ecstaticist

It is freezing in Victoria and we’re buried in snow.

You know, I get tired of posting gloom and doom stuff…but that doesn’t change the fact that our generation is saddled with fixing the mess of the previous generations. Take the world’s oceans: polluted and abused beyond anyone’s knowledge or estimation.

If current trends of overfishing and pollution continue, the populations of just about all seafood face collapse by 2048, a team of ecologists and economists warns in a report in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.

“Whether we looked at tide pools or studies over the entire world’s ocean, we saw the same picture emerging. In losing species we lose the productivity and stability of entire ecosystems,” said the lead author Boris Worm of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

“I was shocked and disturbed by how consistent these trends are — beyond anything we suspected,” Worm said.

Getting people to recognize and psychologically prepare themselves to make the adjustments necessary to deal with the problems will be the great accomplishment of our times. If we can do it, we will be the next Great generation.

The challenge we face is that humans do not have a truly global consciousness. Globalism is not an evil. It is an absolute necessity. Global mechanisms will foster global consciousness. One of these global mechanisms is global electronic communications. This gives us the information we need from around the world to see what the largest picture looks like.

The next required advance will be a mechanism that helps us turn the font of information we have at our fingertips into a resource of knowledge, and, for once, perhaps we can start to learn prior to making the mistake.

Some mistakes are just too big to fix.

Richard Branson is the latest to jump on Bill Clinton’s Global Initiative train. I think it is only good business for companies like Virgin to be out ahead of important issues.

“We must not be the generation responsible for irreversibly damaging the environment,” said Branson. “We must hand it over to our children in as near pristine condition as we were lent it from our parents.

Branson is a former climate change skeptic that has been converted.

“I used to be skeptical of global warming, but now I’m absolutely convinced that the world is spiraling out of control,” Branson told the magazine. “CO2 is like a bushfire that gets bigger and bigger every year.”

Why can’t politicians lead like this? Because the current strategy in politics is to practice wedge-driving. One of the key semantic wedges right now in the US is the “blame america first” wedge, which climate change activists are always labelled with.

The world is waking up to this issue. Too bad the US government is still administering sleeping pills.

Batteries are increasingly being flagged as a huge enviromental problem. Especially as cell phones become disposable items, the leaching of heavy metals and toxins into the environment from batteries is a growing problem.

In what seems to be a miraculous development, researchers at MIT have devised a way to store electricity like water in a sponge. The technique involves the modification of an electronic component called an ultracapacitor, improving it to hold as much electricity in the same form factor as a conventional battery. Not only that, but they can be recharged in an instant, and they last ten years. (more…)