Coyote Crossing

take stegner’s angle of repose with you.  i know, it doesn’t touch on all your points, not by far. 

have a good trip.

Very nice essay.

I would take issue with one comment, though:

You wrote “And all of our environmentalist culture is predicated on the notion that change is continuous.”

I would suggest that many, if not most, environmentalists are well aware of the concept of “tipping points”.

But your point about sustainability is well taken.

Thanks,

- Steve

Given the conditions you specify for the hurricane (by the way, I think it’s a tornado in the original version), I don’t think it would take billions of years. Just a couple of hurricane/tornado seasons. 

Also, once the complex machines started influence each other, that could speed the whole process up even more.

Yes! Very well argued. You written on this theme before, I think, but this is the best formulation of the argument I can ever remember seeing.

I would suggest that many, if not most, environmentalists are well aware of the concept of “tipping points”.

Many, Steve, sure. I’m not sure about most. I’ve certainly run into quite a number who aren’t, and I’ve been a professional enviro for a couple decades, so I run into a lot of them. Us. Whatever.

There’s also the issue that while folks may be aware of the concept, they may not have applied it to received wisdom in the environmental field.

Greg, you’re right about it being a tornado in the original. I blame Neil Young.

If you were fortunate as I was on Monday evening to hear Amy Goodman interview Lawrence Ferlinghetti on “Democracy Now”, he touched on this very point near the end of the interview:

“AMY GOODMAN: Lawrence Ferlinghetti. So what about the state of the world today and our role in it?

LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI: It’s rushing over the cliff. I think practically all of Congress is totally ignoring the ecological crisis fast ascending on us. I mean, and so many people have even refused to see Al Gore’s movie—and I’m looking forward to seeing the new one, The Eleventh Hour—because people think that, “Oh, the calamities aren’t going to happen in my little corner right now. It might happen fifty years or a hundred years from now. I mean, my house isn’t going to be swept away. Or my house isn’t—or my life isn’t going to change. I’m always going to be able to drive to work.”

But it could change overnight. The ecosystem is so finely balanced that it could go out of balance overnight and crash like a computer by tomorrow morning. And not a single presidential candidate for the next election seems to have any really potent ecological program to save the world from this ecological disaster. “

I recommend reading the transcript of the remainder of the interview - personal history of the dawn of the Beat generation and the post-war world, words of wisdom, a compelling and indicting poem on the state of our nation, and a fascinating account of him meeting Neruda and Castro in Cuba in the late 50’s.

Once you hit terminal velocity, things seem very stable.

Awesome essay, and just wanted to say so! :)

Doesn’t recent research suggest that the clovis people and the megafauna were both wiped out by a meteorite impact on the laurentide ice sheet around Younger Dryas times?