By the numbers

Google constantly impresses me. It keeps getting easier to verify wild claims that someone throws at me. So tonight I looked a few things up and, by golly it is not hard to imagine man being capable of messing up the earth.

Let's take it up close and personal.

First we take all the land area in the world, then divide it by the human population; we each get about 6 acres.
Your personal 6 acres is about 1 and a half city blocks. Less than 1/4 of that is suitable for farming. The rest is largely mountain and dessert and frozen tundra.
It is real easy to see how I can affect that much land in my lifetime.

According to Winona Duke, each American's direct and indirect contribution to solid waste is one million pounds per year and 5 million pounds of contaminated water every year.
That sounds impressive, but I am not seeing support for her million pounds per year. The best number I can find is closer to 1500 pounds per year of landfill waste, plus about 40,000 more pounds of CO2, and about 3 million pounds of water.
Ahhh, but that is only on American soil. Add in the stuff we buy from other countries because we prefer that they do the dirty work and create pollution over there. Then add in transporting that stuff around the world. Winona's numbers are pretty close after all.

So...
Imagine if you dump all your 6 million pounds of waste on your own 6 acres.
Without careful management and reuse, you end up living in a smelly garbage infested pig sty.
As long as we buy into our consumer lifestyle, this is what we are doing, but it is mostly in someone else's back yard.

Wisdom of the language

Hopefully this will become a series of entries because there are so many examples of where our language may be harboring a collective wisdom distilled through millions of people over thousands of years.

One example that struck me this morning is "Ignore".
In current usage; "ignore" means "disregard" or "pay no attention to", yet "ignorance" means "to not know".
So does "not knowing" mean that we are actually "not paying attention"?

The teacher was impressing on me this morning that all knowledge is available. We choose to pay no attention to most of it. Some level of ignorance is necessary to play the game we call life on earth.

The take home lesson is that we truly do have the awesome power of knowledge available to us, and it is ok to ignore most knowledge.

Our challenge and our position in the big picture is to make some of that knowledge practical in the here and now.

Thanks, Aina

Truth lies at the point of paradox.

That little message was brought to me by a new friend last week. It elegantly expresses a truth I have been trying to express for years.