I've noticed this year just how quiet it's been. I used to get woken up by all the bird calls, especially in the spring time. Now it's just low level background noise.
The dull and distant bird calls feels so empty, especially since it's been replaced by the continuous hum of air conditioning units and lawn mowers, the violent sounds of vehicle engines with the low rumble of rubber tires and other sources of human activity which never seems to end.
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He notes that now most Americans don’t expect to be “better off in five years” — a record low .... Four in five doubt that life will be better for their children’s generation than it has been for theirs, also a new low. And ... support for capitalism has fallen among all Americans, particularly Democrats and the young. In fact, among Democrats under 30, 58 per cent now have a “positive impression” of socialism; only 29 per cent say the same thing of capitalism.
This is bad news for Sharma as a strong supporter of capitalism. What has gone wrong? Sharma says that it’s the rise of big government, monopoly power and easy money to bail out the big boys. This has led to stagnation, low productivity growth and rising inequality.
It's painful watching capitalism's faithful trying to figure out where their magical system went wrong and why its results aren't benign. None of what's happening surprises capitalism's critics or the cynical exploiters who still benefit for now, but its loyal cheerleaders keep cheering even as their lives, societies and planet fall apart and a voice in the back of their mind wonders, "why doesn't this feel good?"
This may well be some day known as the Anthropocene epoch or something similar, but it's not really time to make that determination now. Geology deals with the measurable result of huge spans of time. To say that we're currently in a particular epoch makes some assumptions about the future. They may be well-founded assumptions, but that's not quite the same thing as layers of rock and fossils, which is what we look to geology for.
This kind of reminds me of the fuss about Pluto not being a planet. It's a technical determination. It doesn't mean humans aren't having an impact on the planet, or that Pluto isn't a significant object in the solar system.
You can call this the Anthropocene all you like, but you might have better luck trying to apply the term formally to a science that doesn't first require a few million years to go by so we can actually look back and check and say 'yep, that's the Anthropocene epoch'.
Geology doesn't actually require any amount of time to delineate different epochs, and the clear and measurable changes that have occurred clearly set our current time apart from the Holocene. Microplastics contamination, climate alteration, and atmospheric composition changes due to fossil fuels makes us extremely geologically distinct from 11,000 years ago, or even just 300 years ago.
I don't claim to know where that line should be drawn, but lumping our current world together with the Holocene just because it wasn't that long ago in geological terms, doesn't make sense. Knowing nothing about our current society, looking at rock 5,000 years ago and rock from now, geologists would think some catastrophic changes had occurred.
I mean, it kind of needs time for there to be enough of a layer. You're talking about a science that looks at the distant past and asking it to talk about at least the next several thousand years before they happen. It's not the place to do it.
Something catastrophic could happen that makes the impact of the human-derived section of the layer we're currently putting down miniscule by comparison. It's unlikely, but the point is that we don't know yet.
Geology isn't really a good medium for activism of that particular variety.
Good luck ever getting Alberta to chill out on anything oil and gas related. I've only lived in the province since 2017 and I've already given up hope that even the most sensible people are capable of seeing climate change for what it is, and not just as a dirty trick by the Liberals in Ontario.
The issue is how deep people's roots are in the industry. It's been the lifeblood of the province for decades, and generations of people now have worked in the industry and lived exceptionally well because of the industry, even with no formal education. Oil and gas is cemented as both an ally and a way of life for most Albertans.
It reminds me of Appalachia and the coal industry, though the key difference there being that Appalachians earn a fucking pittance and Albertans are living in 500k houses with F350s and very little to worry about, so long as the industry doesn't take a hit. So now imagine trying to convince these people that the tar sands have to go.
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