Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
dohboi wrote:Warning about real dangers is 'doing something,' imvho.
Newfie wrote:Tanada,
Some examples of "something proactive" please. Not sure which direction you are going...activism or preparations or??????
Also, I'd like to point out "well educated" does not always mean "smart". It MAY mean someone who has suffered many years of indoctrination and who is a firm adherent. I would argue that many "well educated" folks are woefully equipped to understand the world.
I would like to see some measure whereby people could be assessed on their ability to understand complex and dynamic systems.
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
dohboi wrote:We don't actually need more farm land. There is plenty of food to go around now. The problem is mostly distribution and food choice.
Mostly we need to be turning land that is now ag back into prairie, with rich biodiversity. It has been shown that this is among the most effective ways to sequester carbon. And yes, you meat eaters can have some of the bison that can be allowed again to roam in these prairies, but leave some for the wolves, please. And mostly, most of us will most of the time be having to eat mostly plants.
(And the more people who choose all-plant diets, the more meat there will be left for the die-hard carnivors, so the latter should definitely be cheering on the former, rather than berating or belittling them! )
I think you will want to move vital functions and more and more populations further inland. Why bother going through that twice. I'm thinking Atlanta, Richmond and a few others in the South, and places like Pittsburgh and Scranton in the North.
I do agree that we should be improving and extending canals, locks and damns to insure plenty of low energy (if slow) transportation around the country, at least in the East and Midwest where navigable rivers are relatively plentiful.
Not that any of this will absolutely stop really bad things from happening, but there are all sorts of ways we could be helping human and non-human communities be a bit more resilient and a bit less fragile in the face of the enormous challenges both will be facing going forward.
Reducing vast disparities in wealth distribution is also a well known way to make societies more resilient, but not a strategy that is equally popular with all crowds, for some reason...
dohboi wrote:It's not just about preserving habitat and ecosystems.
We now have pretty well forced the future to come up with a way not only of drastically and totally eliminating carbon emissions from their energy and ag areas, they will also have to devise ways of sequestering vast amounts of CO2...and native grasslands are one of the best ways to do it, especially in these latitudes.
Native grasses have up to 90% of their mass underground, with roots often going down 15 feet or more. And since they die back and get easily buried in snow, in the winter and early spring months, albedo stays very high (versus forest, for example).
We desperately need to reduce both population and unequal distribution, and to change most people's lifestyle into (mostly) vegan diets if we want any chance of feeding anything like the whole population. But much land is needed in the mean time for this vital role of re-sequestering at least some of the carbon that we have so foolishly ripped out of its deep, safe, sequestered deposits and vomited into the atmosphere at rates of ten + of billions of tons a year.
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