I had an interesting experience this week. A grandson’s birthday is coming up and “grandma” decided that carpentry tools would be just the right thing for his seventy birthday. I agree, early exposure to basic tools provides a “leg up” for the rest of your life. Of course, that was just the start of the project, she also suggested that I built a tool box! Not just any old tool box, but an old fashioned carpenter tool box – the kind with an open bin, and a long handle over the top.

When I was a carpenter many years ago in the “way back time” – I used a similar box to carry my tools with me during the day. This was before the time of those fifty pound “nail belts” that carpenters lug around these days.

That sounded like a fun project, so I accepted it as a task. However, when I went to my shop and tried to find appropriate wood for the project, I realized that perhaps I had used up most of the scrap wood that I have been saving for a use such as this. Over the years I have been saving aside wood and things for the future when I would find a need for them. It mostly looks like junk, but when I resurrect something that was to be thrown away for a new project, that is part of the fun for me.

In this case I came up blank. However there were some old shelves that I had saved from my wife’s cabin near Lake Tahoe. Her grandfather and father made the cabin around 1925, and it was the family get away for years. My wife inherited the cabin, but a landslide caused us to tear it down and give the land back to the forest service. While tearing it down, I saved a few pieces of wood and some windows that looked like they might have a future life. I found three old, heavily painted, warped boards from that cabin. I don’t know why I didn’t toss them – they were pretty ugly and useless looking. But… one was the right size to make into the tool carrier.

I decided to see if I could save it, so I cut it into size and planed the wood to get rid of the ugly paint, and get something closer to the thickness that I wanted to use.

What a surprise!!! The wood is Douglas Fir, over 100 years old, and perfect! I have never seen wood that is so beautiful. It is beautiful in all ways. The grain is straight and tight, perfect – no knots, no sap, no nothing wrong – just perfect. The smell is awesome! There is something magical about fresh cut Doug fir that always smells just right. It is light, strong, perfect!

The wood is so great that I became really intimidated to do anything with it. It felt like a huge honor to just be able to see it, touch it, and smell it. Not just wood – but magical, old and mystical wood. Really – I know this sounds silly, but that is the way I felt. So that really put the pressure on to make a “perfect” box – just to honor the wood.

Of course, I didn’t manage to make a perfect box – I made a box that represents my personal skills. It is “okay”, better than amateur, but far from “perfect” in any way. But it is still a magical box for me – I just hope I didn’t dishonor the wood too much.

I have two days to finish the project, I think I can accomplish that. I wonder if my grandson will feel the energy of this box, or if it will just be another “thing”. That doesn’t really matter much – it is special to me. Not the box – that is a simple thing not particularly well done. But the wood, my God, what a special thing. I realize that almost no one will understand what I mean, you can’t until you have spent perhaps hundreds of hours caressing, smelling and listening to wood at this stage of a project. I have done that, and this is really something special.

I have been an active member of the International System Safety Society (ISSS) since about 1984, attending conferences, launching local chapters, serving as an Executive officer (Past President), editor of the journal, contributor in conferences and webinars, etc. I am saying that it is an organization that I am very familiar with – and I have been concerned about its imminent demise the entire time.

For those who might not know anything about the ISSS (just about everyone in the world) a brief introduction might help understand why this is important. System safety (SS) is an engineering practice developed to assist design and development programs minimize safety hazards through a process of identifying potential hazards and designing them out, principally through design decisions. It includes “worker safety” of course, but mostly from the point of view of making safe machines, rather than how to work around unsafe machines. Perhaps it is easiest to think of the profession as “product safety”, although the definition of what the “product” goes well beyond a product on the market, the scope of the effort can, and often does, include everything about the thing being considered – including testing, manufacturing, use, disposal, environment impacts, etc. It is the BIG picture of safety. Because SS is an engineering activity, there is a large body of knowledge and experience required to be efficient, effective and successful. There is a big need for education, but almost no means of obtaining that except through the ISSS and a few consultants that provide specialized courses for a few industries. There are very few university courses covering the profession, or degrees in the field. It is really a profession based upon OJT (On Job Training).

My personal opinion is that SS engineers can, and should, provide critical inputs into ALL design and development programs, both government and general industry, including all types of products. However, with the current worldwide membership of less than 500 members of the society, and perhaps five times that number of active SS engineers, there isn’t much of a chance for that to happen.

When I was elected President in 1990 I found I was taking the reins of an organization that is as close to bankrupted as you can get – the discussions were all about what would happen when we went into the red. My position is that we can’t go into the red because nobody will lend us any money. We pulled together and missed that one by the skin of our teeth, eventually increasing our membership by almost five fold, with money in the bank. That was until 2008 happened and government sequestration took hold and attendance at our conferences was deemed “unnecessary” – cutting our membership and related income to the point were we could just barely break even. Then came covid!

So the ISSS is in a downward financial path. I am wondering what can be done to remedy that situation. Our current sources of income are limited to annual membership fees and income from our annual conferences. Our last two virtual conferences were virtual because of covid, and provided a net loss rather than income. Perhaps there will be a face-to-face conference this year in August, but I am hearing that some of the corporations that traditionally send system safety engineers to the event have eliminated budgets because of their fear about sending anyone to large gatherings of people. Live conferences require hotel rooms and facilities, which require contracts specifying minimum rooms number and other expenses to keep the rates low enough for the conference attendance fees within reason. The contracts are signed up to a year in advance, with the potential for turning a potential money making event into a devastating loss. I am getting very nervous about this year’s conference.

It seems that much of California is burning again this summer. We have had a spat of really huge, terrible fires for the past few years. They are centered in the two main forest types, conifer forests in the Sierras and oak woodlands mixed with chaparral on the coastal ranges. California has historically had big, hot, fast fires in the oaks and chaparral because it grows in the arid, hot parts of California. Decades of aggressive fire suppression have resulted in the accumulated growth of vast tracts of explosively flammable brush and trees- and when it catches fire now it gets so hot and burns so fast that there isn’t much to but watch it burn. That wouldn’t be too bad if it wasn’t that these areas areas are also so attractive for high value homes.

I learned in grade school that the local California natives were “hunter/gatherers” with little, or no, agricultural efforts. It turns out that is far from the truth. The natives were almost entirely “farmers” but their tools were different. They used fire to manage their lands, and used naturally available habitat. The entire state has been intensively managed for tens of thousands of years using fire to shape and create resources needed by the native population. Many of the trees and plants have evolved to the point where they cannot exist without fire. Because of this, it is my opinion that the oak/chaparral fires are “natural”, expected and necessary. The problem is with the fires, it is with the fire suppression efforts and the location of infrastructure within the fire zones.

The confer forests on the east side of the state are a different story. While it is true that these forests also depend upon fire to survive (many species can’t propagate without fire and would therefore go extinct), they too need many smaller fires burning at ground level. While these forests have also been turned into fire danger zones by the over zealous application of suppression (Smokey the Bear was far too effective), as well as extensive logging and clearing that transformed the forests from mixed habitat to one consisting almost entirely of closely spaced, uniform sized trees suitable for logging.

When global warming is added to that, the rainfall decreases, causing the trees to dry and become less “robust”, allowing millions of acres to become infested with bark beetles, weakening and killing millions of trees. This set the stage for what is happening today. Once those trees catch fire they no longer burn along the ground, they catch fire like giant torches – burning hot, fast and uncontrollably. Instead of crawling along the ground it creates huge winds that launch embers and burning bark high into the sky where it carried by the winds to create new fires miles ahead of the main fire. There is no stopping these fires once the get under way, burning until the rains come. We are in another drought year, meaning that this year will be extremely dry and we will get new fires in areas that haven’t yet burned (or maybe, that were burned a couple of years ago and are now ready to explode again).

This is part of the set up for my story about our cabin. My wife’s grandfather and father build a little, very rustic, cabin in the Sierras on the way to Lake Tahoe at around 1925. The cabin was built on a 99 year lease from the forest service with the understanding that we had a responsibility to maintain it until we either sold it or tore it down. About five years ago we encountered a major problem because cabin was built on a bluff overlooking the river, and changes to the drainage caused a lot of the bluff to slide into the river, threatening our cabin. The forest service said we had to fix it our tear the cabin down and leave. After a lot of money doing geologic surveys, engineering studies and whatnot the forest service decided that it couldn’t be fixed, and there our lease was canceled and we had to clear the property, putting it back to the original condition. We had of course enlarged the cabin, installed concrete foundations, installed a septic tank and leach lines, etc. After spending close to $100,000 we were allowed to go on our way. We took the things that we cared about, purchased another cabin located about 120 miles as the crow flies north. It was very traumatic and sad to have to do this, but “such is life” as my mother used to say.

Then this year of new fires came along. Our new cabin was right in line with the path of the largest fire in California’s history, but luckily (so far) the fire split and went around the part of the lake where we are located. We were lucky this time, the fire spared our cabin and the neighborhood where it is located. At the same time, a huge fire started to the west of the location of our old cabin and roared up the river canyon, totally overtaking the cabin site and all of the cabins in that area. We haven’t heard, but assume that the neighboring cabins have been burned to the ground.

So, I have noticed that it is one of those odd things. If our cabin hadn’t been threatened with sliding off of the hill we would still have been there. It would now all be ash. However, since we were forced to move, we still have a cabin and all of the personal treasures. It seemed bad, but now it seems good. It would have been best to not spend the $100,000 but during that time our new cabin has increased in value by more than that amount (and probably more that it is still standing in the middle of healthy forest that is now surrounded by black trees). So in the long run we got our money back, saved the family treasures, didn’t have to panic over a fire evacuation, and have a nice cabin on the lake. It is certainly hard to know when events are positive or negative, they can turn out either way – and we can’t seem to predict.

I think this means that there just isn’t much point in judging it one way or other – there is no point in celebrating “good luck” or agonizing over “bad luck” – we are probably wrong and just don’t know it yet. Best to follow my mother’s advice and realize that is just the way things are … “such is life.”

Last weekend my wife and I were “invited” to attend a fund raiser for a local elementary (K-6) public school. It just happens that this school is where all of our grandchildren attended, as some still do. It is kind of difficult to turn down such an offer.

The purpose of the fundraiser was not to provide money for the “normal” costs of schooling (teachers, buildings, maintenance, etc), but rather to provide funding for “extras” that the children enjoy. I am not sure what the “extras” consist of, but I suspect it is things like art supplies, musical instruments, perhaps some field trips – you know, just some fun things for the kids. We all know that these things are intended to be “fun” – they are intended to enrich the education of the kids.

This school is an interesting one because it is located out in “the country”, away from any towns or population centers. It is surrounded by thousands of acres of farm land – some of the most productive farm land in the world. It is a very old school by California standards, having been started in 1861 (just twelve years after the beginning of the ’49ers gold rush in California. The current school buildings appear to have been built in the 1950’s as part of the rapid ramp up in schools required to accommodate the flood of baby boomers. It is in the iconic California style of almost flat roofs, walls of glass, few or no indoor corridors, access to the school rooms is from wide covered walkways. It is not possible to attend school there without a lot of exposure to “the outside.” The school is old, but appears to be well maintained and is fully functional.

One of the great features of this school is that it is highly integrated, being about 40% white, 40% Hispanic and the rest a mix. It looks like it fairly represents the mix of the community. It also has a nice mix of kids from a range of economic backgrounds. Just from looking, with no data to support this opinion, it appears to be mainly made up of a mix of farm workers and farm owners.

The fund raiser was clearly not composed of a representative mix, it was heavily skewed toward the upper income brackets – enforced by costs that were probably pretty much out reach for many of the parents and grandparents. It ended up feeling like a social mixer of the landed and well-to-do. Because it was for an elementary school most of the parents were what I now call “young” and probably not even fully aware of their future legacy. The are making do, living modest lives, taking care of their kids – but they have support, and they will soon be handed “the reins of power” in the community.

As an interested observer, I couldn’t help but notice that this event was creating the “good old boys” that eventually make the decisions and make the money. I fantasized about how much wealth was concentrated in that room, and came up with billions, not just millions. Billions because a few were children of families that own and farm huge farms in the middle of California. I don’t know how much this land is worth, but it is a LOT! That doesn’t necessarily mean they can spend it, they are “land poor” like most farmers, but it sure helps.

The fund raiser required purchasing tickets, sold drinks once inside, and included a “raffle” of things that had been donated. Pies, cakes, ice chests – that sort of thing. About 150 people were in attendance in a really neat old barn on one of the biggest farms in the area. It felt very “special” to me, and I suspect to others as well. The rumors that I heard indicate that they made something like $45,000 from the fund raiser. Not bad from a crowd of 150!

That has caused me to really wonder about these kinds of events from a Society point of view. I assume they decided to do this because they believe the school is underfunded and thus unable to purchase the “extras” required to create a fulfilling education. That implies that ALL schools are similarly underfunded. The State (and perhaps voters) have decided to provide the absolute minimum funding to schools necessary to meet the legal requirements. Schools in poorer areas have to live with that, they don’t have the necessary resources required to “extend” the offerings. Schools in more well-to-do areas get significant extra help from things such as this fund raiser. In addition to that, the amount of taxes raised for a school district is based upon local property taxes, and those are based upon the value of the homes and businesses in the area. More expensive homes result in higher taxes, that result in more income per student.

It seems reasonable to assume that all of this means that “equality” in schools just plain doesn’t happen. Even if the State provides equal funding per student, and even if they were to mandate limits from local property taxes, there will always be very large funding differences because things like fundraisers and private donations. I don’t think teachers benefit directly from this because I think their income is based upon State standards, but what happens in the schools must certainly reflect this extra, private, funding.

It seems to me that all schools “private or public” should be held to the same funding standards, including the effects of fundraisers and whatnot. All schools should be adequately funded, through taxes, to have all that is required to provide a good quality education. There shouldn’t be spots of excellence because of extra funding. If we are ever to get out of many of the problems facing society today, it has to start with high quality education for all.

As a rather radical idea, I think all private donations and fund raisers should be banned. There should be no ‘outside’ source for money for the schools. It should all be equal, all be fair, and all be enough to provide a high quality education – including paying teachers enough to make the job attractive from a job point of view, not just attractive to those that are willing to sacrifice because they have a calling.

Last week I re-read a book called “Delusions of Economics … and the Way Forward” by Gerald A. Cory Jr. I am not particularly interested in reading books on the subject of economics, but this one caught my attention. I originally read the book a couple of years ago after meeting the author while enjoying a beer at a tiny bar and grill in Davis, California. I find this particular restaurant to be an interesting place to meet exceptional people because of its close proximity to the highly prestigious University of California, Davis. It is not unusual for out-of-town people to drop in to relax a bit and meet a few of the “locals.” My discussions with Dr. Cory happened on a couple of those occasions.

Dr. Cory caught my attention both because of his rather amazing background and experiences, but mostly because he seemed to have a unique view on science, economics, and human progress. One of his topics that intrigued me was “consilience,” by which he means the effort to unity the sciences, both natural and social. His point being that science doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it is in a large measure a social phenomena and therefore is incomplete without considering the entirety of the problem, including people.

Cory’s book on economics started with a brief discussion of how we (homo sapiens) evolved from the first life on earth. He pointed out that in the beginning (hundreds of millions of years worth of “beginning”), all life was essentially “ego” driven. By “ego” he means, self-interest. The whole purpose of life was to stay alive and create offspring. Once the offspring were created, it was up them to survive and create offspring. Interest for the well being of others didn’t exist. Over millions of years life evolved and changed, always based upon the driving force of “survive and reproduce.”

At some point a mutation (actually a bunch of mutations) resulted creatures referred to as “amniotes.” Aminiotes are four-legged terrestrial vertebrates that evolved a tough membrane cover of the reproductive DNA carried by eggs (and later in placentas internal to the mother) that facilitated the survival of DNA-bearing eggs on land. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amniote

The mutations that allowed this change to occur included the creation of genes for “other-interest”, which Cory calls “empathy.” Humans are on this lineage that includes genes for empathy, or other-interest. However, the earlier genes for self-interest didn’t go away, they continued in the mix resulting in genes for both self-interest and other-interest (or said another way, ego and empathy).

The importance of this for this discussion is that there are built-in, genetically created impulses toward self-interest and other-interest. These two interests are always in opposition to each other, creating a “pull and tug”, each countered by the other. If the “forces” are balanced, then there is homeostasis in a kind of dynamic balance. On the empathic side are drives of self-sacrifice, submission, giving, responsiveness, supportiveness and others over self. The egoistic side includes power-seeking, domination, seizing (taking), assertiveness, competitiveness and self over others. When things are balanced there is compromise, fairness, sharing and justice.

One interesting result of this behavioral “model” is that perhaps the Buddhist’s suggestion of becoming “egoless” is questionable. If Cory is correct, egolessness would result in far too much empathy, and the death of the organism (us). The goal isn’t egolessness, it is a balance. Perhaps instead of attempting to eliminate ego (a clearly impossible, and undesirable condition), the suggestion should be to be aware of its presence, and take steps to moderate its influence to achieve something closer to the desirable dynamic equilibrium necessary for a health life, and healthy society.

The reason that Cory goes into so much detail about these opposing forces, and the desirable state of dynamic equilibrium, in a book on economics is that the currently most influential economic theories being used to understand and manage national and global economics fail to include the opposing forces to the ego driven instincts. They are based upon the idea that ALL economic actions are based upon each party in a transaction attempting to maximize what they can get with absolutely no sharing or empathic aspects to transactions. It is all get as much as you can get away with… period, with no thought to the impacts on others, on the environment, on future generations, global peace, or any other “other-interest” considerations.

I think this does a pretty good job of describing how businesses currently approach economic decisions. This agrees with what I learned in my college economic courses. The instructors and texts hammered home the idea that it is the absolute “duty” for everyone in the economic system to fight as hard as they can to maximize their returns. This is supposedly the source of the “invisible hand” that allows the economy to properly achieve a fair and equitable society. Pretty clearly, this kind of equality has not been achieved, and is getting much worse with time. It is a failed model, and a failed approach to understanding the “value” of things. What is often overlooked is that the “competition” isn’t between the supplier and the customer, it is between suppliers. The supplier relies upon “empathy” to promote the most desirable product, the forces of the ego are between suppliers of similar products.

Cory’s contention is that the problem is that the balancing values of empathy (other-interest) are not included in the calculations, and that is why things are getting so far out of hand with the rich rapidly getting much richer, and the poor approaching catastrophe. It is also why we have concerns of global warming, too much plastic in the oceans, ever growing numbers of homeless encampments and much, much more.

Cory’s final point is that the economic model of “supply and demand” (based on self-interest) only works for situations where the items being traded are not essential. Under that condition, then the “customer” can change behaviors based upon price. They can purchase a less expensive house, a less fancy car, perhaps a different vacation. However, this does not apply and does not work for things that are necessities, such as healthy food, health care, shelter and others. Those things NEED to be available no matter what the “customer” can afford to pay. They do not have the option of not eating because food is too expensive, they NEED to eat.

It appears that we have a LONG way to go before achieving anything close to the economic, and social justice, conditions that we want and need – but perhaps opening up the “models” to include the other half of our genetic propensities can inform our actions, regulations, and ethics in ways to work toward a more equitable society, rather than our present approach that seems to be driving us all apart rather than together.

I have been doing a little bit of research on the environmental problems associated with the olive oil extraction process. It turns out that eliminating serious environmental impacts from olive oil processing is a pretty difficult problem because the industry is large overall but subdivided into many small companies, and it creates a LOT of potentially harmful waste. Olive oil process wastes can cause severe damage to the environment due to toxic materials, high loads of organic materials, anti-bacterial properties, and others. These same properties can also result in beneficial uses – but the processing required is relatively expensive. Perhaps the byproducts could be turned into valuable products, but the infrastructure required to do so it expensive. The bottom line is that safe/environmentally appropriate treatment of the waste products can be done, but is expensive – it is much more expensive than alternatives such as “dump it into the creek”. This came to my attention because there is at least one local olive oil producer that elected for the more economical approach of dumping it into the creek (and is now facing fines and clean up costs for making that decision).

I seems to me that the decision about whether or not to process olive oil should have include the costs of properly and safely taking care of the hazardous byproducts to the process air, water, soil, noise, smell, etc. If it costs too much to control the bad aspects of the process, then perhaps the process is not economically viable. I do not know of any “constitutionally given right” to do anything you want because it can make a profit. I agree that people should be able to go into whatever business they want – but in my opinion, that only extends to situations where they don’t cause undo harm or costs to others (including the environment and society).

The olive oil business is a case in point. I think Olive Oil is a good thing. I like it on my salads, it makes nice soap, and probably has a lot of other beneficial uses. It is so good in fact that I am happy to buy it from time-to-time. But if it is too expensive, I probably won’t buy it. For most of my life it was outside of my budget, so I treated it as a “luxury.” TI think that if you can’t produce it at a price that will sell, then perhaps you shouldn’t produce it. Just because there are pressures to keep prices low is not a reason to cut corners and create hazards or damage the environment. Your desire to make money does not equate to your right to cause me harm.

I understand that my approach means some (maybe a lot) of people won’t make money from olive oil if olive oil isn’t produced. It isn’t just the oil processors, there are the farmers that grow the trees, the folks that tend the trees and harvest the fruit, the stores that like to sell the oil, soapmakers, etc. However, if the industry can’t do all of that without causes damage and costs to others, or the environment, then perhaps that industry doesn’t have a viable product. It seems pretty simple to me. Living in Northern California where the ’49s chased after gold with no regard to the damage they were doing, it has always been clear that the limits on what you can do to make money has to be bounded by the value of your product. If gold isn’t worth mining in non-polluting, non-environmentally destructive ways, then it isn’t worth enough to go after. The farmers whose orchards got buried by hydraulic mining tailings shouldn’t have had to pay the cost (in ruined farms) for the profits of the miners. The general public shouldn’t have to pay the cost of cleaning up the resultant destruction and mess.

As a safety engineer, I am very familiar with many instances where large and small companies pumped their highly toxic waste chemicals down wells into the ground water because it was cheap to do so. That reduced the cost of their products and increased their profits. However, many (perhaps most) of them went out of business before the problem was identified, or were fined a fractional amount of how much they saved. Now the public is stuck with many extremely expensive “super fund” site attempting to clean up the residuals of the highly profitable businesses. Much of it will can never be “cleaned up” and will therefore end up in terms of health problems for the public that shares the water polluted by those wells. Even when these companies are caught and fined, the fines are vastly less than the cost for remediation. It would have been far less expensive for the companies and the society if they had spent the money ahead of time to prevent the creation of the problem, but instead they elected to push off the problem (and expense) until sometime into the future — after all, the problem is likely to go away by itself because, who knows maybe I’ll die before the catch up to me.

We need to change our thinking from “how do we reduce the impact of dangerous processes” to “how do we eliminate the creation of dangerous processes.” We need to find workable solutions before we launch into projects rather than trying to find fixes after the damage has been done. To be “worth it” means “worth it” in the BIG picture sense. Plastic packaging and bags are a good case in point. They are creating tremendous environmental problems at all stages of their “life”. Are they worth it? Plastic packaging make billions of dollars a year in profits for some, but at a huge cost to the environment. Does that make any kind of sense? Is it even necessary? These products were essentially non-existent for the first twenty years of my life – I didn’t miss them or need them. None of us thought we were missing something important in our lives. We all know full well that we have very negative, undesirable, obnoxious artifacts in the form of things such as plastic bags and blister packs on products that we can’t get away from because a few people want to keep making billions of dollars. This is totally insane, and similar logic shows up with almost everything we do.

We (individuals) can’t avoid contributing to the problem because we need (or at least want) the products that create the costs and well as environmental and health problems. For example, we want olive oil, but are trapped by the economics of the thing. We want good quality oil at a “low” price. We shop for price, we look at price rather than environmental cost – so pick up the less expensive ones. That means the processors will try to keep the prices low enough to win the most sales, meaning they won’t implement expensive fixes to their environmental problems – if they do, their prices will go up, their sales will go down and they are out of business. We can’t buy the “correct” product because we have no information, and because we also have budgets. There is no “solution” to this in a “free” market. The costs will always be avoided by the consumers and producers, and the costs will always be passed forward to the society (and environment). The “customer” will pay for these costs, but it will be in terms of increased taxes to fix the problems, and a degraded lifestyle somewhere down the road. Unfortunately there is not a clear tie for the individual customer between the cost of their purchase and the eventual fully loaded cost of their decision. The ones that have the savings are seldom the same as those that pay for the external costs.

What is the solution? The first thing that springs to mind is regulation, lots and lots of regulations. Tiny regulations, specific regulations, millions of “can does” and “can’t does”. This approach not only does not work, it cannot work. There are too many things to consider, there are too many powerful lobbyists, things are changing far too fast to ever have nearly enough regulations to cover everything we do. It is practically impossible. What would work? I am not sure, but it seems that the decision of whether or not to produce something, and how to do that, should be tied to “proving” ahead of time that there will be no damages or costs to society or the environment. Should damage occur, then any after-the-facts costs should be paid entirely by those that caused the problems – plus appropriate penalties. Somehow or another we need to shift the responsibility for “doing the right thing” to those that are doing the things. Competition between provides should all have the same constraints – they have to be able to do it properly, not lower their prices by “cheating” or passing the costs on to future generations.

I don’t think we are the last generation of our species. We have endured for something like 8,000 generations and will likely be around for that many more (unless we actually manage to cause so much environmental damage as to cut that short). We will probably stick around for awhile, so why are we doing what we are doing right now?

We act as if there we are the end, once you and I die, that is it so whatever mess we make doesn’t matter. As long as we don’t run out of resources before we die we are good to go. Who cares what future generations have been left to work with? It appears that the furthest anyone can think is perhaps to the children, and maybe their grandchildren – and in most cases they can just “figure it out” just as we did.

We act as if there are unlimited resources of all kinds to support anything we want to do. We slowly pried open Pandora’s box for a few hundred years during the beginnings of the scientific and industrial revolutions only to have the box open completely during the past 100 years where we found that we can do just about anything within the realm of possibility that we set our minds to. Not only CAN we do it, we seem to think that because we can, we should – and have some sort of God given right to whatever it is that we want to get, anything we want to destroy, and anything that creates profit and personal power.

What would it take for us to return to the understanding that we aren’t all going to die in the next 20 years? What does it take to realize that future generations would certainly appreciate it if we left them an environment that supports their lives in relative comfort and health? Why do we have to always grab as much as we can get, even when we have so much we can’t do anything with it other than throw it away?

I guess today just isn’t one of those “positive” days for me. It is so disheartening to live among such insanity. I agree that we don’t have all of the solutions, but we could certainly be making efforts toward them, rather than continually making efforts to destroy as much and as fast as we can. The bombing in Ukraine is a prime example, how can that actually be taking place? What sort of world-view makes any of that alright. It isn’t just Russia that does that kind of thing, many (maybe most) countries have their own histories and their own stories that should make all of humanity cringe in embarrassment. No matter where I turn it is all the same, people getting as much as they can as fast as they can – with little or no regard for themselves or others, either now or in the future. Oh well, I guess that is just the way it is. Luckily I am getting older and that means I only have to tolerate mankind for a few more years. After that I guess I have no more concerns – but it seems to bother me to have to tell my grand-kids “good luck, I am afraid that we let you down.”

I am not easily shocked – but this week’s insanity at Ketanji Brown Jackson’s hearings pushed me completely past that point. I am disgusted, embarrassed, disappointed – and angered by the ugly and hateful performances of Josh Hawley, Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz. It is one thing for these complete, total idiots to put on their act of diversion, deception and deep ingrained hatred for the United States and all that it stands for – I get it, they are destroyers attempting to turn the country into a a fascist, totalitarian dictatorship because they understand that is the only avenue open for people such as themselves to achieve immense power and wealth.

The part that I don’t get is how anyone, anywhere, could watch their show and think that they should be supported in any way. What in the world has happened to the USA? How could it be remotely possible that such clear and obvious stupidity and hate be not only allowed, but supported. How can it be that people like Cruz and Hawley aren’t locked away permanently for their incessant attempts at creating riots, discord and the fall of the country? They are clearly traitors, why are they not treated as such? There are laws against shouting “fire” in a crowded theater because it is well know that such actions can, and do, lead to deaths. It is also clear that they firebrands such as these three jerks do the same, but on a MUCH larger scale.

I am deeply sickened that our great nation not only tolerates, but publicly supports, men such as these. It is an embarrassment to us all. We should all be deeply ashamed that we have allowed the country to fall to this state of affairs.

I have been plugging along on a “spiritual” path since my early days in high school when my brother, who is six years older than me, tried to explain the “beat” philosophy he learned from people such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac from the late 1950’s. My brother lived in Berkeley, hanging out in coffee shops and playing bongo drums, and listening to the great poets of the day while I toiled away in middle and high school. He became a full-fledged beatnik, encouraging me to read books such as “Howl”, “On the Road”, and “The Book of the Dead.” During this time I attended church with a few friends, finding a particularly interesting church with a small “youth group” where we discussed how religion impacts our lives and society, rather than the church dogma. Those discussions, tied together with my beatnik brother’s view of spirituality, helped me to develop an interest in “something” beyond ordinary experience, with rather loose constraints on understanding what that “something” might be.

My brother and I both matriculated (joined) Humboldt State College (HSC) in Arcata California in 1966 during the big buildup to the Vietnam war and the creation of the “flower children” of the 60’s. HSC was on the “speaker circuit” for alternative and “exotic” religions, including several Buddhist and Hindu leaders. It was great fun to go to these events with the exotic smells of incense, sitar music while trying to understand what old white haired Indian men wearing long robes were talking about.

In 1970 and 1971 the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi held extended Transcendental Meditation (TM) seminars at HSC. The students lived in the college dormitories during the summer break, as the town filled with people wearing robes sitting in all sorts of places around town in mediation. It was very obvious that “something” was happening. Out of curiosity, I attended many talks, and eventually paid my $20 (which was a LOT of money to me at that time) to get a personalized, secret, TM mantra. (The “secret” was that the mantra was an ancient one that everyone who knew anything about meditation knew).

I found the practice of meditation to be “life changing” and have continued a daily practice for over fifty years. My meditation has not always followed the TM approach, I explored a range of spiritual systems including Hindu practices, Buddhism and my favorite from Mesoamerica – known as Toltec practices. I finally settled into a daily Buddhist practice, not as “a Buddhist” but as a novice who meditates, contemplates, reads and discusses the topic – without necessarily “buying” all of the stories or practices. I suppose you could say I am dabbling in the topic. I consider myself to be a Toltec practitioner who happens to be performing a lot of Buddhist activities.

One of the main topics of Buddhism seems to be the idea of achieving “Nirvana”. This term is connected to the idea of finally getting beyond suffering, and therefore no longer continuing through endless cycles of rebirth. I find this description to be rather meaningless, more along the lines of a religious belief than a practice that might help in the here and now. The word “nirvana” has been adopted to mean “bliss” or “tranquility,” which sound nice – but also a bit scary. Additional terms used to describe this state of being are terms such as “enlightenment” or “awakenment.” All of this is a bit difficult for me to grasp beyond an intellectual consideration.

I have always wondered what it might feel like to achieve a state of awakenment. Awaking from what? If this term is to be taken literally, it must mean that we are asleep in some sense and therefore dreaming. If that is what is meant, that makes perfectly good sense to me. I have been pondering this issue for over fifty years and have come to the conclusion that we are in fact dreaming, and that ALL that we are aware of is our dream. We have no means of having any solid evidence of there being anything beyond dream, with the possible exception of the René Descarte’s famous statement that; “I think; therefore I am .”

I have always assumed that the state of “Nirvana” (or whatever term fits best) must be one that feels trance-like. I suspect that everyone has experienced instances where it feels like they are experiencing the world as if in a trance. As a simple example, a few weeks ago I was taking the kitchen scraps to the compost pile when I noticed that a bunch of flowers in our garden had bloomed into a riot of extremely vibrant yellow blossoms. It caught my eye, and my attention, in a way that felt a little like “stopping the world.” I paused and soaked in a kind of momentary bliss – not thinking about anything, just feeling joy. That kind of experience happens now and then, and is almost always a surprise and pleasure. Maybe Nirvana is being permanently in that state of a blissful trance. This is scary to me because it sounds too much like where I might be heading with full blown dementia in old age. Dementia seems like being “in the present” but not in a way that is attractive. I actually don’t want to spend my life in a trace – even if those moments in my life have feel extremely peaceful and pleasurable. I want to engage with the world.

A couple of weeks ago I had an experience that was perhaps closer to the meaning of the concept. On that morning, I woke up as usual before the sun at around 5:00 AM. I lay in bed for awhile, feeling my body enjoying the last few minutes in bed before getting up for the day. I got up, started for the bathroom and found myself in bed waking up again! Opps, I had only dreamt that I awoke, the experience of walking toward the bathroom was still a dream. So there I was once more laying in bed wondering if I this time I was actually awake, or had I again woken up in yet another dream?

This time when I got up it was an entirely different experience from any that I have had in the past. I was awake, and things were all as the normally are, but I felt crystal clear – my perceptions were clear and crisp, colors were more vibrant than usual, sounds were more crisp, I didn’t find it necessary or even appropriate to “think” about anything – I just was and that was enough. I realized that my “normal” way of experiencing things feels like it is in a subtly “fuzzy” trance. There is a delay, and a filter, of some kind that takes the sharpness away – and my “normal” experience is the trance, not this new one of being “awake”. The feeling of being “clearly” present persisted for a couple of hours until such time that the events of the day overcame me and I dissolved back to “normal.” I felt like I had somehow woken up – is that what “awakenment” feels like? If so, I like it.

Maybe this is closer to what the Buddhist means by awakening – it isn’t going into a separate “dream state” of a trance, but instead it is just doing what we are always doing, but with a crispness and clarity that we normally miss. Maybe it isn’t really anything at all, maybe it is just waking up. Maybe it is just a more normal experience of normal than we normally experience.

I wonder if those folks that think global warming is a hoax are noticing the negative impacts of remaining dependent upon fossil fuels. Even if global warming doesn’t exist, even if pollution from burning fossil fuels is somehow good for us, even if the increased CO2 levels in the oceans isn’t killing the bottom of the global food chain, even if the rising ocean levels just means a booming economy as we move from the current shores and rebuild on the “new” beaches (my home might become beach front property at an elevation of 52 feet) – even if all of that means we should just keep on keeping on with regard to our use (and misuse) of fossil fuels, there are still the problems that are being highlighted by the war in Ukraine.

Just the problems of nations being held hostage by other nations because of their dependence on fossil fuels seems enough to warrant changing how we use energy – not just how we make energy. So far just about the only thing that is promoted by governments, industry and “the news” is how we can switch from using fossil fuels to using “sustainable” sources of energy. Of course, none of those alternates are truly “sustainable” or environmentally friendly. The only obvious solution out of this bind that I can see is to change how we use energy with the result that we reduce our consumption to the point where we can actually power our civilization on sustainable, environmentally friendly, sources of power.

The discussions should be all about using less energy, not on using the same (or more) energy from other sources. We need to be focused making major changes to what we use energy for, and how much we waste. We have many, many solutions available that use much less energy for the same utility. Examples of possible energy saving solutions including making homes more energy efficient, MUCH more energy efficient is easy and inexpensive. It is almost always possible to bring homes to the point where they consume zero external energy at an upfront cost that is less than not making changes. It it possible to cut transportation energy use by vast amounts using currently available, affordable technology.

Instead of finding ways to “mine” energy from difference sources, we need to actually do the things that will reduce our needs. As we have been shown many times during the last few decades, using less energy does NOT mean less utility or a decrease in lifestyle – in fact it almost always means better utility and a better lifestyle. It is not “taking a hit for the team” – it means improving our lives while damaging the environment less. It doesn’t even mean having less jobs, or making smaller profits, or anything like that. I almost always means more jobs, better pay, safer and more enjoyable work, more security.

What does it take to get people, as a total society, to wake up to the fact that our current approach is damaging, expensive, and as the war in Ukraine is demonstrating, very dangerous. Can’t we just drop all of the ballyhoo and make the necessary changes? Do we really need to make something that everyone can see is an obvious good thing, an obvious need, and an obvious good solution into a civil war? Do we really need to make whether or not to do a good thing into a giant argument? Our current approach of yelling and screaming is just total insanity – and everyone on both sides of the issue knows it.