The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I was in college when the Population Bomb became a best seller, a happy tome about world-wide famines precipitated by over population. Mass starvation, immigration upheavals, wars and pestilence, get ready for a Malthusian Armageddon. Sound familiar? Course, that was 50 years ago, a half century, and sure, the world has been through some famines, its population has doubled from under 4 billion to about 8 billion since then, but somehow we’ve managed to hang on.

Maybe it’s a couple of years of Pandemic, maybe soon it will be the Russian/Ukraine war, but lately there seems to be another groundswell of impending Doom menacing us. Pretty obviously the countries of the world aren’t going to meet the goal of reducing greenhouse gases enough to prevent catastrophic climate changes, the glaciers are melting, sea ice is opening up arctic shipping lanes, record temperatures are climbing, the weather is wilder, the earth is going through major temper tantrums. The End is Near! The End is Near!

What’s a homo sapien to do? Well … I guess we could drive less. Maybe turn down the thermostat. Recycle more. Hell, I don’t know. My guess is we’ll mostly throw up our hands, surrender to despair, call it quits, let the chips fall where they may. If we can’t stop carbon emissions before the Tipping Point, why bother, right? Party on, Bro! Chances are us survivors will be okay, good luck to the kids and grandkids. C’est la vie…. Or not.

It’s a little like falling behind on your mortgage payment right after you lost your job. Might as well skip the next ones, the bank’s going to repossess the trailer anyway. Haul down to the Bud Hut, make a stop at the liquor store, stock up with a few months’ worth of cheap pizzas, enjoy the freedom long as you can. Just no point in fighting fate, right? Right?

Well, maybe the doomsayers are right, the planet is going to get hotter and wilder, the hurricanes will get more frequent, the floods that were hundred year floods will be yearly, tornadoes will become as frequent as robo-calls, your backyard will be a desert and some folks out there will still say it’s all a hoax. Me, I’m not going down without more than a whimper. I just grafted my favorite plum to four rootstocks, I planted two new Asian pears and just for laughs I intend to put the garden in again this year. Although … I may still stock up with cheap pizzas.

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