"...Pahk yuh kaah..."

I guess my mother will be happy to know she succeeded at making sure I didn't have a significant New England accent....

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland "You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
Boston
The West
North Central
Philadelphia
The Northeast
The Inland North
The South
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

putting things in perspective

Hmmm... As i mentioned a few posts ago, I got laid off a week ago. I hate job hunting, but even if I find no job for the rest of this year, the money I've made so far makes me wealthier than 87% of the WORLD's population.

Wow. Where do YOU stand?

I've known for a long time that we Americans take our wealth for granted, but seeing that really brings home how much of a disparity there really is.

Wow.

I don't think there's ANYTHING we could not achieve with our nation's wealth if we really wanted to do it.

A look at the past... or future?

Not far from where I live, the towns of Dana, Greenwich, Enfield and Prescott were evacuated to make way for Quabbin Reservoir in 1938. The people were scattered among various other communities, their houses removed except for the foundations, their cemeteries transplanted, their way of life completely re-arranged. The acreage of the towns themselves -- what isn't now underwater -- was ostensibly annexed to neighboring towns, but much of it is state-owned conservation land protecting the reservoir's feeder streams. Even a railroad and state Route 21 that used to serve that area are gone.

The maps are quite telling (look in the lower right-hand corner): 1938 vs 1939.

Today, I visited what used to be Dana Center. It's accessible by way of a generally passable, still paved road that's closed to car traffic, with grass and moss growing through the cracks and potholes. (On the 1909 map (the first link above), that's the route from Nichewaug through Dana and down along Pottapaug Pond, which still exists as a de facto arm of Quabbin.) A hike of a mile or so through forest that's still reclaiming old farmland at the edges takes you past a modern portajohn, a couple of small trails leading to stone house foundations, a locked hut containing some old signs, and a big rock outcrop I first thought had a stone wall atop it, but found to be a great place to write.

Typical of New England towns, Dana Center had several buildings focused on the town common. I can only guess at what they were from their foundations & my knowledge of NE towns, but I presume the one on the north side, fronted by horse hitching posts, was Town Hall, the one on the west side was a church, and those to the south were houses or shops (or both). The only modern element of the scenery is a stone memorial reading "Site of Dana Common 1801-1938. To all those who sacrificed their homes and way of life. Erected by Dana Reunion 1996."

What did those reunion folks think when they saw the foundations of their homes after all these years? How did that differ from the ideas of their kids and grandkids, who never knew Dana as even a place on the map?

Part of me wishes the reunion folks had also erected something (say a diorama) that would give visitors a guide to who owned the homes and what the Common area really looked like then. But most of me is glad they didn't -- this way we get to see what really happens when nature reclaims things. Dana 2006 is a nice escape from modern society -- lots of sound, but all of it wild: birds of various kinds, bubbling brooks, fish gulping insects on the reservoir's surface, wind in the leaves. The only sound of civilization is a passing plane; this place is far enough in the boonies you can't even hear cars on the nearest state highway.

In some respects, especially with the nonsense going on in the Middle East bringing to mind questions of what kind of future we'll have, walking through Dana today could be a tour of the past or a premonition of the future. Will there be a time when our descendents walk through modern-day towns and see them being overgrown or even crumbling in ruins? If so, why? Will it be because we consciously chose to move to cities or to reduce our population, because some illness struck many of us down, or because we went nuts and decimated ourselves in some brutal manner?

We'll find out ... maybe in the near future.

Back in the game...

Hi, all,
(If anyone's still visiting this blog...)

I know it's been months since I last posted here. Some you have seen comments on your blogs, so you know I'm still alive; and I've seen a few blogs I used to visit vanish. (Tara? Tonya? Where'd you go? Hope you're still OK.) My day job has pretty much coopted much of my writing inspiration, but I'll try to get back to posting here at least weekly or so...
Anyway, that said, on with the show...

Today, I got a post from a list I'm on that included the following line:

"Reduction to a mere physical survival will reduce our
existence to pure boredom. And what do we do with our souls then? We
have to live and, if necessary, to die for what we believe in."

I basically agree, but think the issue we need to isn't so much personal survival as collective survival. If we as a species don't correct the problems that are now fueling ecological destruction, religious apocalypticism, and the ever-present risk of nuclear war, the whole concept of revolution will be meaningless. Of course, making those changes is itself revolution.

The key as I see it is showing how such changes will increase the well-being of future generations. People need to learn that surviving this year, while important, is less so than ensuring our grandchildren & beyond have a world they can live in, be a part of, and, more crucially, have a role in, rather than separate from & superior to, as our culture not-so-subtly teaches. We need to be able to frame the changes, which will be very culture-shaking and to many people demoralizing, as positive and growth-allowing (not in the overpopulation, economic or material senses, but in the long-term, intellectual, spiritual, health, and other senses).

For that to work, people need to see a wider goal, have an outlet for pent-up frustrations that Taker society breeds. I believe that outlet is space: We need to change our attitude regarding Earth to one of nurturance AND to tap the adventurous elements of human ability.

Some people may say such expansion just exports Taker attitudes, but I disagree -- LIFE itself expands whenever it has the chance, and there are VAST spaces out there with little or no life that may be perfectly suited for colonization without any need to invade and impose a rapacious culture on them. In Earth's history, life has done this without our help, but for Earthlife to survive long-term, our help is necessary, because eventually Earth will become uninhabitable by any lifeform. Homo sapiens will certainly be long gone by then, but whatever species are our intellectual descendents deserve an opportunity to live. Maybe they'll thank us, maybe not.

Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee #, and others, suggest that Earth's overall capacity for harboring life has already peaked and is in its long, slow slide toward death, just as an individual person eventually gets old and dies as body systems shut down. I believe that's one reason intelligence, language, and tool-using capabilities evolved when they did, as the only long-term hope for life to continue, and human adoption of that kind of responsibility would certainly be a far more uplifting philosophy than the object-centered, self-centered, or imaginary-being-centered philosophies/religions/political systems that have dominated human civilization.

Some see a Leaver philosophy as being diametrically opposed to civilization (see, for example, most of the writing here), but I don't. It's just opposed to a certain KIND of civilization, and for change to be successful, people need to see that they aren't losing the benefits of civilization, but gaining benefits of another kind that will make up for some of the challenges the transition period will inevitably bring. The change ahead needs to be a conscious effort to change, to select what we keep and what we discard of Taker society.

We CANNOT let that transition be a "collapse" on a global scale in which most of humanity that survives returns to medieval, neolithic or hunter-gatherer lifestyle; doing so would be a denial of the gift of intelligence evolution has bestowed upon us and our responsibility toward other lifeforms long-term. Given how much of Earth's fossil fuels we've used, it might also make it impossible for a future species to do what we haven't yet done, since fossil fuels are reasonably a crucial stepping stone to space travel. (It might not; Ward and Brownlee suggest Earth has maybe 500 million years in which animal life can continue to flourish. That might enable the fossil fuel supply to replenish itself, but wouldn't our doing it right when there's room for error be better than forcing a future species to do it out of desperation, or, worse, to evolve the intelligence to realize Earth's dying and can do nothing about it?)

BTW: Taker and Leaver are references to Daniel Quinn's Ishmael & related books. In brief, "Taker" refers to a society that believes its way is the only way to live and that humanity has the right (even the duty) to dominate other lifeforms for our own benefit. In other words, our mainstream society. "Leaver" by contrast is an attitude of "live and let live" in which the fact of their existence gives other cultures and species their own value and right to survive independent of whatever usefulness they might have to us. For more info, visit Quinn's main site or one of many forums, such as IshCon.

#-- I'm almost done with this book and will be reviewing it here soon.

ALSO: Having glanced over the old posts, I see a LOT of spam, so I think it's time to enable that word-verification-thingy (of course, they aren't real words, but *shrug*)... Hope it's not too much of a hassle.

Intro.../ Rating System

For most people, the concept of doom, apocalypse, holocaust, the potential end of civilization as we know it, isn't high on their thought radar screen... but maybe it should be. We probably can't eliminate all life on Earth, but we have the capacity to eliminate ourselves and several other species, and that should cause serious reflection.

I for one LIKE living here, so I certainly hope it doesn't happen and believe we MUST do whatever we can to prevent it from happening. Despite this blog's title I am NOT a person who believes that such catastrophe is inevitable, that Earth would better off with humans extinct (as one old guy once told me while I was canvassing for Sierra Club), or that some god will come save his favorites and leave the rest of us to roast. As far as the latter goes, I find salvationism an incredibly irresponsible, narcissistic concept that in fact fuels the threats we face and divides us when we need unity to deal with them.

This blog is a look at the literature, film, and other expressions of apocalypse (mostly books, fiction and otherwise). We'll summarize and look at how realistic the story is in the light of modern technology and scientific knowledge, how well the story is crafted as a piece of writing, etc., or, if non-fiction, how accurate and clearly-presented the science and/or political arguments are. We'll also occasionally look at real-world events that might have an impact on our chances of having or avoiding a holocaust.

One caveat: I will review almost anything, and have several dozen books already, but have no interest in financially supporting fundamentalist ministries, so I will NOT buy books published by such ministries. If you already have an interest in this subject, I bet you can guess some of the ones I'm referring to -- the Left Behind series, for example. If someone wants to send them to me free, I'll read them, but I won't pay for them.

I'm doing this because, although there are several good apocalypse-related sites online (see some of them in my links list, and I welcome others), I've seen very few that do more than rank or briefly mention the books/films they list. Not here. I hope to spark some discussion of the concepts these tales contain and how they might help us find a way out of the mess we're in...

*************
ADDED MUCH LATER:
It finally occurred to me you might want some explanation of the rating system, so here it is. All reviews are rated 0 to 5 stars as follows:
0 = Unbelievable dreck with no redeeming qualities. Has to be REALLY bad to earn this one; I can't think of anything I've read in years that does.
* = Don't bother. Fundamentally flawed in numerous ways.
** = Fair. Its problems outweigh its good points.
*** = Good. Interesting and well-presented story and characters outweigh whatever flaws it has.
**** = Excellent. Strong characters and plot; plausible science (even if speculative) and psychology; realistic, etc.
***** = Masterpiece of the genre. Not just a great apocalypse story, but a great tale of humanity, fact or fiction, with some unique quality that stands out.