Maximum Earth

Category: thoughts

  • Fact or Fiction?

    Is there scope to write this as fiction especially if it’s to be for our children’s children? Certainly that approach lends itself to a little more poetic license. Or maybe a sister publication could emerge that’s fiction rather than fact? Food for thought…

  • Are the kids really alright?

    Blue Sky

    Wondering if this can be a children’s book? Seems adults have written children’s books about climate change science especially. However, books like this may not have been aimed at kids.

    Children are going to inherit our problems. Of course, problems and some solutions are well documented but all too often those solutions are rooted in the present.

    What if we, as adults, look though the eyes of future adults: the children and their children’s children. How will they be able to respond to problems of their own days upon this fragile planet?

    It’s certainly good to be ‘solutions oriented’. For instance, so many luminaries are proposing many interlinked crises are already occurring.

    They’re then deriving corresponding solutions for today but, realistically, if the status quo only changes at a snail’s pace (between generations) then what do today’s solutions look like all those years ahead when they finally stand a chance of being enacted?

    It’s not futurology to propose a future context for future solutions to current problems. It’s simply being real. That perspective may sadly be lacking in our jostling and jousting to be The One with all the answers. Let’s, for once, think about the kids and if they really are alright.

  • Mind Map (Of Sorts)!

    Here’s a kind of mind map of a few key ideas currently bouncing around my brain regarding this work. This now needs to be translated into a rough plan eventually leading to a Table of Contents. That’s no easy task given the breadth of concepts herein!

  • Start At The Beginning Or The End?

    So, there’s now a (currently offline) preface (of sorts) for this – assuming it is to become another book length piece or at least borrow from that linear kind of structure.

    It’s a quite personal account of being told by an ‘authority’ at that time of the need to finish what one starts. It’s prompting thinking about limits but there’s more to it than that.

    In the context of this work we should certainly be mindful of limits to ‘natural resources’, for instance. However, there’s something central to that thinking that’s flawed. That is, the conceptualisation of a beginning and an end to phenomena is not always apt being especially dependent upon scale.

    That’s not to say we can always act with impunity towards extraction of capital especially from Earth but that, if we are aware of those limits, it may be possible to work with them rather than against them?

    There may be no beginning and there may be no end. Certainly, demarcating where something begins and ends can be problematic especially if causality is eschewed and again scale must be taken into account.

    For example, if we’re to inhabit other planets in the future can we begin to state that we’ve naturally exhausted this one? In that case Maximum Earth may not be of concern.

    Nature itself cycles. We cycle. Everything may go round and round. Perhaps, ultimately, it’s trying that counts whilst not being unduly concerned about beginning and ends.