About 4.5 billion years ago, the miscellaneous material orbiting a
star at the edge of the Milky Way coalesced into a planet that we call
Earth. It took another billion years—a thousand million years—before
it cooled enough for life’s self-replicating biochemical processes
would flourish in the primeval stew of the oceans. Another billion
years was required before multicellular organisms would evolve. Not
until about 500 million years ago did fungi and plants appear on the
land that had risen out of the oceans. Insects evolved in this
terrestrial ecology. Then 100 million years was required for some
marine animals to transition to the continents on their long and
convoluted journey from simplicity to complexity. Thus began the magic
of life and death that has alternated between the prolific and the
extinct throughout the subsequent eons of history. We, as a distinct
species, evolved as Homo sapiens only about 200,000 years ago.
Tag Archives: Overpopulation
The Quadra Project – The Mouse Experiment
On July 9, 1968, John Calhoun began his mouse experiment called Universe 25. He designed the perfect mouse habitat of 16 buildings each divided into 16 apartments with their own feeding stations. A plentiful supply of food and water was always available. No predators or diseases. The ideal temperature and humidity. Two male and two female mice were placed in Universe 25 on that July day. Calhoun and his team then watched what happened over a nearly four year period (New Scientist, Dec. 14, 2024).
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Turning Down the Heat Part 2: Change Your Life Bulb
By Carrie Saxifrage and the Climate Action Network
In early July of 2024, a small group of Cortes Islanders, supported by Friends Of Cortes Island (FOCI), screened the film “How to Boil a Frog” for the community. You can watch the film here. The film is about the five-pronged problem life on Earth is currently facing — overpopulation, a war on nature, wealth disparity, peak oil (hee hee), and climate change—and offers five actions that can help—boycott Exxon, change your “life bulb” (reduce consumption), a change of heart, one kid per couple, and kick some ass.
This article is the second in a series focused on each of these five solutions. You can read Maureen Williams great first article on a change of heart here. This second article is about changing your “life bulb.” The term refers to the end of Al Gore’s 2006 movie An Inconvenient Truth in which minor suggestions, including a switch to LED bulbs, float across the screen. The disconnect between the size of the problem and the size of the suggested solutions was so very obvious. It still is. Whether or not you change your “life bulb,” it is still important to “Kick Some Ass.” That will be the next article in the series.
Continue reading Turning Down the Heat Part 2: Change Your Life BulbTurning Down the Heat
By Maureen Williams and the Climate Action Network
In early July of 2024, a small group of Cortes Islanders, supported by Friends Of Cortes Island (FOCI), screened the film “How to Boil a Frog” for the community. The film is about the five-pronged problem life on Earth is currently facing — overpopulation, a war on nature, wealth disparity, peak oil, and climate change—and offers five actions that can help—boycott Exxon, change your “life” bulb (reduce consumption), a change of heart, one kid per couple, and kick some ass. This article is the first in a series focused on each of these five solutions from the film, and more. You can learn more about the film and the filmmaker, Jon Cooksey, here and here. You can even watch the film, here.
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The Quada Project: Beyond 1.5°C
The consensus of scientists is that limiting the global temperature rise of 1.5°C is no longer reachable, but limiting it to below 2.0°C is possible, according to an analysis of global information undertaken by the Inevitable Policy Response study from Britain (Jacob Thomae, New Scientist, 2 December 2023, “Keeping our Cool”). We were once on a path to 3.5°C, which has been reduced to 2.4°C by 2100. But the IPR study thinks that we have a 90% chance of holding the temperature increase to between 1.7 and 1.8°C, primarily because of the progress that has been made on green energy since the Paris Agreement in 2015. This is the good news.
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