Ordered some books last week, about a year and a half since the last time I did something like this, and I just got them today, so I’ll finally have something to read once again, at least for a while. I’m talking about A Dance with Dragons by George R. R. Martin, The Born Queen by Greg Keyes, and Victory of Eagles and Tongues of Serpents by Naomi Novik. This means that I’ll finally be able to get to the end of The Kingdoms of Thorn and Bone, some two and a half years after reading The Blood Knight and a good six years after first discovering the series by reading The Briar King and The Charnel Prince, so this is what I plan to start with. Then I’ll probably move on to the two from the Temeraire series, leaving that monster of a fifth book from A Song of Ice and Fire last. After all, considering the mind-boggling scope and complexity of that series, I’ll need to look up some events and characters before picking it back up anyway, so there’s no loss if I’ll wait a while longer and in fact it could be a good thing to finish the others first, so I’ll be able to take it more slowly with this one and reduce the risk of missing things.
The order was placed through a company that I hadn’t ordered anything from before, namely the Romanian branch of Books Express. That meant that I was slightly suspicious at first, not knowing what they were all about, but they gained a fair amount of points from me when I sent them an e-mail about A Dance with Dragons around 3 AM and they replied within about 30 minutes, if not less, and also immediately updated the information on the site, since the number of pages that’s usually listed for this edition is wrong. I placed the order immediately after that and have been very pleased with how it worked out, so I’ll probably look here first from now on, especially since their prices for the readily available books are very close to what you’d need to pay if you’d be ordering them from abroad yourself, and sometimes even less than that. And they seem to throw in a free bookmark for every book you purchase, since there were four of them in the parcel, which is a very simple but still pretty nice touch as well.
It’ll take some willpower not to start reading any of them this week, but that’s the plan. I obviously kept putting everything off and do need to write something this week as well, so that must take priority, plus that yesterday I found myself needing to leave my room for a couple of hours, went to buy a few more things, since I seem to be able to do that reasonably well lately as long as it doesn’t require any actual interaction, and happened to find a little book about healthy eating that’s very appreciated around here, so I bought it. Thought I’d give it to dad, since he keeps marking such articles in newspapers and saving them, and in fact did so yesterday, but he just left it on top of the pile of newspapers last night and I took it to quickly go through at least the more generic parts of it as well, just to see what it’s all about. So I’ll do this and figure out a way to write a non-personal post, even if it’ll only be a short one, by the end of the week and only then start reading these books I ordered.
I had uploaded the updated version of my little fantasy art gallery quite some time ago, but the link still pointed to the old one until today. That was because I wanted to reduce the number of scripts from three to two and also add some brief descriptions for each author, and in fact I still want to do that, but the new version is fully functional as it is and it does include some small improvements over the old one, so I decided to link to it anyway. I can always make those changes later.
Actually, now that I think about it, there is another minor change that I think I’d like to make. But that’s largely irrelevant for users, so it doesn’t really matter at all whether I’ll get around to making it or not. What I hear does matter for people is changing the background, because I got some pretty adamant complaints about the color and, while I have no intention of changing it for the blog, I guess it makes sense to do without an image background altogether for the gallery. The font perhaps could be changed to a more standard and simpler one as well, so there won’t be anything left that could detract from actually viewing the images, which is what a gallery should be all about.
Otherwise, yesterday was the first day in probably well over a month when I wrote in my story during the day as opposed to late at night, just before going to sleep. Then, since my Internet access was also down last night, I took the opportunity to add a little bit to something else that I’ve been thinking about paying some attention to once again for the past two years or so. Understandably, that was very hard, taking me some 40 minutes to properly type something that I only need seconds to go through in my mind, and that I do go through in my mind every single day. But at least it’s a start…
The results of another study, which apparently took two years to complete and is supposed to feed into the preparations for the Rio+20 summit in June, have been published. It shows that biodiversity loss is off the scale, the nitrogen cycle is completely out of control, climate change has already exceeded the safe margins, the phosphorus cycle is almost at the upper limit of those same margins and ocean acidification quickly approaches unsafe levels as well. As far as solutions go, it suggests giving all women access to family planning, reducing food waste and no longer using GDP as virtually the sole indicator of an economy’s health, concluding that the main causes for these problems are overconsumption and overpopulation.
No shit?! Was it necessary to waste all this time and all these resources on coming up with some conclusions and recommendations that anyone willing to have a look around and think for a moment already knows instead of actually doing something about the problems themselves? After all, it’s not like those in power are likely to do anything more than glance over it and use it in their continuous struggle to gain even more influence and control, hanging on to the points that support their existing views and completely ignoring the rest.
Then again, there’s not much else to do with suggestions like these, seeing as we’re talking about the same old list of politically correct, necessary but far from sufficient measures. Yes, offering access to and promoting family planning will gradually reduce the number of births and possibly end population growth by the end of the century, but by then we’re likely to have at least some 50% more people living on this already severely overpopulated planet, so relying solely on voluntary measures is far too little, far too late, coercive and even utterly draconian ones being absolutely necessary if we are to still have a chance to solve this problem before Nature will solve it for us in ways that will be extremely unpleasant for nearly all living things that call this pale blue dot their home.
And that’s not even the sole problem, as we have another very common but also potentially inefficient suggestion here as well. Now of course we should reduce waste of any and all kinds, not just the food waste that the study seems to focus on, that makes perfect sense and is simply a matter of efficiency, and of course we should also try to develop methods of obtaining the necessary resources without causing unsustainable harm to the environment, but saying that methods must be found to greatly reduce the per capita consumption in rich countries without this necessarily having any negative impact on living standards implies wasting even more time, resources and ingenuity on mitigating the effects of a problem that we ourselves create at the expense of further development and at the expense of our continued evolution, if you will. It implies struggling to stay where we currently are while turning a blind eye on the real problem instead of solving it and advancing further.
Yes, as I said, we have a waste problem, a huge one, and that needs to be solved both because it harms the environment and because it’s simply a matter of efficiency. And yes, we also have a problem with the specific resources we choose to use, seeing as anything that’s not renewable will get depleted sooner or later and anything that requires causing long-term harm to the environment in order to obtain can certainly be said to in fact waste other potential resources. However, both the total consumption and the total amount of damage being done are directly related to population and solving just these problems would be far from sufficient at this time, especially since we don’t only need to stop causing harm but also to fix the damage already caused and realize that, being the most highly evolved species on this planet, we have a duty and a responsibility to protect and nurture the others we share it with.
In addition, it’s completely wrong to say that we have a population problem in poor countries and a consumption problem in the rich ones, as this study also appears to claim. In this age of globalization, the problem is the total environmental footprint, and if you want to take things separately then the only thing you can say is that the rich countries carry a large share of the blame for that and the poor ones a much smaller, albeit currently also increasing, one. This means that, while even some poor countries and communities may already have an unsustainable impact, at least in some ways, at this point we could simplify matters and say that we can keep things in check in those parts of the world by conditioning any improvement in the standard of living of those who live there on a proportional population reduction, putting the pressure on them to solve their population problem as quickly as possible if they want better lives for themselves. However, there can be no such balance for rich or even developing countries and communities, as those already live well beyond their means, so it’s actually in these areas that the population must drop the fastest.
What this all means is that the solution remains very simple: If we are to have any chance of solving any other major problem, we must first drastically reduce the population, and at this point it’ll probably be a much better idea to focus on the rich and developing countries and regions, because that’s the only efficient way to actually reduce the existing overall impact. I don’t even know whether we still have enough time to do enough strictly by drastically lowering the number of births, but I sure wish to get to work on that immediately and reduce the risk of needing to kill or unnecessarily allow people to die, because this is the other option and the one that will be chosen for us if we keep on waiting and shying away from the measures that need to be taken simply because they’d be too unpopular or would go against this or that outdated tradition or dogma.
It’s really as simple as that: The longer we wait, the worse it will be, and we’re long past the time when anything but very drastic measures could possibly be sufficient. As such, we either bite the bullet and start doing what needs to be done right away in order to perhaps still be able to choose how the situation will unfold, at least to some extent, or we’ll find that these choices will be made for us… And unfortunately most of the other species we share this planet with will pay the price for our failure to act even before we will.
As I tend to do each year, with the exception of the last one when I didn’t even do this much, I just want to remind everyone that today is Earth Day. Not that it means much in itself, since not much can get done in a single day, but every little bit can help and certain major campaigns started or centered on such events can actually have significant effects, assuming enough people take part and do it properly.
If nothing else, at least do the little things today, or pay even more attention to them if you already try to reduce your environmental footprint. Turn everything that uses electricity completely off when you’re not using it, don’t let the water run any more than it has to, don’t fully flush after urinating, walk or use a bicycle whenever possible, try to use public transportation instead of a personal car even for longer distances, sort your trash and recycle everything that can be recycled, don’t buy more than you need, reduce the amount of waste as much as possible, spread the word… You know the drill.
What’s most important is not to look at this as something that’s being forced upon you, but as something that will benefit us all, including yourself and all those you care about. If some of the little things you should do, not to mention the more significant ones, appear too difficult at the moment and you think that an attempt at this time may end up making you less likely to even try again in the future, then I guess you could wait a while longer. However, while you’re waiting you should send messages to the authorities, start or join campaigns or other such movements, and demand the infrastructure that will make it easier to hold on to such beneficial behavior patterns than to harmful ones.
This week is one of action against CISPA, the new “worse than SOPA” bill that’s being pushed through the United States Congress as yet another part of a global effort by governments and large corporations to control the Internet. Perhaps most notably, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has set up a page that lists the organizations that support this protest, offers a brief explanation of what CISPA means for regular Internet users and allows people to quickly send protest messages through Twitter. They also posted a message detailing other actions you can take.
Of course, this is largely aimed at United States citizens, since it’s not an international law, but don’t be fooled into thinking that it won’t affect you if you live elsewhere: The companies behind most of the very popular sites that a large majority of Internet users use are based in the United States and therefore fall under the incidence of such a bill, so it will affect you just as well. And we do need every voice this time around, individual actions becoming even more important because this bill has been tailored in such a way as to gain the support of the large corporations that operate on-line, so we shouldn’t expect any backing from them. As such, you absolutely must add your voice to those that call for this bill, and any others like it anywhere in the world, to be scrapped.
While I’m at it, I should add that there have been some new positive developments on this side of the pond, in the fight against ACTA: After the previous European Parliament rapporteur on ACTA resigned in protest back in January, the new one has now also strongly advised against ratification. This should mean that we are now even closer to the treaty’s rejection, though there are still battles to be fought and the industry’s powerful lobbyists will be formidable adversaries until the end.
Last but not least, you may want to check out The Guardian‘s “Battle for the Internet” series, which is supposed to continue until the end of the week and present the various battlefronts of this modern war. Regardless of how good or bad the articles will actually end up being, such an effort should at the very least serve to once again remind us that the fight is global and we’re all in this together. The focus may be CISPA this week, but Internet users are facing a constant assault all over the world, not only in countries governed by authoritarian regimes but also in many that are traditionally seen as bastions of freedom and democracy.
