5/22/23

 Monday, May 22, 2023

In bed before 10 after watching the funeral episode of Succession, up at 6:10, 49℉, high of 67℉, cloudy morning, partly cloudy afternoon, sunny evening, wind S at 2 mph, 1 to 8 mph during the day, gusts up to 15 mph.  The sun rose at 5:20 and will set at 8:15, 14+54.

Geri will be off to an early dinner at Le Reve in Wauwatosa with an old friend.  I'll graze or go out. . . . Finished the beef vegetable soup Geri made a few days ago at my request.

CPP  Quite a bit of pain today.  I went to Grafton to get new eyeglasses at Costco intending to go to Walmart in Saukville/Port Washington for bird seed and suet but went home after Costco.  Unproductive, lost.

Self portrait in oil from when we lived in Shorewood.  It was stored under the basement stairwell in Saikville where a mourse left its opinion of my art in the vertical white dropping alongside my face.

Climate Change Optimism from Jill Lepore's What We Owe Our Trees in the May 29, 2023 issue of The New Yorker: "The Earth is about four and a half billion years old. By about two and a half billion years ago, enough oxygen had built up in the atmosphere to support multicellular life, and by about five hundred and seventy million years ago the first complex macroscopic organisms had begun to appear, as Peter Frankopan reports in “The Earth Transformed” (Knopf), an essential epic that runs from the dawn of time to, oh, six o’clock yesterday. In his not-at-all-cheerful conclusion, looking to a possibly not-too-distant future in which humans fail to address climate change and become extinct, Frankopan writes, “Our loss will be the gain of other animals and plants.” An upside!

It's an interesting idea that the world would be better off with homo sapiens an extinct species.  It raises questions like 'better off for whom or for what"?  And 'how to measure or assess better off,' on a net basis (beneficial contributions (to whom or to what?) minus detrimental impacts (to whom or to what?)  Should all the issues be addressed from the point of view of us humans?  Is there any other basis?  If our species were to become extinct, would it permit the regeneration of natural processes on this planet that would lead to the generation of other species of flora and fauna, other life forms,  and ultimately a new species with humanlike intelligence?  An evolutionary start over?  From the cosmic, whole universe perspective, the disappearance of one species on one small planet destined ultimately to be swallowed by its own sun would seem to be almost a non-event.  In other words, who would care?  Who gives a shit?   Believers I suppose would answer "God" who created this species, and only this species, in His own image and likeness.  For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.  John 3:16.  On the other hand, since believers hold that God has a providential plan and that nothing happens without his concurrence, one way or the other, if we disappear it would be because God wants us gone, that He would be pleased to start all over again, sort of like a new Noah-adventure.