Latest Reflections (July 2022)
Jonathan Cloud July 4th, 2022
A momentary pause in the midst of marginally-managed chaos. So much is going on, both good and bad, forward and backward. And yes, it’s still accelerating. The Earth’s population hasn’t leveled off yet; currently, it is estimated to be 7.96 billion (but see https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ for today’s calculated number). The rate of growth has however leveled off, from 2.2% to 1% per year during my lifetime. Eventually, the population will stabilize, but the question is, at what level?
At the moment the burden on the Earth is increasing. The planet is already in “overshoot” on seven of the nine (soon to be ten) ecological boundaries. So in some sense, we are already in the midst of collapse — and in which we are still accelerating, putting more CO2 into the atmosphere, degrading the environment, and continuing the loss of biodiversity. These trends need to be reversed, sooner rather than later.
To reach even the modest goals of the cities, states, and the national government, greenhouse gas emissions need to peak by 2024 and then start a rapid descent from their all-time high, when the temperature is actually expected to reach the 1.5°C level.
So this is the big picture, and indeed this is a large part of what I have been focused on in the process of joining and quickly becoming Earth Regenerators’ fiscal sponsor. Meanwhile, locally, we’ve moved to Rochester, bought a small house in Brighton (an inner-ring suburb), and I’m busy transforming what used to be a quarter acre of lawn into a permagarden — an orchard, a vegetable garden, and a pollinator garden.
Writing this I’m conscious of leaving out much of the narrative and of the context of how we got here, which will have to wait for another time. What’s new, though, is the intention to keep posting reflections on a regular basis, to begin to leave a trail of breadcrumbs for myself, to be able to reconstruct at least the story from here on.
Exactly how best to do this is still to be determined. Obviously, this is one place, which is most relevant to my personal history. There are many parts of this site that need revision and sometimes deletion, but they’re useful just because they chart a path to where we are now. This work still needs to be done.
What I want to share here, however, is where I am on the things that matter most to me:
- Climate change
- Biodiversity Loss
- Habitat restoration
- Clean energy
- Community development and change
- Health and wellbeing (including our family’s and Victoria and my own)
Most of what’s going on for me in these areas is reflected in the ridiculously large number of websites that I still maintain, most of which seemed good ideas at the time but are still largely undeveloped:
- WorldThatWorks.org
- AppropriateSolutions.org (an extension of the work I admired on appropriate technologies)
- ANewAtlantis.org (an imaginative recreation of what supposedly may have been past lives, though I don’t believe that kind of individual reincarnation is actually what occurs as part of the natural cycle of birth and death; effectively I believe in the extinction of consciousness, which is one reason it’s important to leave some trace of one’s existence behind)
And of course:
- PossiblePlanet.org (and the earlier CRCSolutions.org)
- RegenerativeFinancing.org
- NewJerseyPACE.org
- PossibleRochester.com and
- PossibleRichester.org
Sadly neglected are:
- EcovillageNJ.org
- GreenEconomyNJ.org
and a host of other sites that now remain accessible on the web only because I don’t have the heart to take them down. However poorly they were done, they were my work, and represented an advance in my own thinking at the time.
How far I’ve come, and where I’ve come from, is the real focus of this site, and that’s pretty much for family and close friends. And that’s okay.