Earth thought 208 of 365 : "I have lost my origin. And I don't want to find it again." (Bjork) In Bjork's mouth, this is free-floating desire, an openness to new identity, to what is beyond identity. Ironically -for such an ecologically conscious person as her- it is also a perfect expression of our collective global fantasy. We will find our origin again, whether we want to or don't.
Earth thought 209 of 365 : Hollywood movies love to play with the idea that reality is dream. How consoling. A twentieth century thought in a world supposedly constructed from sheer desire -psychology and capitalism in one. But the twenty first century thought is this -our world has limits. Reality will come pouring in if we don't respect them. That's called sea-level rise, not some dream of flooding water. That's called water shortage, not some fantasy of the lone Versace dress on the desert, wearing a mannequin inside.
Earth thought 210 of 365 : I wonder, is time running out on us to establish an effective international, environmental order? I sometimes think that the waters of climate change will flood in on us, so to speak, making our dithering about obsolete. And yet that point of pressure will be too late. That is my midnight worry.
Earth thought 211 of 365 : This has been a bad year for environmental disasters. The people of Haiti suffered immensely, because we design our cities poorly and allow whole sections of the world to grow unimaginably rich while others languish. This tendency, known as "uneven development", coincides in the last quarter century with a tendency of the global economy to draw the countrysides into increasingly massive and dense cities. Mexico City is a classic example, but Port au Prince was too. And there, in that overly dense place saturated with low income laborers, cheap landlords and corner-cutting builders made their score. The combined effects were tragedy when joined with an act of nature.
Earth thought 212 of 365 : The tragedy in Haiti was horrific. But the tragedy under the Gulf of Mexico is still largely opaque. People respond with empathy to loss of human life and of livelihood, but the lives of others, of fish and bird, of sponge and mollusk -these are largely veiled as if by a deep sea of consciousness, cloudy and fading from the light.
Earth thought 213 of 365 : The trick with multitasking is to let go of inessential things; stuff whose omission might inconvenience, but which is simply not important in the long run. To clear out time to address big environmental problems, I find it helpful to multitask in that way.
Earth thought 214 of 365 : What do popular environmental films like Avatar do? Is it even an environmental film, as commonly described? Avatar engages in a fantasy by which eco-centric beings beat the military-industrial complex. Wish. Not just because these beings win -seldom do the colonized have acts of nature to help them- but also because the problem is hardly that simple. We aren't just fighting steel-cold greed. We're fighting pervasive ignorance and unconcern that shaped our institutions at a time when few thought we had any pressing need to be environmentally minded. To take one example, the founding fathers of the U.S. Constitution did not foresee a world where term-limits and lobbying can substantially thwart long-range planning for environmental matters that don't carry a present cash value. They weren't being greedy -they were just unconcerned out of ignorance. And countless of our institutions are like that.
