As my final semester winds down, I am spending a lot of time with friends and colleagues. The extended gang of teachers and administrators from Poetry Inside/Out held our end-of-semester meeting yesterday. We read a few poems, shared a meal and much laughter, and generally celebrated our latest successes and my contribution to the program, which is coming to a close.
Departing is such sweet sorrow.
I’m frequently told how easy life is for me. Always by people who think life is difficult for them, as they go on to explain.
According to these tortured souls, life is hard because they haven’t made the necessary psychological commitment to the notion of a world economic collapse. And I have, so I have it easy.
Now that Barack Obama has been hanging out in the Oval Office for a whopping two weeks, he’s starting to show his true colors. Turns out those colors aren’t bright blue. They’re purple, with a red tinge. Obama has bought into the Calvin Coolidge notion that, “The business of America is business.”
Animal populations increase in size in the absence of constraints. Classic ecological examples include extirpation of all native predators (consider white-tailed deer in much of the northern United States, for example, now that humans have removed their predators). In our case, ready access to cheap fossil fuels alleviates constraints such as famine and pestilence. Like all animals that overshoot — that is, outstrip resources — the human animal will undergo a large-scale correction. The longer overshoot persists, the larger the human population becomes, and the greater the requisite correction. The Club of Rome was right, way back in 1972: There are limits to growth, for economies and populations.