Fixing the Problems of Our World
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6. Wheels are the core invention of our species from which all others are derived, transferring gravity and inertia into culturally applicable motion—wagons to clocks to computers. We must let these circles turn smoothly, inertially, making use of their innate shape and receiving the natural bounty of the simplest disposition of matter and mass in gravitational fields. Don’t unnecessarily hasten or override circles. Let them spin at no cost to the atmosphere or non-sustainable resource base.
Creature-drawn vehicles—that is, metabolically powered rigs: bicycles, wagons, wheelbarrows, rickshaws, and shopping carts, one by one or coupled in long trains—are still the most energy-efficient way to move goods.
On this very day windmills and waterwheels blanket the most successful planets in the Andromeda system. Throughout the universe wheels are turning without any evident impetus, moving economies and politics, flaunting eternal motion.
Our dilemma is to develop a global market in which homeless people and street citizens everywhere can be acknowledged as useful stewards, wheeling their vegetables, bottles, rags, papers, and recyclable garbage in shopping carts. They are not an aberration; they are the basis of habitation and ecological transmutation.
Poverty is a harbinger of a different form of wealth.
Bacteria, one-celled animals, bugs, and worms are running economies on their own native wheels which dwarf the macroeconomy by more than a trillion to one.
7. Keep all lineages of plants, insects, amphibians, mollusks, fishes, etc., alive and happy. Every gene and genome will ultimately be needed. This indigenous information pool is our only reserve of anything. Our urbanized lives are based on the unexamined quiddity that the grasses and jungles, topsoil and silt, waters and air are populated, filament by filament, droplet per droplet, molecule upon molecule. Extinguish this living fabric by neglect or gluttony and we might as well be walking on cinders in spacesuits.
8. Global warming has so many separate causes and accelerating factors that it is already beyond political control. Even a worldwide Kyoto pact could not come close to keeping pace with the industrial expansion of one part of one province of India or China, to which one can add the deforestation of South America, the wringing of oil out of the sands of Alberta, the running of air-conditioners and hair-driers in Bangkok and Miami, roadside bombs and other incendiary devises and gratuitous explosions and fires, and so on. Every piece of metal sticking out is a heat coil in the sun.
This crisis needs an unconscious shift at the same primordial level as the production of oxygen by bacteria at the dawn of life. That one triggered a burst of molecular intelligence. The world started under the canopy of volcanic ash and exhaled into a blue sky and clouds with singing worms and lizards.
Are you listening, 2112?
Everything at a global scale is a collective manifestation already: hurricanes, nuclear bombs, ice sheets, war, coffee, cars, cigarettes, TV. New forms manifest when we allow their oracle into our minds.
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