It turns out that I am bad at this " writing things in a blog" business. I am now 73, retired and even more irritated at how little humanity is managing to measure up to some of our biggest challenges. Donald trump, a moronic thug and grifter has now been the U.S. president for more than a year into his second ( unbelievably) term. and somehow this tiny , inarticulate and intellectually challenged guy is managing to make things much worse on a planetary scale ..... but the thing is he couldn't do this alone. He needs support to promote the increasingly irrational and destructive actions that are in opposition to the long term interests of most of humanity and the natural world - lots of blame to spread around! 
   As an example of this, his administration has removed many of the environmental protections that had been so painstakingly assembled over the last 8 or so decades in America, while at the same time doing everything in their power to increase the rate of  fossil fuel  consumption. Then, as if this wasn't enough, he has initiated a new war in the middle east with goals that are unclear to everybody and, I am guessing, with no genuine intention of helping the people of Iran to gain freedom from the tyranny they have to live under every day.  This latest action has led to effective , even if temporary, closure  of the strait of Hormuz to shipping  with the net effect of decreasing oil supply and jacking up energy costs to economy crushing levels, while at the same time allowing Russian oil exports to increase in order to allow the psychopath Putin to fund his attempts at rebuilding an old and ridiculously unwieldy empire.
    The most interesting aspect of the world's response has been to try to  keep down the price of oil products by releasing oil reserves and to start looking for alternate sources of fossil fuels ( mainly oil and natural gas). In my home, Canada, there is talk of finally having  a reason to build more pipelines to increase the export of the low grade sludge that we have so much of under the boreal forest ecosystems we have been blessed with. A lot of this talk is just logistically silly because even if it was a good idea, ( and it isn't ) it would be at least a decade and many billions of dollars of investment, not to mention considerable further deterioration of indigenous peoples rights, to achieve it - certainly not a solution to any current problem.  My question is about how anybody can jump to this kind of talk when clearly the problem is really one of dependence on fossil fuels. It is not as if we have not already lived through the destabilizing effects of oil shocks before or that we have not seen the war-promoting effects of competing efforts at control over oil supply in many places. It is also unlikely that anyone could be unaware of the environmental destruction brought about by the oil industry ( the polluted Niger Delta, the pollution of Canada's boreal rivers and wetland, the effects of ocean oil spills ( eg. Exxon Valdez , Gulf of Mexico oil platform leaks)  or the horrible pollution that  results from wartime destruction of oil infrastructure.  Even more importantly, is it really possible that anybody on the planet could be so uninformed or intellectually challenged or ideologically blinded that they are unable to see that our real challenge - our greatest existential threat, is the reality of the rapidly developing CLIMATE CRISIS. 
  All of this should mean that ALL of the talk should be about how we can most quickly and effectively stabilize our economies and energy supplies by increasing the rate at which we develop wind and solar energy supply, step up energy conservation/efficiency, electrify transportation and increase our research into alternate energy sources and effective mitigation against the coming changes.  All of these approaches are much more cost effective and promote innovation and economic progress  and also importantly help all nations to become more independent and less subject to Economic Coercion. Why are we so hell-bent on self-destruction?

      ​​I am approaching seventy years old and so I think I qualify as someone who has been exposed to humanity long enough to have some understanding of our short-comings. Additionally it is probably worth mentioning that for almost that entire time I have seen the world from the point of view of a naturalist and later a biologist/naturalist.  In some ways it feels like I have been under a state of siege my entire life. As I worked enthusiastically to amass the knowledge necessary to understand the workings of the universe I was aware that , though I could find the company of like-minded individuals, I was mostly alone in my awe for the natural world.  OK – I thought- I can live with that! But I was wrong!  All around me, as people scrambled to acquire all the things that clever marketers promoted as necessities for a good life,  I could see the consequences of that collective action on the natural world that supports us. All through the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s I have felt the anguish of knowing that the world that I treasured was becoming a shadow of its’ former self.  Birds of prey populations plummeted  as a result of a loathing for predators and the effects of pesticides,  mercury accumulated to frightening levels in aquatic ecosystems, many species were in steep decline as old growth forests, prairies, wetlands and almost every other conceivable ecosystem  were annihilated at every opportunity for the sake of some apparently necessary economic expediency. Along the way, some of the devastation became apparent to the public and from time to time awareness would lead to a  tempering of the destruction and some laws were put in place to regulate the degree of damage that  our air and water would be permitted to sustain. At moments it even seemed that there might be hope for a brighter future. But here I am in the 2020’s  and we are in the midst of the 6th mass extinction event   ( over a nearly 2 billion year history of life on earth) and we are the cause of it and maybe it doesn’t matter anyway because we are also steamrolling catastrophically towards an almost inconceivable change in the earth’s climate that will make it much less hospitable to us and most of the rest of life’s diversity- and all these changes are being generated by us. Of course, there are some in denial,  others who are looking to blame someone or something else  - but the evidence has been in for quite some time now – we are 100% responsible and we, as well as nearly every other living thing on earth, will pay the price for our out-and-out negligence.
      There was a time, when I was a child , that I honestly thought that I would be able to go out and save the world once I understood the full picture- because all you would have to do is explain the problem to people and once they understood the dire nature of these changes and recognized what precious good fortune they were willing  to lose in exchange for fleeting luxuries or convenience – they would come to their senses and do the right thing.  Dream on silly guy!  For  the last few decades I have tried to come to grips with the science and the politics and the economics of all these issues and sadly here is the conclusion I have come to.  We have a more than sufficient understanding of the science of all these problems and we also already have the technical know-how to be able to correct  or compensate for the things we have, up to now,  so badly managed. We have the ability to do things differently and live in a sustainable way that would allow for a good life for every human on the planet , without any further loss of biodiversity  or  runaway climate change. And we are not going to bother!
 
  Really? Are we so happy with the bill of goods and short term perspective  that we have been sold by the corporate/political       world? Is the inertia so great that a species of our adaptability is incapable of making any changes regardless of the consequences  of staying on our current path?
    I do know of individuals who have changed the way they live to try to do right by the world and I also know of technologies and systems of approaching problems that work much better than the status quo and would provide equal levels of economic benefit and quality of living but so far it is at a scale that is far too small to make any difference. Why?