No More FireFlies

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If you are paying attention at all and not a Trumpster that denies climate change, the earth is in a lot of trouble....

Some scientists want to shade the sun to cool down the earth. Reading this, I imagined all of  us sitting in a cold dark blizzard saying "Someone screwed up!". Have you learned about the sixth extinction? Scientists are warning about insects and other animal life dying off.  We are screwed, I am old, I at least won't see worse of it. Sometimes I think it's good some of us never had children. Who wants to bring a new person into a world that is collapsing on every level?  The insects are dying off.  When 75 percent of insects die off, there's a major problem.

There's some serious stuff going on. India just reported a heat wave last month, where the temperatures were in the mid 120s, don't things start cooking at just a few more? I know chicken will cook slow at 180.  Europe is experiencing an extreme heat wave this week. Where I live, June wasn't too bad, but now the heat and humidity have kicked in, it's housebound time. The New York times reported that the migration out of Guatemala is drought and heat inspired. As a kid in the 1970s, I remember being given warnings about how the planet would be in trouble and how bad things would get. Well those things are happening now.

We basically are killing off habitats of animals so they are in more danger then ever before. It's kind of messed up how humans can screw up so much. As for any would be deities and earth "creators"... Isn't it piss poor planning to design a planet with a species with the ability to destroy the whole place just trying to keep itself alive and entertained? Why are our food and energy needs wiping the place out? Why can humans make more babies then the earth can sustain? I never knew how fast humans could get pregnant until the Duggars came along, it really showed the importance of birth control. Something is wrong with that.

Many areas of the world are very crowded. China and India are approaching a billion and a half in population. Once I returned as an adult to a place I lived as a kid. It was a suburb of big metro city, but it had at least 10 times more people. The crowds were scary. Today, I live in a nearly empty fly-over state full of wilderness that is more well known for people leaving then moving here. It was shocking. Let the cold scare people away from here, overcrowded states always have the rent skyrocket!

When I was a Christian I used to get in arguments with people who told me the world was not overpopulated. It seems they simply paid no attention to the world around them. How much in denial are these people? Everywhere is far more crowded then when I was a child. 

When young, I loved the woods and while woods were limited to "parks" in the very urban city of my middle childhood, I would go out and hang there as much as possible. The peace and quiet were wonderful. Collecting rocks and leaves were ways to pass time. There seemed to be a spiritual feeling in the woods of calm and quiet, especially with no bears or wolves to worry about in that area. 

Nature is kind of closed off to me now due to disabilities. There's no walk along the lake shore or hikes in the woods. I can't walk more then a quarter of a block on a walker and even that's pushing things. Books like Walk Across America were wonderful to read, with the sights, scenes and people that Peter Jenkins met. Another book was Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, that explored communing with nature.  Today outside of some scenic views one can see by car in my area, and a local Nature Center where I birdwatch from indoors,  most of my contact with nature is via books and nature shows on television.

One isolated positive asset of my family, was there was enough money to go on vacations, I got to see Boston, New England, and the family went out West staying at Best Westerns in a 1980 Suburban. We made it out to Utah and Colorado. I didn't know that then but this would be the most travel I would get in my life. Travel is beyond our financial means. Outside of a good friend that has taken us on day trips to neighboring large cities, travel is a foregone conclusion in our household. This means missing out on some nature scenes. I still have some photos of the trip out West with the mountain peaks and Yellowstone scenery.  There were a few camping trips in earlier childhood where we would go to a Harper's Ferry campground with a pop-up camper. I would run away and disappear into the surrounding woods and parks and go play with stranger's kids as much as possible.

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I had some time in nature as a young adult, I lived in a tent at a Girl Scout Camp which is now closed sadly, for two and half months. Some of my day was spent in the arts and crafts tent as I was hired to be the arts and crafts director, but also served as a counselor in the evenings. There was time to traipse around the woods there, which I enjoyed. I centered a lot of the crafts on nature too having the kids make plaster molds of found objects in nature and painting rocks.

When I was in the woods, in one state we lived in, one of the parks had this stream full of fish, and rocks galore surrounding this stream, and I would follow it, collecting rocks.Watching the leaves change color also invigorated me. When I was kid, teachers had us collect butterflies, leaves and rocks. I don't think kids do this anymore. One time in fourth grade, I found a giant moth, that looked like the one in the picture, and it was the star of the day at my elementary school. It helped make up for the gross out scenes of tossing insects into jars of formaldehyde and sticking pins through the middle of them. With my rock collection, I still have my child hood rock collection, it was added to my present day adult rock collection. Now the pieces of granite and marble I found, sit nestled next to geodes, fossilized wood and thunder eggs.

There were times alone in nature, I had spiritual moments, that were hard to explain to others. Later Christians would warn me against  communing with nature. Nature worshipers were supposedly "pagan" and on the hot slippery slide to hell, as they felt at "one" with the outdoors. As a young adult, I would realize my transcendental tendencies, which I later returned to brought me a lot of joy.  One thing I think happened to our world is that civilized people have lost any connection to nature. The industrialization of agriculture separated human beings from the dance of the seasons, and even growing food being mindful of the importance of nature disappeared.

A man the other day said to me, "Remember when we were kids, and you'd drive home from a trip even on a highway, and the entire windshield would be plastered with insects?" I remember, with horror, he was correct and that one simply did not see this anymore. One thing I do remember as a kid, was seeing tons of fireflies, I saw them both in Virginia and Ohio and even as a teen in my present state. Those are now gone. I see a very rare one, but it's rare. I know they don't exist in the numbers they did when I was young.

One thing I learned about myself, is living in huge crowded cities, drove me nuts. The noise of other human beings even with my hearing problems wore me out. I felt crowded all the time and over-stimulated. One thing that helped me mentally was moving to the rural town in the middle of nowhere. I still miss the quiet there, though I obviously do not miss the extreme religiosity, politics and lack of resources. There we lived near a huge park, and would go to it weekly but the place was so rural, my apartment parking lot was constantly full of deer. We once encountered a giant snapping turtle three feet across, that had wondered from a neighboring lake down the street from the huge park, and got it out of the middle of the road. Too bad, there was no camera to take it's picture.


Where I live now is far more crowded but one can get to some woods within 5 miles driving north. There's country and farms, only a few miles south of me. This is considered a rural area just not as rural and remote as where I once lived. Huge cities are not for me. The noise, the smog in the air, the crowds all influenced me badly. There were times in Chicago I thought I would lose my mind, as the cacophony around me never ceased. Everything seemed complicated too, like there was too many choices and everything was too far away.

They paved over everything in my cities I returned to as an adult that I lived in as a child, though a few parks were still intact. I even remember my present smaller town from the 1990s, and it grew bigger and sprawled out with more parking lots, almost to the point I didn't recognize anything when we moved here. My husband was born here and grew up here.  During my lifetime, seeing so many beautiful areas turned into subdivisions, parking lots, office parks, malls and later strip malls which are now emptying around here, was disappointing and heart wrenching. In one city I lived in as a child, they shredded some woods I explored to put a 6 lane highway through the place.

With overpopulation, even when I was a fundamentalist Christian, I adamantly disagreed with then fellow Christians about overpopulation. The world is a lot more crowded then when I was a kid. There was far more people. Even remembering the world population was 6 billion when I was a teenager and now had become almost 8 billion was a fact I could not ignore. I don't get Fox news watchers who deny what they see in front of their face. Back in the 1970s, overpopulation was a big deal. Now no one cares. The religionists of many religions all went nuts, and protested birth control and sensible scaling back. The Vatican preached against condoms and birth control for the third world. All these people are fools, who have ushered in more pain and suffering for our world. Here power and money, run the train. There are people on the right wing , sounding warning cries for declining population, because there may be less cannon fodder and underpaid serfs to be had. Don't think the recent attacks against reproductive rights aren't being fueled by the elite for their own agendas.

There definitely is a growing disconnect with nature. Too many think too technology is going to save the day. While we do have growing technology, the rest of society isn't catching up. Workplaces are still run like 19th century fiefdoms, there's been no evolving of authoritarian institutions for humanity to progress down a positive path. Religions say no to new economic ideas and limits on population. I don't think technology will save the day. Even climate change is such a huge issue, and our money system is so centered on enriching the few, that having scientists even have the resources to invent CO2 scrubbers that work or build enough desalination plants for water-poor regions, just isn't going to happen. One scary thing is that humanity is going to need to figure out that it is part of nature, instead of going down a destructive path that could lead to our extinction.The present path is just not sustainable.