog, so I shall move on, removing mention of the lord, and just calling it year 2012. So then, what is the state of the planet?
Do we have a clear indication from any source, anywhere, that can be taken as a standard measure of the state of the planet? Is there any common platform and mass appeal to consider the state of the planet ?

Is it important at all ? After all, the planet has been here for over 4 billion years, and likely will be here for many billion years more, even if you and I shall be gone, and even if humans will have probably evolved into something else before dying out, while life form as we know it is snuffed out of the planet, and as the planet loses its habitable environment, and as the sun dies out eventually, plunging the whole solar system and this corner of existence into deep darkness.

Well, for some, it is not important to consider the state of the planet, because, on a short term basis, nothing is particularly wrong with it – even if in the long term everyone and everything must die. But for others, the state of the planet, that of the well being of its inhabitants, particularly of humans and human induced changes to the environment that affects flora and fauna as well as global climate – is a hugely important issue, and things are changing rather rapidly, so much so that a changes during a single human lifetime is at times too great to really comprehend.

Is there a historical precedence of species overpopulating itself and over-developing itself to extinction ? I believe there are, and that humans are proving no better than lemmings or cockroaches, technology and God notwithstanding.

So, what is the state of the planet ?

Too long and evolved a subject – so I shall come back to this time to time. This writeup is just a musing of 20 minutes at lunch break. I was actually having a dish of Bibim Bam – its Korean. If you never had a bibim bam, you should try once. I mean, just for the name itself. How can anyone refuse a dish with a name like bibim bam ?

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So what is the matter with the planet ?
What is the matter with its climate, its environment, its air, water and soil ?
What and how much have we, the humans, done to preserve, or destroy it ?
At what rate are species going extinct in this age of human technology ?
What awaits us down the line ?
Is there a population bomb waiting to take everybody down ?
Is there reason to worry?

Living in North America, there are scores of people around the world that think coming to North America is the next best thing to going to heaven. And within the continent, it is USA in particular, that appeals to disgruntled folks around the world as a magnet, a mecca of freedom of speech, human rights, and the chance for everyone to rise to his or her potential – its the American dream.

Today, the affluent society around the world, and particularly of old Asian nations such as India,  appear to be blindly in love with a rather shallow version of the western pop culture and superfluous extravaganzas. But, is the American dream really sustainable over the long run ?

Is it repeatable on lands other than the US? Is it sustainable even within the US ? For how long and in what fashion ?
Meanwhile, what is happening to the planet, to the civilization, and indeed, to the future of our race and our ecology ?

I have a lot more questions than I have answers.

Tonu