Being in the Right Place at the Right Time

Two things, Climate Change, and Man’s Inhumanity to Man, have begun to weigh into the world’s make-up.  Carol and I have begun remarking about timing and how we have actually been fortunate. Now we are old, at this age, old by any definition. So, we don’t have a long term horizon staring at us. Instead, I guess, we have a bundle of gratitude, because the world allowed us to do and see things that might now be less easily accessible.  Now, to be fair, many of these same things continue to be available, so I would counsel folks to take notice. Before your own personal time runs out, act. Put that Bucket List to work and do and see the things you may have simply dreamt on.

Carol and I have been fortunate. We both originate in families that had limited resources. And we all know that resources often dictate what we do, or where we might visit.  Personally, I grew up in a broken family, with a working mom who worked hard to bring in the resources needed to feed and house her kids. Until I was about 12, I never ventured farther from Manhattan than say The Bronx.  And even after she moved us up to Rockland County to live in New City Park, it still kept me within ten miles of the city. So, I had not seen much of the world through my high school years.  Carol pretty much the same, although she lived just outside New York City.

And then I abruptly zoomed out of New York to reside for a time at Stanford, maybe 25 miles from San Francisco.  Imagine that.  And why would I do something as far-fetched as that? Well, my sister had dropped out of high school at Julia Richman to enter the work force during WW II. But she thought that both her brothers needed to go on to finish college. So, she convinced me to attend Stanford.  And so, suddenly I was resident on the West Coast of America. And guess what? Climate change had not yet dropped into the San Francisco Bay Area. So, we enjoyed reasonable day-time temperatures. And if there were forest fires they were relative rarities, unlike today.

But my point here is that timing is important, but action really is everything. We live on this spinning globe for a limited time. Some of us, perhaps most of us, will elect never to examine much of the globe, preferring instead to live a calm, limited life.  My own personal experience suggests that we might want to expand our horizons a bit and opt for a more expansive view of life on Earth. Seeing our globe is to better understand the humans who reside therein.

But, to return to my earlier premise, carrying out that more expansive view may be as much luck as energy levels.  The world continues to change over time, and much of that change is determined by humankind.

For example, many regions of our globe are beset by evil doers, trying to assert their control over ordinary folks. The Middle East is perhaps the prime example of that phenomenon. In 1964, we managed to travel to India and stop on the way in Beirut. It was really our very first excursion outside the United States. We found Beirut amazing. The people we met everywhere seemed happy and just delightful. Even our various taxi drivers seem to revel in happiness. The city was lovely and, for us, quite exotic.  But this was in 1964, as noted. Today, Beirut seems on the verge of collapse as a civilized place to live. It has been drawn into the cesspool of the Middle East miasma.  The entire Middle East seems a region to be avoided at all costs, even for a brief visit.

And then, beyond evil doers, we have the changing of our climate, due to inaction on the part of humankind, despite the increasing evidence, since at least the 1970s. Apparently we humans reject changing our behavior whenever it gets in the way of making money.  And we have been piddling around, mostly talking about the need for changing our behavior, while steadfastly rejecting any actual doing of change.  And while we have been chatting about the climate, the climate has actually been reacting to our collective stupidity.  Slowly but steadily, global temperatures have been inching upwards, sea ice at both poles has been melting, and weather extremes have been occurring more aggressively.  Forest fires, especially in our West, and throughout the Amazon basin have become a new norm, creating whole regions poised on the edge of disaster. Exactly how these phenomena will change our earth over the next 50 years is the subject of considerable argument between scientists and science deniers.  And it should be noted that the science deniers have become a larger and more aggressive collective, mainly fueled by big money, because climate action always suggests the need to change our ways—especially in the form of reducing carbon emissions. That always suggests changes in our technology, especially our automotive systems, and our energy development systems.

And as we argue, the planet does its own thing and begins to change, whether we like it or not.

Now these planetary changes have and will continue to affect regions of the planet. In our West, forest fires affect whole regions, changing the landscape, and modifying our ability to literally see through the mess that fires create.  In one area of California, a town is literally sinking, due to a geological phenomenon called subsidence:

“In California’s San Joaquin Valley, the farming town of Corcoran has a multimillion-dollar problem. It is almost impossible to see, yet so vast it takes NASA scientists using satellite technology to fully grasp.

Corcoran is sinking.

Over the past 14 years, the town has sunk as much as 11.5 feet in some places — enough to swallow the entire first floor of a two-story house and to at times make Corcoran one of the fastest-sinking areas in the country, according to experts with the United States Geological Survey.

Subsidence is the technical term for the phenomenon — the slow-motion deflation of land that occurs when large amounts of water are withdrawn from deep underground, causing underlying sediments to fall in on themselves.” 

With changes this dramatic, I begin to wonder about the future of towns and cities located along coastal areas. What will happen to Florida an entire region surrounded by an ocean that may well begin to capture the land, perhaps bringing it all underwater?  Similarly, cities like New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Seattle may well become threatened over time.

All of this is to suggest that we need to be paying attention. The world around us is changing in ways we do not yet fully comprehend. And some of that world may actually disappear, or be changed in ways that we cannot predict.

Two things occur to me as I write this challenging note. One is that perhaps the Greta Thunbergs of our world are correct. We must act to preserve our planet, or we will find ourselves overseeing its ultimate destruction.  I know, Greta is just a teenybopper, but she seems smarter than most of the fully adult humans who surround her on the planet.  She is warning us, because she will be one of the ones on the planet who may live to see the ultimate effects of our collective stupidity and inaction.

The other observation, which may be silly, is that, if you wish to see the planet, perhaps you might want to consider an earlier rather than later visiting schedule. Some places, as noted, seem unwise, because the resident humans seem too intent on killing anything that moves. But other places remain, for the moment, open to visiting humans. Perhaps earlier rather than later is my advice. Our planet may not be around forever.  So perhaps start doing your research now. Where have you always wanted to visit? Now may be the time.