"He said his interest in the secondary recovery of silver had been one result of certain computer models that had been given wide circulation in the early nineteen-seventies, using differential equations to link such things as world population, pollution, resources, and food, and allow them to swim forward through time, with a resulting prediction that the world was more or less going to come to an end by the year 2000, because it would run out of resources." From John McPhee's compendium of his geology books, Annals of the Former World, page 105. The predictions turned out to be way too pessimistic. A piece by John Cassidy in the most recent New Yorker reports that, if the United States had to rely on just its own oil resources, it could get by for an entire four and a half years.
At just this point in history, the United States embarks upon an unlimited military adventure that will be very costly in its use of resources, especially oil. (I say unlimited not because the Iraq situation is unlimited but because the rationale for action in Iraq justifies about an invasion a year for the next decade.)
The Roman Catholic Church is experiencing a major shortage of clergy, as the priest population ages. Dioceses are consolidating parishes.
At just this point in history, Rome tries to place firm limits on the role of the laity in church services and stridently rejects any widening of the priesthood to include women and married people.
What these have in common: in both instances, major institutional change is necessary and inevitable. In both cases, that realization prompts a spasm of frantic activity to maintain the systems that cannot continue to work.
Reform means developing the models for the new world, carefully and quietly, someplace off in the corner. When segregation was accepted practice, the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee was holding workshops in which African Americans and other Americans met on conditions of equality and friendship. In a thousand places throughout the world, people are meeting and organizing on new principles of resource use, of friendship, of power-sharing.
The little furry things stayed mostly in their burrows for many years, eating roots. Then, when the thumping up above died away, they emerged and finished off the last of the eggs.
Posted by shea0017 at October 8, 2004 8:59 AM