7 Hiroshima Bombs per second

What if you had a magical 1950s PU truck and a quarter tank of gas. Every time you used gas it is replaced by the gas you used – and a tiny amount more. Again magically, as you enter the freeway on-ramp and stick the pedal to the metal both the carburetor throat and the fuel jet internal diameter expand as well – again by tiny amounts. You merge going an idle cruise at 55 with plenty of room between your speed and the limit. In the meantime the gas tank gets fuller by tiny amounts, and the larger carburetor throat makes the engine run more responsively. But the freeway ends. You apply the not-magical brakes, but he-he-hey! Light turns green! Now you accelerate like a bat out of hell! Pretty soon, gas is leaking out. You could sell gas, except every other vehicle is also magical. Nobody wants it. Meanwhile the brakes are wearing out. The carburetor is eaten away from the inside. You are a long way from home now. The choice you have is to drive on until it all blows up or use what brakes you have to: Stop! Get out! And walk home! Climate change is like that. Burning fossil fuels drives climate change. Ocean absorption energy due to climbing atmospheric CO2 concentrations has accelerated from balance zero - to energy equivalences of over seven Hiroshima Atomic Bombs – EVERY SECOND! Tic7 . . Tic7 . . Tic7. . . and climbing . . .

Too Late?

If it is not too late already, and as far as I can tell it is, but I have been wrong before, and hopefully I am again: I think, as opposed to believe, that our best chances of surviving as a species, and perhaps even, if we are lucky, any kind of shared human sense of culture - with dignity - , is to look to Original Peoples and their social and environmental grace for redemption of our relationship with Mother Nature. It would be an unimaginable twist. On a planet, now bound in barbed wire and plastic, rising raped, and screaming – at least to our ears - if there are any peoples with any sense of perseverance and grace in the face of genocide, plagues, disasters, discrimination and near extinctions, these teachers exist in the specked isolated islands of thrashed but surviving indigenous. To return to that kind of respect and diverse inclusiveness of what is right – and what is wrong – to beg that pill in the presence of the nature of place, and the downtrodden, what a remorseful and bitter taste that would be. So, we don't stand a chance . . . Do we?

"Original" Ideas

Dust to dust: They say the cure, or best outcomes for mental illness is connection. All connections arise from and return to the Nature of Place. And it seems too that instruction from the practitioners of our Mother planet's Traditional Environmental Knowledge (TEK) approach would have particular resonance to those suffering from social prejudice and abandonment. In a time where we all suffer from hate and war, a respectful social partnership between Government, Unsheltered Citizens, and Original Peoples just may be the key that unlocks the door to the reset of Human Culture that we so desperately need to get through the accelerating whip-lashings of Climate Change. Probably the most experienced, intellectually acclimated individuals to the Nature of Place, besides Original Peoples, are the Homeless. That we treat Unsheltered Citizens as a waste product of our perverted economic system is perhaps its most fatal flaw (of which there are several other heavy contenders). The world is desperate for land stewards. Having a system for planned and supportive migrations for those without shelter at supportive portable and migrate-able camping sites overseen by trained TEK guides while providing basic services, including food, hygiene, health and monetary compensation to these Citizens for using fire to keep warm, cook with, and make biochar (sequester soil carbon) in our public and private forests would do much to reduce fuel and fire hazards in our forests and grasslands.