Waste Not, Want Not

    There are all sorts of definitions to the word waste: wasted hours, wasted talent, wasted futures, wasted lives.  Even the late Doris Buffet (her younger brother is Warren Buffet), "...eschewed giving money to what she jokingly calls 'the SOBs' -- the symphony, opera, and ballet," according to her local news outlet, the Omaha World Herald.  And when asked what she wanted on her gravestone she replied, "She Made A Difference," adding, "unless you do, why were you here?"  Couple this with an opposing fact that Anna Mehler Paperny* mentioned in that you're 63% more likely to kill yourself than die in a car accident.  Wait, what??  She adds: If eight hundred thousand people around the world kill themselves every year, that means about twenty-two hundred a day, or three every two minutes.  Statistically, two dozen people killed themselves in the time it took you to get out of bed, showered and caffeinated.  Maybe forty-five during your commute to work; another ninety in the time you spent making dinner.  Unless you, like me, take an eternity to do any of those things, if they happen at all.  In which case, think of it this way.  Every time you mull killing yourself and manage to talk yourself down because you have more to do and more to ask of life, a handful of people have lost that internal wrenching match and ended it.

Time lapse photo of stars during Earth's rotation over Fire Volcano, Guatemala.  Photo: Babak Tafreshi  from Nat Geo)

   Okay, that's a bit grim, even if it's reality.  But then as José Ramón Andrés Puerta (better known as the award-winning chef and founder of the relief group, World Kitchen, José Andrés) told AARP: What good does it do me if I have the best restaurant in the world and three blocks down the road, I've got hundreds of people who don't have anything to eat?  It feels awkward.  And it's okay to feel awkward if I'm trying to --hopefully, in the long run-- do something to make sure we don't have this situation.  As the classic band Earth, Wind & Fire pointed out: You will find peace of mind if you look way down in your heart and soul; don't hesitate 'cause the world seems cold. That's the way of the world.  Another of their songs added: You're a shining star no matter who you are; shining bright to see what you can truly be.

    Stars raining down.  How we look up and decide what we're seeing may be how we're looking inside ourselves.  Do we see something glowing and radiating and if so, do we view that as good or bad?  The new conspiracy theory (debunked) is that the Covid-19 coronavirus rained down from space, said Discover.  But just as other conspiracy theories and extremist groups such as QAnon grow in popularity, so does our quest for answers during these unsettled times.  Said another piece in Discover: "There’s good evidence that conspiracy theories flourish during times of crisis," says Joseph Pierre, psychiatrist and researcher at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.  "When we feel insecure, we often look for information that provides an explanation for chaotic events."  People seek out alternate takes on reality when they’re inclined to mistrust official ones for various reasons.  Groups most prone to conspiracy theorizing include people with lower socioeconomic status, those who have been excluded or ostracized and those who feel life is out of control.  All of these groups’ numbers have swelled since the start of the pandemic.  "Where people are feeling powerless, anxious and threatened," says Northumbria University social psychologist Daniel Jolley, "conspiracy theories can offer some relief."

   That said, here's what I've been reading about our world, no conspiracy, just reality.  We rob the earth.  Said National Geographic: Every year we transform more than 100 billion tons of raw material into products.  Less than a quarter becomes buidings, cars, or other long-lasting things.  Less than 10 percent cycles back into the economy...to get along on this Earth, we must do just one thing: Stop wasting so much of it.  Here's what a review in the London Review of Books added: We now move more sediment each year than all the world’s rivers combined and the demand for sand is only exceeded by that for water...Shanghai, New Orleans and Bangkok are already sinking under their own weight... Renewable energy?  Consider copper -- said the previous article: ...a single giant wind turbine uses about 33 tons.  More bad news? -- those turbine blades regularly break down and have to be replaced...they aren't recyclable (more on that later).  Then came a review in The New Yorker of Rebecca Giggs' new book on whales; here are just a few quick notations (STOP here if your stomach is at all queasy): early whalers would injure the calves first in order to draw in the protective mother (both would be slaughtered); while 30,000 sperm whales were killed in the 1800s over 700,000 were killed a century later; an estimated 99.85% of the Antarctic blue whale population had been slaughtered as of 1964; between 2005 and 2014 Japanese whalers killed 3600 minke whales; remaining whales in the ocean are now so full of mercury and other toxins that many are considered a danger to human consumption; whales have recently washed up on shores with ears bleeding from damaging acoustic warfare experiments.  Such reading is extremely sad, but perhaps not as sad as pondering what we may have unknowingly destroyed.  The review added these points: ...some humpbacks swim more that sixteen thousand miles each year, three-fifths the circumference of the earth; their "songs" and sounds are the loudest animal noise on the planet; and their slaughter over the last century has been estimated to be the equivalent of burning 70,000,000 acres of forest due to whales' ability to sequester carbon.  

    But here's something perhaps more interesting, implied the review: Songs of humpbacks off Puerto Rico are heard by whales near Newfoundland, two thousand miles away; the songs can "go viral" across the world.  Some scientists believe that certain whale languages equal our own in their expressive complexity; the brains of sperm whales are six times larger than ours, and are endowed with more spindal neurons, cells associated with both empathy and speech.  Yet no one knows what whales are saying to one another, or what they might be trying to say to us.  Noc, a beluga that lived for twenty-two years in captivity as part of a U.S. Navy program, learned to mimic human language so well that one diver mistook Noc's voice for a colleague's, and obeyed the whale's command to get out of the water...Contained in their mystery is the possibility that they are even more like us than we know; that their inner lives are as sophisticated as our own, perhaps even more so.  Indeed, contained in whales is the possibility that the creatures are like humans, only much better: brilliant, gentle, depthful gods of the sea.

    There is much we've yet to know, perhaps even the fact that we've destroyed much of what we had yet to learn.  The review above from the London Review of Books put it this way: But this is also the way things pile up: the implications, the endless connections, the long life of our destructive tendencies.  There is the impulse to claim and build, to drill and extract, to take up more space.  There is also the desire to see, grasp, know, understand, to go where no one else has been, higher and deeper and to the heart of the matter.  The review talks of some bacteria only being discoved in 2006: ...in air sampled 41 kilometres above the earth.  Such bacteria are called extremophiles, because they thrive in conditions hostile to human life (a concept that still places the human at the centre of things).  Another review in The New Yorker let us also know that we actually know very little about eels...to this date, mating adult eels or their eggs have never been seen, despite decades of research and ever more sophisticated tracking technology (what we view as adult "eels" are actually juveniles not yet ready to mate).  Said the review: ...To the eel, death seemed relative...the timing of an eel's final transformation, the one that brings it to both its own death and the birth of the next generation seems to be unrelated to time itself: eels might feel the pull to return to the sea after eight years inland, or after nearly sixty, or never, remaining behind in a sort of suspended animated.  The eels that travel together across the ocean might be at the same stage of life, yet decades apart in age.  Svensson (Swedish journalist and author, Patrik Svensson) is captivated by the implications of this. "You have to ask yourself: How does a creature like that perceive time?"  But the eels are vanishing; where a hundred would arrive on a stretch of coast in Europe in the 1970s, perhaps only five now arrive.  The review ends: In our age of extinction, every loss is like this: the disappearance not just of a creature from its ecosystem but of all that we might learn about it, all that we invest in it, all its layers of meaning, from our human future.  To lose the eel is one grief; to lose the eel question, another.  The earlier review on whales ended along a similar line: Or perhaps we are simply embracing what we sense will soon be gone, memorializing what does not really exist, as social media has taught us to do.

    Smithsonian noted that Russia just released some footage of hydrogen bomb tests it had done nearly 60 years ago (ironically, days earlier marked the passing of the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki which killed an estimated 210,000 people): It had a destructive force over 3,000 times as destructive as the bomb used by the U.S. to destroy Hiroshima.  And it was three times as large as the biggest bomb ever detonated by the U.S., dubbed Castle Bravo...From a different perspective, as Carl Sagan wrote in former President Jimmy Carter's farewell address, this same technology has been used to launch rockets into space.  "Nuclear weapons are an expression of one side of our human character,” Sagan wrote at the time. “But there's another side.  The same rocket technology that delivers nuclear warheads has also taken us peacefully into space.  From that perspective, we see our Earth as it really is—a small and fragile and beautiful blue globe, the only home we have.  We see no barriers of race or religion or country.  We see the essential unity of our species and our planet. And with faith and common sense, that bright vision will ultimately prevail."  Such a destructive force may pale in comparison to the microbe, or even the mosquito (one theory says that mosquitoes may have helped in the demise of dinosaurs); as Timothy Wineguard notes in his new book, The Mosquito: Currently, over one million microbes have been identified, yet only 1,400 have the potential to cause harm to humans...It is estimated that there are about one trillion species of microbes on our planet, meaning 99.999% have yet to be unearthed...Dinosaurs, whose long progeny lasted from 230 to 65 million years ago, ruled the earth for an astounding 165 million years. (as I noted in an earlier post, we humans have existed --at least in what we define as a "civilized" form-- for just over 6 thousand years)  But they were not alone on this planet.  Insects and their illnesses were present before, druing, and after the reign of dinosaurs.

    Editor Nicholas Thompson wrote in WIRED:  Not long ago, I was driving with my three sons back from trying to ski on a mountain that doesn't really have snow anymore, and we were talking about climate change.  They're 11, 9, and 6, and they're upset, as they should be.  They know that their adult years will be spent in a world of raging fires, flash floods, and mass extinction.  They love Greta and resent their elders.  The future feels different and vaster when the actuarial tables give you 80 years to go, not 40 (or in my case, maybe 20?).  We talked about turning our thermostats down, eating less meat, and putting the cable box on a smart plug...I tried futilely to explain what capitalism is and why it was still a reasonable way to organize human affairs, despite CO2 levels now reaching 415 ppm, I told them there was still time.  They found my explications unpersuasive ...That's when my oldest son asked: "If there's one thing that I could invent that would help, what would it be?"  It's an awesome question -- maybe a quintessentially 11-year-old one.  From our first moment of consciousness up through childhood, the things we think we might be able to do with our lives broaden and broaden.  And then, at some point around adolescence, they start to narrow.  Our imaginations shrink, our obligations grow, we charge ahead on certain roads and avoid the ones less traveled.  Eleven is wonderful.  You're aware of the world and its limitations, but if you're lucky your imagination hasn't been crimped yet.  Really, maybe, you can do anything.  

    

Increase of CO2 levels over the past 800,000 years; graph: NASA Vital Signs

     Maybe, or even despite of, this swirl of bad news and destruction and battling is better summed up as a potentially wasted opportunity, a chance to look anew like that 11-year old, a possibility of changing patterns and beliefs and attitudes.  A chance to even figure out how to recycle those wind turbine blades, or create something as helpful and as simple as Project Echo.  From the big to the small, from the things we cannot imagine to the things we cannot see, we may still have a chance to not waste away, that if we hope to stop the fighting and stop the hatred and stop the fires and stop the virus, we may have to look in an entirely new direction.  As the review on David Farrier's book (In Search of Future Fossils) concluded: Perhaps radical acts of imagination, those which decentre and unanchor the human, will let us see most clearly what might be to come.

*As mentioned in the last post, I am grappling with trying to gain insight into people who suffer from depression and/or entertain thoughts of suicide, especially during these difficult times.  In that end (and saying this without any irony) I continue to enjoy the frankness of Anna Mehler Paperny's book, Hello I Want to Die, Please Fix Me.  In her book (her language is brutal at times, no holds barred) she writes: I learned very quickly who was safe to confide in.  Which friends would judge, flee, insist on calling my parents or the police.  Which would listen, tell me they loved me, let me crash on their couch, without getting me in trouble.  Maybe it's unfair -- to sometimes need someone to confide in while also needing that person to take no drastic action in response to that confidence.  But, again and again, that's where I found myself...But here's the thing: If the way I feel is just part of being human, for fuck's sake give me death.  I cannot countenance the assertion that this hopeless chasm is simply an extreme on a spectrum of healthy emotion.  It has no relation, however distant, to sadness.  Sadness is a pain that reminds me I'm alive, that I'm an animal capable of emotion and a sense of loss.  Despondence is the flat, parched death of the soul.  There's nothing there...No one tells you that after trying to kill yourself and failing miserably, you don't necessarily wake up in the ICU feeling awesome...Because everything that made you loathe yourself before is still there.  Except now you're the crazy freak who can't even kill herself properly, who every morning takes meds that seem to do nothing, who's been away from work for a month and returns to pitch stories to someone who found her passed out and overdosed in her apartment.  Chasing your vocation's a powerful protective factor.  But being thrown back into it after an inpatient stay highlighted the agonizing delta between the person I perceived myself to be and the person I wanted to be.  Her book is gutsy, heart-rendering, and so nakedly revealing that it both shocks and educates you.  If you have at all wondered what may be going on in the mind of someone you even suspect is severely depressed or is "a tough nut to crack" then take a peek at this book; and more importantly, if you suspect anyone that you know who may be contemplating suicide call the Suicide Hotline at 800/273-TALK (8255)...or 911 (the new hotline of 988 is expected to be active nationwide sometime in 2022).