Overshoot Day

 Happy Belated Overshoot Day!

 Overshoot Day is a concept that illustrates how humans are using more resources than can be sustained. According to the Overshooters calculations, we'd need about 1.5 Earths to remain sustainable. There are criticisms of the methods of calculation but I think the illustrative value of the concept is undeniable. And sufficiently depressing to be included here. :) 

These are some good links that discuss it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Overshoot_Day

https://www.euronews.com/2020/08/22/explainer-today-is-earth-overshoot-day-here-s-what-it-means

Voting with your feet

We are all tiny dots contributing to one huge mass.

As the population of the world gets larger, our individual actions have an ever-smaller impact on the sum of our behavior. Our personal decisions such as whether to recycle trash or cut electricity usage become a smaller percentage of the problem--or the solution. But as population increases and resources are stressed, those tiny, incremental actions of each of us becomes ever more important. Our footprints become more and more microscopic on the global scale and yet all those tiny footprints add up to a larger and larger global impact. Individual significance decreases as our global significance increases. Odd.

Two different worlds

I've recently been engaged in a political conversation with my brother-in-law. We are on different sides of the political spectrum. While trying to understand how we could have such different world-views, I put together a web site that helps me keep an eye on the headlines from two conservative-leaning papers and two that are, from a conservative viewpoint, left-leaning. Check out https://see.pessimism.com. It isn't officially in production yet and maybe never will be. But I find it interesting and useful.

from an interactive display at ArtecHouse in DC	Somewhere on the Outer Banks, NC, near the Pea Island bird sanctuary, I think

This post was updated in 2020 so you can't really trust the blogger Post date of 2018. Good to know when getting one's info from a blog posting.

This is to test use of images.

Someone feels special!

Obligatory pessimistic quote:
We all overvalue what we know and undervalue what other people know.

I'm the most optimistic pessimist I know. And yet I'm truly a pessimist, not just a deluded optimist. (That wasn't supposed to be a deep thought worth sharing--just a test post to see what I can do with this blog, how I can name it, whether I can use TLS directly, etc.)