Are you like me? When riding down the road and I see a piece of woodland newly clearcut, or dozers and heavy earth moving equipment playing in the soil where corn grew, or alfalfa, I go, “What the hell now!?” Are you like that too? I assume most of us have a conservative streak when it comes to changes to a landscape we have grown up with and love. To some degree this conservatism must be a protective measure, a resistance against that which we don’t know versus that which is familiar and comfortable. Humans have very little protection against the rate of change built into the system they have unwittingly devised. Even our zoning laws are meant as much to legitimize change and future development as they are to protect. Zoning laws only get you to the next revision, and the next. Look at the south side of the village of Montgomery. The village is being compressed in an inexorable vise of industrialization. What was a red barn on a rolling hillside of green grass is now a twenty-seven-acre building with a concrete block retaining wall to rival the former World Trade Center’s foundation walls. In fact, the footprint of the World Trade Center complex was 16 acres; the Montgomery Medline building is 27 acres under one roof.

The passage of time dulls the impacts of these irreversible changes, as those of us with memories of the previous state of things pass and are replaced with new humans who have no memory of the “way things were.” “Oh, that big building? Sure. That redlight? What of it?”

In 1968, Paul and Anne Ehrlich published “The Population Bomb.” (There’s a copy of it down in the cellar in one of those boxes of books and artifacts from my past life, in one of those jumbled, decaying, frayed boxes of personal history in a state of hell, all interspersed with bee boxes and hive frames in the cellar without end, the cellar with a mind of its own, like the inside of a rampant AI robot intelligence out of control.) At the beginning of the Age of Agriculture, 10,000 BC, the world population may have been 10 million. By the start of the Industrial Age, 1800, there may have been 1 billion people on the planet. The year of Ehlich’s publication, 1968, the number of Homo sapiens was 3.5 billion and the growth rate was 2.05%. The number of people on Earth today is 8.1 billion with a growth rate of nearly 1% per year. World population is projected to be 10.4 billion by the end of this century. That means for every person alive when I graduated high school there will be three. My grandfather, who was in many respects an old socialist, a man fighting for the eight-hour day and against child labor, never saw the problem with population growth as a standalone topic. He believed the Earth could sustain unimaginable increases in the number of humans – just think of how many could live on the plains of Kansas alone, he said. The real challenge, he argued, was what would be the quality of these lives? How would the wealth of Earth be distributed? He was a locomotive engineer and within that came a natural belief in progress and technological advancement. Of course, technology in his time was mechanical; technology today is electrical and computational. The speed of change has greatly outpaced our rate of population growth, outpaced the imaginations of all humans except the sci-fi futurists, and, some say, outpaced our ability to contain it.

All of us have a mental image of the subsea BP oil pipe gushing oil into the Gulf of Mexico during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill fiasco. Leave alone for a moment the existence of the huge gumbo field of heavy oil covering 1200 square miles of the sea floor. Imagine, if you will, all the hydrocarbons mined on Earth coming out of that one pipe. With all the changes humans have tried to make to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, with our solar panels and wind turbines, and mis-guided nuclear plants (what a dangerous way to boil water! The threat of unhinged sabotage alone should be enough to put the kibosh on the thought). With all that and more to come, the capacity of our single, global wellhead increases each year from 1.5 to 4%. Humans are not decreasing their usage of oil; they are increasing it. In 2023, worldwide oil production reached a record 101.8 million barrels per day, up 2.3% over 2022. Projections suggest another increase in 2024 to 103.5 million barrels per day.

Our inability to grasp infinity is the same as our inability to fully understand that 99.9% of all the species of life that have ever existed on planet Earth (and, by extension, all known life in the Universe) have suffered extinction. There is nothing within the natural world to suggest Homo sapiens will follow a different fate. In fact, evidence suggests we are hastening our own demise. In 1945, Albert Einstein and various members of the Manhattan Project founded the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and 1947 the Bulletin wound up the Doomsday Clock, a metaphorical expression of how close mankind is to Midnight, in other words, to human extinction. They started the clock with 7 minutes ’til midnight. The Doomsday Clock has been reset backwards 8 times. But it has been set forward 17 times, and as of January 1st, 2024, we stand at 90 seconds until Midnight. The Bulletin considers nuclear proliferation, climate change, and other manmade effects which could lead towards world-wide catastrophe. This week’s concern is that Putin, in violation of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, is planning to take nuclear weapons into space. He wants to be able to disable all communication satellites with one atomic explosion, one electromagnetic pulse (EMP).

To be continued...