- PLANET OVERWATCH: grass roots awareness

Grass roots surveillance of large-scale activities. Urban renewal, urban forestry, tectonic remediation, covered cities, elevated walkways, solar power. 

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1106222/

LEARNER full text (2024) and chapters

All or nothing, PeaceWorld or death

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1106222/

APPRENTI texte integral (2024) et chapitres

Tout ou rien, Le monde paisible ou la mort

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WORLD WAR COVID
From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
Learner, begin

- PLANET OVERWATCH -

 Per Al Gore, we face several emergent phenomena: 

·      Global Mind: a computer-based network of planetary awareness;

·      Earth, Inc.: national-capitalism taken to its extreme of pathocracy (rule by psychopaths). This is my definition, not his.

·      We might add Peak Ecology: the exhaustion of key Earth resources like healthy soil, breathable air, good water salt and fresh, climatic stability, biota, hydrocarbons and ores.

·      Finally (and well beyond the scope of Gore’s vision), we must organize Learners to sort out this Raft of the Medusa and rework it better.

Instead, environmental desecration takes root in the politics of disinformation. Paradoxically, it becomes a mania of “conservative” doctrine. Reactionaries cause as much harm to foreigners, to children and to the natural world as they can get away with; the same way bull sea lions trample any cub that gets in their way, silverback gorillas trash the undergrowth when pissed off, and other primates cast their dung at passers-by.

This nonstop environmental desecration brings on unprecedented meteorological disasters — and perhaps additional tectonic upheaval. Massive reforestation would soak continental surfaces with a little more water and slow the global melt and aqueous redistribution of millions of tons of it, which could buffer some of these cataclysms. 

Past civilizations sealed their fate by denuding bottomlands and forestlands nearby. Worsening weather and famine followed close behind. 

The Chinese have an expression for abusers of this kind, whose shortcomings (lack of compassion and failure to perform propitious rituals) bring on environmental disaster, and its opposite for others wise enough to avoid them. The latter retained the “Mandate of Heaven” while the former lost it. Like Rousseau’s “general will” for governments in the West, this mandate became the only valid endorsement of an Oriental government. Those without it automatically lost their legitimacy. Revolution was not only inevitable in this case, but mandatory to end governmental abuse and its environmental fallouts.

Multiple on-site monitoring groups and volunteer public inspection teams will augment governmental and administrative overwatch agencies for high-risk projects on PeaceWorld. 

We should draw an important distinction here. People invoke environmental regulations like the Superfund to clean up hazardous waste sites. Yet these efforts are incredibly crude. Most remediation projects use high-pressure water, superheated steam, dredges, bulldozers and toxic chemicals to scrape everything away — the good, the bad and the ugly. They accomplish little more than this, for eventual disposal in leaky dumps, out to sea or in poor countries.

There is no proven way to dismantle a worn-out nuclear reactor — much less the 500-odd commercial ones and who knows how many more scientific, military or covert for other reasons? 

Much of the billion-dollar Exxon Valdez cleanup was either value-neutral or injurious. It was ordered anyhow, for its propaganda value, per Jeff Wheelwright’s Degrees of Disaster – Prince William Sound: How Nature Reels and Rebounds, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1994. Here we are, a generation later, and ExxonMobil has yet to make good its fines while the environment continues to bear its stigmata. “How best to remedy environmental disaster? Hire more lawyers… and judges!” 

Not to mention the Gulf of Mexico, or Fukushima, or planetary disasters to follow evermore nightmarish.

Eight complementary remediation paths suggest themselves, (the last one perhaps the most important).

1.     Eliminate lifestyles, technologies and corporations that produce the worst pollution. Among the worst, military technologies (see http://www.uwec.edu/grossmzc/schrinrj.html) as well as the manufacture of private automobiles, motorboats and their fossil fuels, plus agroindustries based on trial-and-error genetic engineering as currently malpracticed;

2.     Shut down the worst point-source (factory-type) polluters preemptively. Subsidize less funky technologies. 

3.     Regulate potential polluters to minimize their negative impact. Mandate dependably closed systems that recycle industrial toxins and lock them in impermeable membranes. 

4.     Stock sufficient emergency containment and clean-up equipment on-site at all times. This would include double-hulled and bunker-hulled oil tankers, inspected tugs with certified crews at every tanker landfall, and containment buoy systems in every port. 

5.     Research alternate energy sources and substitute as appropriate. Learners who share this topic of passion should focus on every scale from top-to-bottom of energy management: botanical, biological, ecological and social, as well as deader sciences that run on nothing but algebra.

6.     Stop disrupting natural recovery. Beyond isolating and collecting clearly specified layers of pollution, accelerate post-disaster recovery only when it’s feasible and safe.

7.     Determine if biochar, agrichar and terra preta can be engineered on industrial scales to produce high-carbon soil supplements by the millions of tons while drawing a lot of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/08/100810122030.htm

8.    Unforeseen new technologies?

The supertanker Exxon Valdez lacked functional radar and a wary bridge crew. Its corporate bosses lied about their state of preparedness long before and after the disaster. The ExxonMobil Corporation (with others such as Mitsubishi, giant agro-combines, precious metal and timber extraction companies) have spearheaded the most destructive environmental policies their Masters of Business Administration could dream up. May they and their ravenous investors recognize the insane trade-offs they’ve made between short-term profit and the hardship of their children in the long run. May they experience a massive change of heart and make amends.

In the future, bridge-mounted video cameras will scan the instruments, crews and surroundings of supertankers and other vulnerable machine assemblies. Distant hobbyists will oversee them, the equivalents of today’s ham radio operators. Professional on-site crews and home-based amateurs will share the chore of monitoring control centers across many signal frequencies, telltale panels and control panels currently developed as “glass cockpit” aircraft controls. These Virtual Monitors will have access to complete on-line Operations & Maintenance Manuals, pre-filed contingency plans and e-published Emergency Guides. Randomly scheduled inspections of on-site monitoring equipment will ensure against malicious tampering. The primary goal will not be to guarantee procedural minutia, but to track down institutional negligence in the long run, and, in the short, head off multiple simultaneous system failures that had not been foreseen early on. Then broadcast Red Alerts: “Bridge crew of Exxon Valdez: Red Alert!”

Once an alarm went off or was disabled, word would go out on the Overwatch Network: “Something interesting is happening at XYZ address.” Scrutiny would then intensify as more monitors checked in. Like good journalists, these international hobbyists would make it a point of honor that every incident within their purview got reported before it turned into a disaster. Alerted locals would gather to witness on-site incident response in person. 

Michael Yanitch is Dutchsinse at https://www.youtube.com/user/dutchsinse. Several times a week, he reviews the latest geophysical activity on Earth: earthquakes, hotspots and volcanos. Based on his review of seismic databases on Google Earth, he makes earthquake predictions for the upcoming week or ten days, surprisingly successful ones. In the future, others will apply his techniques to their own discipline. 

Spy satellites will serve as periscopes for these future hobbyists. Some observers will specialize in a certain type of structure or industry, (for example, nuclear power); others will become regional specialists. Through obsessive observation, they will memorize every detail of their chosen specialty and take note of anything out of the ordinary with microscopic precision. 

Learners will survey PeaceWorld much more minutely, with the intent to sustain it, than the CIA and its international equivalents surveyed WeaponWorld with the intent to deceive effectively and not be deceived in turn. Nowadays, we still don’t know the general nature of this planet (more familiar with the surface of Mars than with the deep ocean floor, and even more so than with the microbial ecology in each human being). In the future, we will know better.

This said, merely because modern means can pry into everyone’s personal privacy, that does not mean we must submit being stripped of it. On the contrary, new, very detailed laws will let consumer protection groups and individuals detect and report those who intrude into their personal privacy without a signed authorization, and sue them easily and painfully for their misdeeds. Legal precedents have already been established for unauthorized photo portraits and leaked medical records. The rest of the private sphere remains to be barricaded in the same way, as was brilliantly legislated by the EU in 2018.  Merely be a question of fastidious attention to detail, as with every future topic of passion on PeaceWorld.

Virtual monitors will register their topics of passion in a public register listing in detail their points of focus and the time they’ve spend on each of them, with the intention of revealing those who might misuse this information. These records would lead investigators to whoever plotted to do harm. A majority of honest monitors will make it a point of honor to identify and isolate those who might betray their topic of passion.

Lastly, many Learner investigators will specialize in the preventative study of “worst case scenarios,” those that financial interests ignore to avoid costly preventive measures (as with Fukushima, the Titanic, Deep Water Horizon and its Taylor Industry ghost, etc., etc.). If a majority of study peers confirm such Learner warnings, their remediation will take priority over deficient plans already set in place. Otherwise, the project will be dropped until adequate guarantees can be financed. Fukushima reverse-engineered to prevent it.

Across the planet, elite battalions are on standby to be dispatched with their high-tech weaponry almost anywhere on Earth within a day or two. Why are so few professionals assigned to respond to ecological disaster? Are good government, pure air and clean water so bound together that no written guarantee is called for? Fat chance. No one can afford to waive rock-bottom guarantees of personal protection. The future world constitution will list them in black and white. Dedicated, independent overwatch officials – mandated to exert the full force of the law without favor or prejudice – will back up these guarantees. Anyone who gives up such protections should expect to be crapped on as often as they are lied to and beaten without redress.

Throughout history, those who controlled the water supply ran everything else. China, Egypt, Babylon and other hydraulic civilizations flourished by regulating the course of waters. Entire civilizations collapsed when ecologically unsound policies, that might have seemed profitable in the short term, induced unintended consequences in the long run. Multi-year famines resulted, then plagues, wars and all too often annihilation soon thereafter.

Such errors will dwindle under Laocracy that calls for absolute private equity, personal emancipation, elaborate safeguards against exploitation internal and external to the nation, and a lot more free time to philosophize. It will require that we raise rare and beloved children into healthy adults and that an enlightened public heeds ethical warnings in order to ward off unintended consequences. Finally, massive majorities will have to cherish Learning above all. 

Laocracy may have evolved among subsistence hunter-gatherers; it flourished thereafter in the irrigated fields of prehistory, despite the Plant Trap’s sentence of hard labor. Egalitarian societies arose spontaneously among subsistence hunter-gatherers. Insofar labor-intensive agriculture permitted, they remained in force among farmer-warriors. 

No matter how backbreaking the daily toil, everyone sought their fair share of freedom and justice. As among earlier wolf packs, tyranny unchecked invited collapse.  Large-scale, gravity-fed irrigation systems were surprisingly delicate structures that required lots of hard work from all hands. In a single night of furious payback, a few disgruntled farmers could wash out the most elaborate irrigation layout. No one could be denied an equal part in the allocation of water and other privileges without jeopardizing the whole. 

All too often, pointless torture and execution of whole families may have been invoked and carried out. This abuse never silenced the perpetual demand for justice, at least not for very long. 

In ancient Indochina, the best leaders were taught the following tenets. The king had to maintain the lightest control over his districts; the district chief, over his villages; the village headman, over his households; and the senior householder, over the members of his family. The saying went: “The Emperor’s law stops at the village gate.” It could not cross that gate without burning it down sooner or later, thus confirming its own incompetence and losing its benefits. This was plain common sense: an iron rule of social cohesion.

There is a tight correlation between freedom and clean water. When clean water becomes so scarce it must be boiled, metered or sterilized before it can be drunk safely, freedom is in danger. China revealed this tendency thousands of years ago. 

For the first time in history, we face the same problem with clean air. Weapon managers look forward to turning all the air that’s fit to breathe into a marketable commodity. That would just splice another cable to those that bind us already. 

Face it: oxygen is a 100% lethal addictive drug. Going cold turkey from oxygen (or water, or protein, fats and carbs) makes withdrawal from heroin seem like a serious allergy. What’s more, our bodies turn oxygen molecules into free radicals that rust out human cells and wear down their telomeres in a cumulative demolition derby we call “aging.” 

Of course, once enough Learners reach this conclusion, that will put an end to the Prohibition of recreational drugs and reveal the serial stupidity and self-interest of its fat-cat hierarchs. Profits derived from that criminalization fuels a multi-decade sprint to fascism that has come to maturity across the planet. 

This Second Prohibition reminds me of the Roman persecution of Christians. 

Both lacked a valid precedent, good motive and just purpose. Both promoted grand and petty crime, elite hypocrisy and contempt for government. Both contradicted fundamental liberties and jeopardized global peace. Both became playgrounds for sadists, brutes and tyrants. Both were wasteful of innocent lives, their productive effort and good reputation; at odds with vital institutions; and eventually unenforceable when confronted by spontaneous mass resistance. Both were invented, organized and perpetuated by psychopaths with the passive consent of their conscience-driven, info proletarian victims.

Corporate hirelings have not turned free air into a controlled narcotic yet, because they haven’t monopolized its supply and thus inflated the expense and legal risk of breathing it. Give them another generation of private automobiles, fossil fuels and suicidal over-industrialization to make natural air unbreathable to let them turn the trick. The hyper-disastrous finale of Fukushima might achieve the same result under a global rain of radioactivity. I can hear them bellow: “We must protect the children from this insidious danger” by locking them up by the million and throwing away the key. Wait, they’re already doing that…

So-called “recreational” drug use has been routine among humanity for at least the last 10,000 years. The Dutch policy of gedoogbeleid (lit. "policy of tolerance") will be seriously considered everywhere, wherein that drug use is illegal but tolerated under strict guidelines, provided no other crime results. That would include all “recreational” drugs.

These days, we face an ever-worsening resource base. Almost any drink is better than that which flows from the tap at growing expense. Go and take a sip. Chances are, it is at least slightly toxic and tastes awful. Middle-aged prostates give up in despair and fertility indices collapse. Children’s test scores document this decline as youngsters’ brains suffer cumulative damage from over-chlorinated wastewater and dissolved lead, as well as airborne contaminants that only massive forests could purify. 

Big forests do just that: they attract and soak up torrential downpours that wash out the ash, dust and smoke from the air. They metabolize useful components and let the rest flow quietly out to the sea.

Industrialists gloat over the average person’s preference for their expensive soda pop, powder mix beverages and bottled water, over tap water. One TV ad crowed that its over-sweetened brown pap is to America what water had been to ancient civilization. That attitude is sickening, literally and figuratively. 

No stream, lake, aquifer or catchment basin is safe. Rain falls as a vile corrosive more and more radioactive. Snow bears its own toxic burden, even on remote mountainsides where sparkling streams harbor the fecal contamination of wildlife suffering from recent pandemics of their own. 

Washington State’s Puget Sound was once a sylvan nursery for gray whales and matchless marine life. It has become their graveyard. Gray whales swim into the Puget Sound and succumb to liver rot. Yet this region has one of the most stringent quality standards for a body of water of its size. Even Lake Baikal, the sacred Eye of God that once held the purest water on Earth, has been deep-pumped with toxic effluents for decades, thanks to Soviet industrialists staring down Stalin’s firing squads. 

Despite cleanup efforts, or perhaps because of them, our urban waterways are open sewers. Across the globe, marine mammals crowd the shore to commit suicide, driven crazy by inflamed sinuses. Ask any congested diver or airline passenger how bad that hurts. Their immune systems (and ours) are compromised by tons of dioxins, PCBs and other toxic chemicals that lace our air and water. Plus three times more background radiation (five times now, maybe more?) than the Earth has experienced for millions of years.

Once-fertile farmlands undergo two destructive processes. Real estate developers acquire the best bottomland, pull up its native growth and pave it over with buildings, parking lots and roadways. What agricultural land remains is soaked with industrial herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers. As a result, the soil’s organic balance is shattered. Once-fertile soils turn into sterile clay to which plant nutrients must be added synthetically. Lacking organic binding, loose soil erodes at irreplaceable rates. It slimes our waterways with oxygen-depleting muck saturated with artificial fertilizer. This in turn chokes the life out of rivers and seas through microbial overgrowth and its lethal die-off. 

We have been conditioned to prefer greasy, over-processed foods over “healthier” raw vegetables. This bias is neither thoughtless nor accidental. Our digestive disorders worsen when we consume dangerously contaminated raw foods. Modern pesticides, antibiotics and radioactive toxins (and worst of all, genetic tampering) resist ordinary food decontamination techniques like washing and cooking. The human digestive system took millions of years to adapt our bodies to natural foods. What’s more, the millions of years plants took to develop toxic defenses against herbivorous attack have been refined by thousands of years of artisanal agriculture, centuries of industrial ag, and dozens more of recent genetic engineering. It would take another million years for us to adapt to those contaminants in our over-processed foods. 

Agro-corporations encourage this bias. They carefully sterilize over-processed foods and allow greater and greater toxin loads in raw foodstuffs. Their ultimate goal? Turn pre-processed, high-priced and irradiated foods into life necessities for everyone three times a day. 

Public health officials ignore this trend, even though food irradiation and genetic engineering schemes menace us with insidious medical disasters. 

Fresh food bestows life; food long dead imparts obesity, diabetes and gastritis. Irradiated and long shelf-life foods should be minor consumer items reserved for emergencies. Otherwise, most foods should be bought fresh, lightly cooked and chewed slowly and hungrily (hunger being the best sauce) on the same day. This nutritional habit is a peace requirement practicable at current scales of consumption only under pure peace parameters. 

For example, the baker’s insane ambition of turning good bread into bread that won’t go stale in day. Good bread only lasts one day and then goes stale, at which point it can be turned into “French toast.” The attempt to square the circle of bread with a long shelf life merely creates the American epidemic of gastritis currently dubbed “gluten intolerance.” Might as well call it “idiocy tolerance.” Not to mention the addition of sulfites and God knows what other pollutants to wine — on orders from fat beer lobbyists, no doubt. Overpaid idiots…

Not satisfied with strip-mining the Earth of its mineral wealth, corporations strip-mine our health, talent and dreams; our bodies of their healthy appetite; the air and water of its purity; the soil of its fertility; and culture of its good sense and empathy. Very little has been left to embezzle, short of our life, liberty and happiness. 

We rely on “factory farming” for cheap meat. Livestock is trapped in cages so small they can’t move, or in mass pens intended for far fewer beasts. Their brief existence is spent buried alive – their sickly bodies fattened on powdered animal flesh, antibiotics, hormones and other noxious additives in criminal quantities – before mass slaughter cuts short their nightmare. 

Road rage and spillover criminality may result from eating meat seasoned with such unsavory compounds. Surely a God of Irony would reincarnate consumers of such grisly foods into a “factory farmed” animal existence for the next few life cycles, if only as a lesson in good manners. And any corporate CEO who drives his indentured farmers out of business unless they farm in this manner, merits an even worse fate as part of his Karmic lesson plan. 

The worst outcome you can arrange for someone you despise: his misery, the fading of his children and his grim death: those are outcomes you are destined to reincarnate into. A simple rule of Karma.

Perched as we are at the summit of the food chain, our immune systems are overwhelmed by a cumulative load of toxins. We suffer from an internist’s nightmare of allergies, nausea, diarrhea and constipation, vertigo, gray-outs, panic attacks, headaches, chronic fatigue, lupus, respiratory ailments, diabetes, infertility, cancer, fetal and neonate mortality. Public health officials blame all this sickliness on smoking, overeating anything but cauliflower, failing to exercise and hating ourselves. Thus they deftly subtract themselves from the cause/effect equation and forsake significant improvements to hygiene, real nutrition and preventive public health. 

We are left with numbed minds, irritated nerves, wills eroded and bodies exhausted. In the absence of superb public health, mental decay, violence, denial and neglect must worsen; apathy, inertia and fantasy come to dominate our thinking. Constitutional protections lapse as the commonwealth decays. 

As you read these lines, the ozone layer unravels and the sun itself bears a lethal frown. Once-healthy outdoor lifestyles offer nothing more than skin cancer and early onset blindness. 

Please get your kids to wear good sunglasses, long sleeves and a shaded hat when they go outdoors! Slather their skin with sunscreen at every opportunity. They will thank you later, for your annoying interventions, when their colleagues come down with lethal skin tumors by middle age or go prematurely blind.

We are facing many serious problems: institutional inertia, laughable education, criminal rampage and pandemic disease ... If clean air, rich soil, vigorous forests and pure water were freely available, and if we benefited from them without regard to weapon requirements, a surprising number of these problems would dwindle to mere irritants. 

At Mt. St. Helens and elsewhere, nature has demonstrated her remarkable resiliency. After major pollution sources are shut down, faltering ecosystems recover spontaneously. Many more delicate and/or seriously damaged environments cannot restore themselves without our assistance. Don’t count on natural regeneration, however, until we shut down most of our toxic outputs or until nature takes a break from our spoiled-child tantrums by wiping the slate clean and starting over from scratch: bacteria and such. Do we really want to reincarnate into bacteria another few trillion trillion trillion times?

Clean air, soil and water will become Learner priorities. Dedicated environmental agencies will arise under a supranational World Court and alongside enthusiastic local Administrations. They will:

·      census air, soil, water and bodily contaminations impartially; 

·      shut down persistent offenders; and 

·      enforce new environmental regulations. 

Deliberate polluters will be bankrupted by withdrawn subsidies, public boycott and punitive taxation, the proceeds of which will finance effective controls for less sloppy industries. A convicted polluter will occupy his toxic site until it is certified safe. Whatever the cost, we must shut down runaway pollution; tear out and rebuild obsolete transport, garbage and water systems; flush out and repurify aquifers, rivers and lakes. 

Halfway, feel-good measures are no better than doing nothing at all. False economies here are as worthless as starving to death to save on the grocery bill. 

Massive reforestation is essential in every territory that once hosted large forests. Vast stretches of Yellowstone, America’s premier National Park, burned down a few years ago like a slum-corner convenience store. What more warning do we need? We were told this disaster was only natural; the fifty years or so it will take to grow back are “acceptable.” Assuming, of course, the rest of the Park doesn’t burn down in the meantime, leaving us a cinder desert where our greatest park once stood. 

Actually, Yellowstone is a giant volcanic caldera that threatens to blow clouds of volcanic glass across the entire country. We are talking about a thousand Mt. St. Helens exploding at once, with yard-thick ash falls a thousand miles downwind, plus nuclear winter whatever the season. Could this be the natural end of every overgrown species? My hunch: a thickening veneer of climax forest across the globe might be the only living thing that could hold this type of catastrophe in check. 

Every river and coastal region should be edenized. Climate shifts for the worst have coincided with biohabitat simplification along coastlines, river lines and edge zones of climate, latitude and altitude. 

The annihilation of Viking colonists at the feet of North Atlantic coastal glaciers may have resulted from growing herds of sheep and goats that overgrazed the ecologically fragile shores of Iceland, Greenland, Canada and Scandinavia. Subsequent puffs of volcanism and the subsequent Little Ice Age? 

World edenization may moderate the worst effects of our pollution and its climate extremes. Our grand project to become ecologized should reinforce heroic efforts to become civilized.

The cleanup of urban areas will include the following tasks, but not necessarily those alone.

·      Break up built-up surfaces pointillistically in urban zones. In other words, perforate hard surfaces with topsoil plugs and replace entire avenues and city squares with parks and greenbelts. Economies of scale would dictate that vast areas be devoted to this project, not just median strips and a few holes in the sidewalk. Isolated urban plantings – like trees lining a road – have a harder time surviving than mixed stands of vegetation assembled in a park. This does not mean we should stop planting roadside trees. On the contrary, a single row of one variety should be interspersed with other species. 

·      As transportation costs go up and urban air quality improves, urban agriculture and rooftop gardening will become attractive business propositions. Urban roofscapes will go under glass in northern latitudes and turn green with plant cover everywhere. Hot cities will whitewash their rooftops and streets to transform themselves into bright daytime stars when viewed from above. Shady greenbelts and greenswards will slash across urban areas. Highways and railways (vacuum mag-levs tubes?) will skirt urban areas entirely or be driven underground where automotive exhausts can be sucked up and filtered. Indeed, following Seattle’s lead from the century before last, cities may pave over their entire ground level downtown, thus insulating pedestrian traffic and amenities from automotive congestion, accidents and pollution. 

·      An interim solution might involve stretching lightweight elevated walkways downtown, threading them above or below urban arteries and letting them span busy intersections. Heavier, stronger overhead byways might accommodate bicycles, rickshaws and other lightweight conveyances. 

·      In addition, seedbeds might be planted where concrete foundations exist today. From these beds, re-architected bamboo structures might grow, equivalent in tensile strength to the steel currently used on-site. By bamboo, I mean vegetation best adapted to local engineering needs.

Ground cover will be replanted along eroding mountain slopes, hillsides and watersheds. Plant varieties will be systematically propagated in every biohabitat. Diversified softwood plantations will be planted along devastated fringes between hardwood and softwood habitats. Climax ecologies will be restored and protected wherever possible. 

Where melted ice once covered millions of square miles, white trees, bushes and flowers will be planted and propagated.

Specially tailored oleophagous (oil-eating) bacteria will attack oil slicks from driveway sheens to industrial and maritime spills. Special trees, shrubs and micro-organic communities will soak up runoff water and persistent toxins for subsequent collection and recycling. Almost every watershed, wetland and beach on Earth will be restored to the best version Learners can make of their natural state. 

Mr. Harrison Ford and his rich, perceptive friends have set aside development-free belts between major wildlife habitats and the nearer pole. These set-asides will permit forests and their animal populations to migrate towards more temperate latitudes as global warming cooks forest-edges nearer to the equator. Once these forests have grown back, they will require fewer and fewer protections and artificial supplements. But until then, those should be multiplied. 

Climax ecosystems are enormous natural pumps that collect water and inject it into the atmosphere as purified rain. Learners will make sure that these organic sprinkler systems work the way nature intended them to. We mustn’t allow them to dry out and heat up much more, or allow the seas to cool off too much as a result of glacier melt … and perhaps spin us into Weather Chaos if we fail to do so.

Solar power is another peace technology weapon managers loathe because it is decentralized, anarchic and anti-combat. On a battlefield, you cannot expect to draw energy directly from the sun. Any energy-collecting machine caught out in the open would get bombed to bits, not to mention drawing the enemy’s attention to its nearby consumers. 

Besides, solar power is a one-shot deal. You buy the panels and set them up (or paint them on your windows) and wind up in the energy business for yourself. It doesn’t require massive, stinking and/or radioactive power plants, proprietary mineral rights and obsolete refineries whose owners impose spiraling service fees on the rest of us. 

Note how petroleum production is at an all-time high by international agreement, gasoline consumption at an all-time low due to the 2021 conditions of COVID, yet gasoline prices are at an all-time high in direct contradiction to free market supply and demand. This would not happen if individual and local soft power utilities came online.

Terra preta technologies may reduce industrial amounts of carbon dioxide and slow down global warming before its atmospheric accumulation cooks us off this planet. In addition and perhaps more significantly, some of the captured carbon can renew exhausted soils. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/08/100810122030.htm 

Trees capture carbon as they grow. Large tree plantations absorb huge amounts of carbon dioxide and hold back greenhouse warming. As old growth biomass collects more water and carbon on land, the oceans might recede, warm up and salinate. Massive reforestation projects may counter the effects of industrial greenhouse gasses that seem to generate glacial melt, marine cooling and desalination. This cooling may interrupt vast deep-sea currents that shuffle planetary temperature variations and moderate the global climate.

A lot of the CO2 of human origin gets sucked into the sea. Unless we reverse that process ASAP, that will turn them into mild seltzer water too acidic to sustain marine life. Long-term effects demand more study, but deeper studies must not delay obvious and immediate intervention. 

In the meantime, the good news is that the nickel in sea urchins shells is a cheap and long-lasting catalyst that turns carbon dioxide into chemically inert calcium carbonate chalk just as readily at sea as in the chimneys of our power plants. Salps are another potential CO2 collector on a massive scale. Plankton and sea life of this kind will have to be factory farmed by the megaton and sown across the sea.

We may need to reforest Texas-, Europe-, Australia-sized landmasses. This project may show little impact until we have buried mature trees in checkerboard acres and immediately replanted that ground with tree seedlings. That might not be the wisest policy; it might cause regional imbalances: too much effort here and not enough there. 

A better plan might look something like this. Children go out into the countryside with their parents on birthdays and other holidays to plant trees and shrubs as part of a religious festival. Similar projects will proliferate. Wise Learners, get planting!

As I write this text, my own hypocrisy grieves me. We cut down two wild cherry trees on our small plot of land. A year earlier, we had planted new fruit trees pruned much smaller. We even uprooted a beautiful stand of bamboo because it encroached on a neighbor’s yard. Afterwards, to ensure against trees falling on our buildings, we cut down or trimmed all of them. I regret those losses. 

The Emerald City Seattle has less and less tree cover every year. Biomass, clean air and shade suffer all in proportion. Urban arborists replace big, old trees with dwarf ones that won’t impinge on overhead power and telephone lines. This bureaucratic compromise contradicts their fondest inclination. Why don’t you plant big trees and bury the damned power lines instead? We urbanites have lost our soul to concrete and asphalt … when all our cities could become gardens! 

There is irony here, if you think about it. The easiest and cheapest way to cool down a home in summertime, or a city for that matter, is to plant shade trees along its sunny flanks. Deciduous shade trees are quite suitable: they drop their leaves during winter and allow the sunlight to shine through when it’s cold out.

Even though we may not know exactly what to do next, we could set our pace step-by-step back onto the right path. Gaia should see to the rest — and perhaps to our long-term survival. 

In any case, if humanity must engineer its own demise, we should leave behind compelling proof of heroic attempts to correct our worst errors, just as the vanished Minoans left us the moving testimony of their magnificent artwork, just as I leave you this draft of Learner. 

If I could get it engraved on the interior walls of massive desert pyramids, I would. Instead, it is recorded in evaporative pixels.

Whether or not we kludge along in mediocrity is matter of indifference to the universe. It would be more important that we unite in peace, act heroically and leave behind a sterling record of fine achievements, no matter how fleeting or everlasting. 

If ancient peoples thought about such things, I suppose they believed they belonged to the Land, (Vietnamese Xa), as Xa belongs to nature. Later on, various phantasms entangled us (pretend or truly sacred? Who can honestly tell?): God(s), chains of ancestors, sovereign states, ideologies, bureaucracies, Freudian or holy trinities, deconstructionist simplicities, simplifying nihilism, the next tomfoolery. 

Of late, we don’t belong to anything. On the contrary, everything and everyone belongs to the most tormented among us, for whom anything goes without regard to consequences. The more harebrained and vicious their schemes, the worst the disasters that unfold from their clumsiness without follow-up correction, the stronger that makes them because it made them richer. They bring to mind ten-year-olds who got hold of the car keys: gasping, screaming and laughing their hysterical way through a horrifying series of near collisions since the car hadn’t stalled yet. 

It is time we recovered our sense of belonging, the way a lost child is brought back to parental arms. Time we regained calm competence and wisdom instead of playing Russian roulette with the world, blinking blindly from panic greed and failed inspiration. 

Global reforestation could restore our sullied habitat to a semblance of its primal purity, soothe disastrous weather patterns and promote edenic diversity. Who knows? Edenization might moderate tectonic disasters and help heal the atmosphere and the oceans. This may be our last chance to make amends for environmental abuse. At the same time, we could bind each other’s social, physical and psychic wounds in our common withdrawal from misery. 

Uruk, Babylon, Love Canal, Chernobyl, your hometown: the list of dead-end ecocides could stretch out real long, real fast.

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