Adaptation

Welcome to the new blog for Aftershock, preparation for an uncertain future!

If you have found your way here for the first time, here is the link to all website blog and diary entries up through today Aftershock!

I'm learning to adapt to this new space, and over the next few days I'll get everything set up. There are many reasons for this change, not the least that my friend Gary did it for me, but the important one is that I want to make it easy for you to comment without having to write a separate email.

So I'm adapting. I'm a human, an adapting machine, the most destructive and fearsome creature in the history of life on earth. There is nothing we won't change to suit us, there is never a thought of, that's enough, I'm full, just constant expansion. We are fucking relentless. I adapt so well that I have learned to destroy my entire world in order to get "more." We adapt through changing our thinking and inventing technologies to create the change we need.

This desert tortoise that I came upon yesterday hiking on the north shore of Lake Mead is a type of adaptation that is so extreme it hardly seems worth it. This little tortoise can go a year without a drink, spends most of his time underground, and can almost completely reabsorb his urine. He has adapted through physical evolution to the world around him without changing the world. His limits to growth are his ability to compete with other animals for water and food. His expansion is slow and limited. Our expansion is limited only by oil to grow the food we need to live to breed ever more people. That got me thinking.

We have a dramatic uncertain future ahead of us as a species. We use it up, absorb, eat, consume and discard more material and energy than this little tortoise could every imagine. We are bad dogs, top dogs yes, but very bad dogs indeed, and in your private moments you know it in your bones. We are the problem.

The question to ponder is what sort of adaptation will we make, individually and as a tribe to have some hope of surviving the next fifty years (yes, I know this does not apply to me, as I'll be dead long before that). Will we create the thoughts of compromise, collaboration, limits to resources, and will we except that we do not have any right to breed without limits, to use resources that are SHARED resources with the rest of life on this planet? As a species we seem to have never thought to say, I'm good, I've had enough, leave some for others who share my world. Our survival memes, our social lessons at mother's breast, are so deeply ingrained that we believe we are separate, special, and that the world is for our use. We act as spoiled children gods, uncaring of the consequences of our godhood. Oh we are such fearsome beasts, and we wield the power of fossil fuels as our sword to demand and create homes and life and population where it is inimical to us.
Aftershock is a blog about the morning after. The party's over and the empties lay all about. The world has more than a headache. Her seas are fished out, and becoming sterile, the forests that support us with precious topsoil are disappearing, global warming is changing our weather and food in human visible time instead of geological time. The adaption that the tortoise made through eons of evolution, we must make in an instant by us.
I've been accused of being gloomy. I guess we see anyone who says "hey there is no more beer" as being a sour pus. In fact I'm am having a great time. Chiclets, we're ringside for the big bout, this is the Sunday afternoon match up that has been several million years in the making. Every ancestor of yours that dodged a lion or dug a trap and outsmarted that lion has led us here to this moment. As terrible as we are, and dinosaurs would have shrunk from our hubris and resultant actions, we are also sublimely beautiful, creative, loving, caring, and sweet.
We did not destroy our planet on purpose, it was our nature, oops. We were playing a close in game with our eyes on the small field. That's not good enough for what comes. This blog is about how we channel our power, our nature into partnership with our home planet, instead of having it for lunch.
Can we do it? Fucking ay! Of course we can, we do anything we want, we do everything want . When we expect things as a group, we get results. So take your hand out of your pants, it is time to yet become different again. This match up is with ourselves, we must change our very nature. What the hell, it is the thing that we really are best at.
So welcome to Aftershock, a website dedicated to recovering from the peak oil hangover and planning a new (much smaller!) civilization. Normal blogging of my life, because "it's all about me" will recommence after I'm done playing with the new blog software.