Opinions on many topics ...

Descendants, July 4, 2018

The year I came for the first time to America as a twenty-year young man, the books that were featured in book stores and that I bought and took back to my little village in Germany included "Bury my heart at wounded knee", "Native son", and "Manchild in the promised land".

I learned English with these books. And I realized the extents of the genocides on native Americans and buffaloes, understood the cruelty of slavery, and for the first time saw the white male, who had caused all of this, for who he was and is. I realized that the decendents of those who committed the genocides, lived on the fruits of slavery, took the land owned by others still did not accept or acknowledge their heritage. And not accepting this heritage implies that they cannot see themselves for who they are and they cannot see those who survived the geoncide and overcame slavery.

I am a descedant of those who caused the Holocaust, who were colonisers, and who contaminated the world with the capitalism initiated by Adam Smith. I have accepted this heritage.

Admitting to myself who I am is the door I need to pass through if I want to see others: I will always be a white male, a privileged male, and I will never feel what it means to wake up as an underprivileged male or women.

Accepting who I am is the basis for changing who I am.

Knowing that I will always walk in my shoes and never be truly able to walk in some else's shoes, I understand that seeing others requires me to listen. Only by listening, can I comprehend what they feel, fear, aspire to, desire.

Living with a black woman has made this very clear to me.

I am not only a descendant of those who were before me. I am also a product of my time. I cannot truly comprehend what it means to have been born into another time. Particularly today, where times are changing at a speed unimaginable just a few decades ago, those born in the most recent decades have a very different reality than those born half a century or more ago. And their perspective of their future is very unlike the perspective I had in my youth.

What about those who are twenty years old today? How do they feel? When they are sixty, the biggest mammal will be a cow. What do they fear? I can only begin to comprehend this if I listen to them.

When I was young, the main fear was nuclear war, a nuclear accident. What is it today?

We need to listen. Understand we are the resuult of different experiences. Accept our differences and meet on equal levels.

Work for a future where white boys don't grow up to be superior, privileged, colonisers. Where the descedants of slaves feel worthy and equal, where the survivors of genocides can build new memories.

My thoughts are similar to what Ephrat Livni expresses in “There’s only one way to truly understand another person’s mind.”

Humans and Earth, 26 September 2016

It's all about flow. When humans started to change the flows of elements in the carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, water and, above all, energy cycle, the physiology of the earth system changed. In a dissipative system, the flow of energy determines the system characteristics, and a small change in flows can change the macro - characteristics. Over a long time, energy flowed from the surface system into the crust - until we found a way to cataclysmic reverse this process.

The Holocene, the last geogical epoch that started 11,700 years ago, with its exceptionally stable climate and sea level provided a safe operating space for humanity. We learned quickly not just to gather and hunt what nature provided, but to produce food and more. Despite some pandemics, disasters, and human-caused atrocities, we slowly developed civilization. But growth and change of everything was slow until technology, medicine, and the introduction of economy as we know it changed the game. When with the extraction of oil seemingly unlimited energy became easily available around 1950 the anthropogenic cataclysm accelerated rapidly and changes of many system parameters were 100 to more than a 1000 times faster than on average throughout the Holocene. The stable homeostasis in the safe operating space that was so beneficial for us was replaced by a rapid transition to a new state yet unknown to us.

Today we are using 18 Terawatt to accelerate this transition and most of it comes from the fossil fuels stored in the Earth's crust over hundreds of million years.

When 75000 years ago the volcano Toba erupted and dispersed a total of ... Jules, most humans vanished from the face of the Earth and only a small number survived in Africa. A 1 in 100,000 years event. When Mount Tambora erupted 200 years ago and dissipated ... Jules, it caused wide-spread famine in Asia, Europe and the US East Coast. A 1 in 1000 years event. We are dissipating. ... Jules every year, making us comparable to a Tambora eruption every 10 years and a Toba eruption every 50 years. We are the asteroid causing the sixth mass extinction, and we are causing it faster than the previous ones.

Importandly, by changing the flows, we changed the system behavior. With 1.5 Terawatt in 1900 and 18 Terawatt in 2015 we caused the system to store an additional 320 Terawatt. Most of this, more than 90%, goes into the ocean. If the additional energy had all gone into the atmosphere, the average global temperature would be 50 C instead of 15 C. Humans would only be able to live in a small number at high latitudes.

The additional energy flowing into the system is almost as much as the total global wind energy. This is changing the dynamics of ocean and atmosphere and the flow through water cycle. One particular flow we can expect to increase dramatically is the flow from the land based ice sheets and glaciers into the ocean. Sea level will rise. Using the longterm relationship between global Temperature and sea level, it seems like we have committed already now to a rise of more than 20 m. We do not know how fast this will happen, but it is safe to assume that it will happen faster than in the past when the change in energy flow into the system was at least an order of magnitude lower than today. In ignore-ance of this, we continue to invest in the coastal zone,.migrate there, move our production there, and build the urban coast as if sea level never would change.

And we continue our economy against humanity. Not realizing that economy is the link between our society and the Earth's life-support system, we allow economy to satisfy our needs by killing the life-support system. A medicine that serves our immediate needs and pleasures by killing us is not a good choice. We have become the anthropogenic cataclysmic virus, the ACV, in the Earth's life-support system. If civilization is to preserve, the ACV needs to transform itself into the healer changing the physiological flows on the planetary system back to a healthy state.