The Big Issues: When Should We Stop Burning Fossil Fuels?

I often hear people making statements like - "There is no point reducing my carbon footprint, because anything that I do is insignificant compared to increases in developing countries."

Realistic people convince themselves that this is a realistic position. Sensible people make the sensible choice to enjoy life now before the oil runs out. Rational people come to the rational conclusion that we are ripping ourselves off if we don't gorge on the cheap fossil fuel pie - Nobody will leave the last piece of the pie on the table out of politeness, right?

Sure, we'll move to cleaner, more expensive fuels later, but only when we really need to. You've heard this all before, haven't you?

Working...

This whole blogging thing is harder than it seems - I'm working on 17 different threads, which ostensibly means that I am not getting any of them to a point where I'm happy enough to hit the publish button.

It seems that I'll need quite a lot more focus, but please bear with me - I'll get a rhythm somehow...

For now, I think I'll try publishing a couple of less-well polished ideas - with your help, I'll try polish them on the fly - please let me know if  you're not following and I'll try to fix, or clarify in a comment or follow-up.

Kind regards,

Jamie

The Big Issues: Canadian Tar Sands

Updated

Did you know that over the last two weeks there were 1252 arrests during a sustained, non-violent, civil disobedience sit-in at the Whitehouse?

If you get your news from the mainstream media, you may not even be aware that tens of thousands of concerned people have just finished phase 1 of a protest that surely has ramifications for you and your family. What were they protesting against?

The Little Things: Music

Music is such an important part of what makes us human. I vividly remember the in utero response of my first child to Eskimo Joe. Watching with a mix of wonder, laughter, and love as my wife's heavily pregnant belly bopped away in time, I began to appreciate just how primevally we experience music. I have never lost that sense of wonder, laughter, and love as I watch my children grow into tiny little people with an innate and entirely unselfconscious joy of dancing and singing - even before they can walk or talk.

Music that we like makes us feel good and helps to bind us together as a cultural group. Just what music we like is highly subjective of course, but thankfully it is beyond my ambition to explore that subjectivity today - The mental thread that brought me here is far lighter - I just want to share some cool music...

A Little Thought Provoker: What's up with all the earthquakes lately?

We seem to hear about some new seismic event almost every other day, and from a quick check of the Web I’m not the only one wondering whether the earth might be falling apart...?

The Google-equipped inquisitive mind finds a figurative tsunami of pages exhorting that recent natural disasters are signs that we are in the "End Times". At time of writing a Google search for "earthquakes, end times" yielded literally millions of results (Well, for me it does anyway)

When pondering Sustainable Human Flourishing, religion of all flavours warrants very serious cogitation, so you can bet that I'll share some thoughts on biblical end times prophecies in later blogs - today though, I want to share an interesting hypothesis that I came across in my search for “the truth” about all those earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, etc...