In early 19th century England, from stage right, the heroine of a children’s fable, Goldilocks enters. Cruising the woods one Sunday afternoon, she discovers a little cottage and enters it. It turns out to be the home of the bear family who had gone on a stroll while their porridge cooled. Goldy found the chair, porridge, and bed were just right, so she rocked, ate, and slept until the 3 bears came home, scared her witless, and she leaped out the window to an uncertain ending. Apparently, there was a moral that Goldilocks wasn’t as innocent as she pretended to be and was violating someone else’s property, i.e., trespassing. Realizing this, riddled with guilt, she leaped. Or was she pushed by Baby Bear in a fit of rage? It’s probably best we’ll never know; trespassing followed by the possible murder of a sweet little girl would be a tough pill for a 3 year old to swallow.
In recent times, Goldilocks has had a much more important role to play than she ever did as a children’s literary heroine. Scientists have been metaphorically naming the conditions that have encircled Earth and existed for billions of years, as Goldilocks because they are just right for life. This life zone is 30 miles thick for microscopic organisms, such as bacteria, but 3 miles (16,732 ft) for humans, based on the highest permanent habitation to exist. Within this life zone, the physical conditions such as the temperature range, moisture, and atmospheric gases are ideal for biological systems, from the virus to the human, to survive. Consequently, we find a relatively solid, stable platform, Earth, plus a healthy Goldilocks is necessary to for life to flourish.
Instead of nurturing her and pampering her, we have been beating the shit out of Goldilocks for several centuries to the extent that she is seriously ill with symptoms that are so obvious, so blatant, and go so ignored as to be laughable. Laughable in the sense that we would find the Grim Reaper a great court jester. For Goldilocks, things are JUST WRONG and getting more wrong with each passing day.
To ignore and not address the causes of her illness 100% with all our scientific and collective wisdom is beyond stupidity. It is to commit globacide. We humans are not only responsible for world destruction, which includes ALL life, but we are hanging ourselves, too, in a delusional mass suicide. We are the cause and could be the solution, and rectify our sins by immediately addressing Goldlilocks’ ills. These mega-symptoms include the two current monsters: Climate Change and Coronavirus.
Climate Change. Everyone can relate to weather because it is what we see and feel 525,600 minutes each year. Weather is changing constantly, sometimes instantaneously and obviously. For example, a cloudburst, a tornado and a forest fire can change our personal space in a second. Weather for a week or a month is not going to change the vegetation composition from forest to desert but dry, hot conditions extended over months to years will, and this is would be climate.
Climate is not well understood by most people because Earth responds subtly and sometimes unnoticeably over time. Vegetation changes in a specific region are the most visually noticeable and we feel temperature shifts most readily. Examples of climatically changed biomes change seen in our lifetime are the Canadian boreal forest biome northward creep, invading Arctic tundra and the Sahara Desert southward sand creep invading the sub-Saharan Sahel savanna of Africa.
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Extreme weather events are anomalies that are longer, more frequent and more intense (e.g., prolonged drought and record precipitation). Unprecedented floods, hurricanes, tornados, and monster, deadly fires are extreme weather events when they are not the norm for a given region. They are indicative that the long-standing and once-stable climate for any given region is shifting so rapidly that Goldilocks’ stability is threatened. Rising levels of temperature, carbon dioxide, methane, plus distressed ecosystems through deforestation and fire, exotic species introductions, and species extinctions can be manifestations of climate change.
If we wish to get a taste of how devastating and life-altering climate change can be on a large, readily observable scale, we need not look any further that Australia. Australia provides us a continental-sized look at how climate change can impact a very large region, very dramatically. A country of unique biotas, Australia is giving us a very palpable example of a distressed, proud people due to massive devastation of at least two unique ecosystems. Australia has the largest reef and greatest diversity of terrestrial marsupials and reptiles in the world. Hundreds of marine species are threatened on the Great Barrier Reef due to rising ocean temperatures and acidity and one billion animals have died in apocalyptic fires due to severe drought.
Coronavirus. Climate change, up until this century, had been the only bad boy in town until an explosive pandemic, Coronavirus, paid the world a disastrous, but not unexpected by scientists, visit. In modern times, the world has experienced other pandemics—HIV, Ebola, and Zika—but nothing, as deadly and globally life-altering as Coronavirus. In modern history more and more of these viral pandemics can be linked to ecosystem disruption, the most obvious being the tropical rain forest destruction and agricultural invasion. The viruses’ tropical habitats are exposed, eliminated and altered, allowing the viruses access to domesticated animals, tropical humans and then, possibly, the world. We see this when exotic species like cheat grass or the English sparrow are introduced intentionally or unintentionally to a new, vulnerable habitat with vacant niches. These aliens could occupy vacant niches vacated by extinct species or simply carving a new one, especially if they will have no natural predators in their new habitat. Even if the spread of the Coronavirus didn’t disperse in this manner, as virus habitats fall, this pattern could easily happen with greater frequency.
Our response to Coronavirus has been shock, as if blind-sided, which we were, despite scientists’ repeated warnings that we can’t continue to disrupt critical ecosystem functioning without devastating consequences. Being caught with our knickers down, has become somewhat norm for Americans. We would rather remain ignorant and suffer the consequences than face adversity head-on, or better yet, a novel idea would be to try PREPARATION! Reality is not real to us; living for the moment with no thought given to the future is our motto. It has everything to do with selfishness, indifference to the common good and an addiction to instant gratification. Probabilities mean nothing to us because we don’t understand statistics. It only makes matters worse that, in general, we can be a very lazy people.
Coronavirus is a gift in the sense that it provides a portend of the future, giving us an opportunity to do things differently and to prepare for worse epidemics and even more painful climate change devastation. The Coronavirus invasion and climate change are not natural, but symptoms of a badly wounded, but hopefully not yet defeated, Goldilocks. But based on historical reactions to dramatic and devastating events, like Katrina, more often than not, we return to our old ways, paying lip service to doing things differently this time. History means little more than a series of novel stories if we don’t learn from it.
Coronavirus is a bellwether, and it has forced us to make some modest sacrifices, plus motivated us to rapidly devise some very creative solutions that might be applicable to its runaway freight train cousin, climate change.
Summary. Our world is a world in grave crisis, unlike anything ever experienced before in the history of civilization, even with all the wars and epidemics combined. I’m sure we don’t fully comprehend that, and if we do, we stay in bed. We would rather ignore that reality and not talk about it. Like death; we have difficulty facing it head-on.
At this juncture, particularly in the U.S., we are responding to these two monster calamities differently. Regarding Coronavirus, our opportunity for a jump-start was delayed by our current administration. When revealed and the potential rate of dispersal understood, we responded swiftly but as a duck hunter not a sharpshooter. Climate change has been creeping into the lives of the American public since the turn of the 21st century. Knowledgeable individuals who could have sounded the alarm to the general public, like TV weathercasters, didn’t. Thus our response has not been so much shotgun, but lackluster and inadequate.
Everybody loves Australia whether they’ve been there or not. Australia is big and hurting and really a macrocosm rather than a microcosm to our painful future. It is not a peephole but a picture window into our global future. The view from that window reveals a living hell, a silent world, a world devoid of time for expressions of love because it is a world on survival mode. Thus far, the U.S., the most powerful and gluttonous nation in history, seems resolute to remain sluggish or even immobile. Why? Because in part we are allowing ourselves to be held hostage by a dysfunctional political and leaderless system. Our apathy and slothful response guarantees climate change and pandemics will result in the inevitable destruction of innocent peoples and centuries of human creativity and the extinction of millions of exquisitely evolved species. While it is important to commit to personal lifestyle changes and joining environmental groups, it is paramount to choose real leaders NOW who understand what this lack of inertia means to the future of Earth. We need to dispose into the landfill of history the useless rubbish of politicians we currently have.
But most importantly, we are being incredibly selfish by denying future generations of what we and preceding generations have had: an Earth, thanks to Goldilocks, that has been “just right” as regards natural wonder, beauty and peace. A contented and stable Goldilocks has allowed most humans to experience relatively good lives. Instead we are handing them total global chaos, an Earth spinning rapidly into a black hole, with zero possibility of a return.
Edward Abbey wrote in 1968 in his classic, Desert Solitaire, one of my favorite books of all time, “……what I write about in this book is already gone or going under fast. This is not a travel guide but an elegy. A memorial. You’re holding a tombstone in your hands.” Are we going to commit our descendants to have to write the elegy on that tombstone? It doesn’t have to end that way if we listen and respond to the cries of a cancer-stricken planet; cries that have never before been as loud and as unanimous in voice as now. Can we get off our merry-go-round of ignorance, greed and selfishness and give them some semblance of what we and our ancestors were gifted from Goldilocks: a “just right” Earth? We certainly can but we need to address the ‘real’ in reality and do whatever necessary, regardless the pain it costs us now.
At present, Goldilocks is not happy to find the rocking chairs busted, the porridge scalding, and the beds lumpy. She has found the Bears’ cabin, JUST WRONG. We need to restore our beloved Just Right Goldilocks, who will treat not only our descendents but all other species as she has treated Earth and all its creatures for billions of years.