ecology – Stories That Are All True

I wonder a lot about the future, which is why I was so glad I got to write out my thoughts about it. I’m not a scientific genius, but I do have enough smarts to predict what’s going to happen if we can’t live above ground, or the ground is ruined by radiation. Unlike Fallout 3, there is a brighter future underground, because we don’t have to live socially any different than we do now. It’s our physical limitations as humans that bind us to a huge problem, a lot of whom don’t see there being one and won’t do what’s necessary until their house explodes or there’s a food shortage because our farmland has been nuked.

A lot has been written about our dystopian futures, but it’s all fiction. We’ve never stopped to think about what would happen if we were faced with nuclear war or natural devastation. If the United States is attacked with a nuclear bomb, it would take the ground around it a hundred years to be fertile again. Nuclear treaties keep the world safe for a number of reasons, mostly because world leaders are not able to starve their own people or others if NATO is any threat at all. The immediacy of nuclear war would kill people right away. No one thinks about the fact that their grandchildren and great grandchildren may not get enough to eat because there’s not enough soil unaffected by radiation.

It’s not just bombs. Nuclear power is a wonderful thing right up until it’s not. Things go wrong at plants with the best laid plans. We can’t ignore these things, we have to find a way to successfully live around it. Leaders who wrestle with nuclear war are only thinking in the moment, and I cannot fathom what that discussion was like during WWII, particularly among the Japanese after they didn’t know what hit them.

By the same token, they’re responsible for their own radiation leaks with plants like Fukushima. That’s not to say that nuclear plants are bad and we should get rid of them. Just that for now the technology and chemistry is not capable of defeating human error.

People aren’t capable of acting as smart as they are under the best of circumstances, and the level of intelligence in the room goes down the more people are in it. Groupthink is a powerful drug, as evidenced by the former president’s lovely mugshot. We cannot defeat global warming with anti-vaxxers. It cannot be done if they can’t be convinced that science is real, vaccines are real, and global warming is not a hoax just to fuck with them.

Scientists are not saying that the globe is heating up and will get warmer consistently. They are saying that as the planet heats up, the swings in temperature, air currents, and water level will create chaos. We are not slowly getting warmer at a rate where everything happens concurrently. We are adjusting to a new reality…….. poorly.

The worst part is feeling the politics of all this. Other countries are so much more aware than we are, and so much money goes into making sure we’re as environmentally disastrous as we can possibly be for way longer than we can afford. The oil and gas industry own the United States and we cannot pretend it doesn’t. All climate change policy has to pass based on interest, and they buy out all the votes they want. If you want to grease the wheel, you will. who cares whether it’s legal or not?

We are not the only ones in the world that have a corrupt government, but we’re one of the countries that can do something about it because we aren’t beholden to a monarchy or a despot (anymore). We are also not the only country leaning toward the fascist right, which generally leads to deregulation of all sorts of things. We cannot afford to move backwards, and currently not enough of us are voting forwards. It’s not just the presidency. It’s the congress and local politicians down to the school board. The entire country is centered around who believes facts and who doesn’t. We found out who would justify civil war and who wouldn’t….. and what we found is “more than you might think.” Are we really going to wait until there’s a section of the military that’s on board with a coup? Because this is how you get a coup de etat. It’s not the difference between supporters and non-supporters of the orange gelatinous shitbag, it’s between the people who pick a side and who don’t. If we don’t vote out fascism, we’re going to get it.

I cannot live under that regime. No person of color or queer can. So far, we have no way in some states to advance representation to the smallest degree. The state of Arkansas just passed a ban that high school students cannot take African American history in high school to count for college credit because it might be some sort of indoctrination. “Heather Has Two Mommies” is not welcome in any Florida classroom. I would suggest, before people ban books about persons of color or minority sexual orientation/gender, that they go back to Emett Till. This covers both bases. People can still be killed for whistling at a woman for being black or same sex. Violence against lesbians is very real, although men are more likely to rape us than hit us.

Emett’s story encapsulates everything that’s wrong with our society, as well as what is right in terms of what his legacy has created. I just think it needs to create more by white people recognizing that this country is very much not what they think it is. That’s because all communication in telling the majority they’re wrong is being banned as well. Voting rights in Georgia come to mind.

Perhaps it would be easier to work together on future problems if we weren’t so busy actively trying to destroy each other. The environment is not just physical. Safety doesn’t always correspond to the physical structure you’re in. Sometimes, it’s a feeling. Safety in our society is falling by the wayside. Even the cops are in on it.

Those who study history are desperate for those who don’t to get a clue, but politicians have no idea how to get ahead in the system while also changing it. The government is not built for quick change, and I think that’s mostly good because too much change with this large a population would break most people trying to keep up. That being said, it’s time for more than what we’ve been getting. The planet is getting sicker and only one party cares. Other countries care so much more than we do that we’re an embarrassment.

That’s probably because we don’t have Eisenhower taxes coming in anymore. Government research is not being funded to the level it could be thanks to people like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates. Yes, Bill Gates has a foundation, but it’s not exclusively working on American infrastructure like the country would be able to if the same money came to us in the form of tax. We could spend more on climate change because we have money. But, of course, going to space on a vacation is much more important than funding grants for science and technology research.

We don’t even have government-funded health care, and even with our population we have the money to get it done…. we just won’t. Yet prescription drugs are lower in cost everywhere in the world because buying in bulk for the whole nation makes it where drug companies are only getting a set amount of money for them and not jacking up the price in different areas. There is a marked difference between drug prices even doing the research at home on your own. If you call three different pharmacies, you’re going to get three different answers…. except on over the counter meds. They seem to be about the same price no matter where you go because there’s only so much you can charge for paracetamol.

The question becomes which problem to work on first? It’s people. Nothing happens without buy-in, and we are lost to figure out how to create it.

Meanwhile, we make movies to highlight all the hypocrisy. The reason it’s not getting through is that people either think it doesn’t apply to them or the message is being written off as leftist propaganda.

We had a good thing going in the 50s in terms of the space race and figuring out how to adapt society to move forward. The thing that didn’t is the people. All the racism is still here. All the homophobia is still here. Everything that needs to be weeded out never left, it just went dormant.

You can fix the technology, but you can’t defeat stupid.

As the National Park Service says, “it’s hard to make containers to keep bears out. There is considerable overlap between the smartest bear and the dumbest tourist.”

I think that’s a lesson from which we can all learn.

How would you design the city of the future?

My city would be completely sustainable and small, perhaps even easy to break down and move because global warming is slowly killing us whether we like it or not. Eventually, you may not have a choice whether you live in Houston or Helsinki. I’m not trying to be all doomsday here, I’m just trying to troubleshoot what issues we’re dealing with. We should have researched more about what carbon emissions could do before we built cars. We just didn’t know we needed to do it. We needed time to discover that CFCs were destroying the ozone layer and I had to give up my Aquanet habit until they could figure it out.

(I’m glad they did, but I use a water-based wax & gel called “Gorilla Ear Wax” now. I also have the gel alone and it’s called “Gorilla Snot.” It’s a Mexican product originally, so when I bought it the first time it was because the label made me laugh- it wasn’t in English and I thought it was clever, so why not?)

I thought Al Gore did a great job with “An Inconvenient Truth” and I wish the government had truly listened. I feel that car companies have not embraced new technology easily and therefore have no idea how much they’re going to become completely irrelevant if they don’t change. It will speed up the relentlessness of Mother Nature, because we won’t be able to predict what’s going to be hit next with accuracy in the future because the temperature swings are going to be too violent.

That leads to putting together buildings that have enough strength to withstand extreme temperatures and weather. I feel the that Finns are the best in the world at this because they have to be. They have to have a lot more in place for “oopsie babies” and poor people because the temperature is too cold to leave anyone outside and feel good about it. The construction of their houses usually has the finest insulation available and windows with three panes of glass with argon instead of two. We could learn a lot from Scandinavia about living with extreme cold as much as they could learn about living in heat from me. I’m from the South and I’ve lived in the Pacific Northwest. Ask me anything. 😛

I think it would be smart to learn from the military on how to build down into the ground in the desert and make it comfortable. I’m sure part of it is full-spectrum bulbs in the overhead lights or permission to bring a lamp if you need it. It stands to reason that places like southwest Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona can’t withstand heat if it gets any hotter. They’re going to have to get creative, and I believe that letting the heat pass over you is a viable option. It would also be good for places that experience wildfires. I believe that a lot more houses would survive if the only thing you could see on the ground level is a concrete slab. What else can we do without building an entirely new infrastructure to regulate temperature and acts of God (in the insurance sense of the phrase)?

I’ve found houses built in the US, New Zealand, and Australia on this very concept. The ground provides natural insulation if you can keep your house dry, because it won’t take as much in power to cool your house. The walls will stay cool longer with that much padding. Even in the desert, groundwater is colder than the air above, thus the need for dehumidifiers built into the HVAC system. It is not easily or cheaply done, but it’s amazing how much you adapt when you have to, not because you want to spend that money or DIY that much.

If we’re dreaming entirely new ways of building, the earth will survive whether we do or not, so it makes sense that we adapt to it. It will never adapt to us. Because we already have more technology in living underground than living in, say, space, I think it would be wise to invest as much money as possible in getting it even further along. We could create buildings in the middle of lakes and oceans to naturally cool them. My favorite cinematic wonder in film is the underwater kingdom on Jar-Jar Binks’ home planet. Seeing the fish swim in the windows was just magnificent on the big screen.

I would love it because I am a fish person, anyway. Just not goldfish. They’re pretty to look at but require too much maintenance. I’d probably go with tilapia because they are so plentiful and freely available if I catch my own. Because of course, by now in my head there’s a beautiful underwater house in a lake I’ve filled with tilapia myself. I watch so much of this stuff on YouTube that I’m very Elle Woods about it. “What? Like it’s hard?” I may not be the best at DIY, but I can certainly tell when a contractor is bullshitting me or not. I know what things cost and what’s worth the hype. Insulation with as high an R value you can find is priceless because you’ll hardly have to do anything to keep yourself comfortable. Energy will just keep getting more expensive, and I don’t think it’s a bad move to start making your own. You can run an entire homestead off solar panels and batteries. You can even tap into the grid and make your utility bills negative, but won’t experience a loss of power if your batteries are dead.

The thing about construction and insulation is that you cannot miss a trick. Any leak and the whole concept is ruined. The quality of every material matters, but not as much as the skill of the people doing it. If no one tells you that you need a French drain for your basement in order to convert it into livable space, your basement is going to flood every time it rains. You just won’t notice it until your beams are rotted.

It is very, very hard to retrofit a house, especially where converting basements to living rooms is concerned. If you want a three-story house, you have to know that up front. Retrofitting a house for the proper drainage only sort of works. The only way to do it properly is not worth the money because you’d have to rip everything out. Even more expensive when the ceiling isn’t tall enough and you have to lower the floor to live comfortably.

In other words, basements build to hold Christmas stuff and basements built to hold a gang of teenagers like it’s “That 70s Show” are not the same.

That’s all about building the cities of the future. Using materials that work with the earth to make us more comfortable, instead of insisting that this fight is one we can win if we do nothing long enough.

But in every seed of desperation, there’s a strand of inspiration. We don’t need to let global warming paralyze us. We need to learn to roll with it. I, personally, will deal with it a lot better if I can see fresh or saltwater fish. But that’s just me. Maybe you’re the spaceship type. I wish you peace, luck, and any other color shirt but red on a trek not to be lost in space.

Mother Earth is trying to tell us something, and we are falling down on the job. We have to fix it one way or another. Mine would address it before it even leapt off the blueprints, in my city I build in the future.