The only constant is change itself. (Heraclitus)
You will recognize this opening as one of my favourite literary devices, paradox. Here are some other paradoxes. I didn't make these up. You can Google them to find their sources if you don't believe me.
1. Freedom isn't free. Neither is free energy.
2. Fixing stuff makes messes. Cleaning up messes makes more messes: the second law of thermodynamics.
3. Those who want to save their life will lose it.
Matthew 16:25
4. It's weird not to be weird. ( John Lennon )
Some paradoxes work by equivocation, using a word in different ways without saying so. Like freedom isn't free. Decoded: freedom in the sense of having options isn't free in the sense of being without cost. You are going to pay. There is an analogue to this paradox in the first law of thermodynamics which is about energy, called Gibbs free energy, free in the sense that it is available to do work. There is a cost to free energy. We're going to pay.
Other paradoxes make use of a limitation of thought: when we attend to the particular, we miss the whole. If you make your choo-choo go by burning coal, you can ignore the second law of thermodynamics for a time while making use of the first law; but eventually you or your grandchildren will wind up in a mess. If you try to save things by hunkering down and burning more fossil carbon, you are done; the mess will get you.
Whatever the reason for confusion, a paradox is an unsettling puzzle demanding that we make sense of it. Make sense of this. Business as usual includes plans for change. In the absence of plans for change, business fails. Antagonistic to this idea is the instinct to withdraw from the threat of failure and return to the safety of some imagined golden age when things were going well because the mess could be ignored. We didn't imagine that dealing with the mess would require us to change or fail. We are going to change or fail.
If you know the second law of thermodynamics you are the only one in the room who knows and you are weird. Otherwise, you are not weird, which is weird because the only way out of this mess is to respect the second law of thermodynamics. We cannot continue indefinitely to make messes faster than the system can regenerate and export chaos in the form of heat. That is mathematics, not opinion.
Now that we have established that business bites, we are going to make some changes.
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401 words. How am I doing?
Cree Nations Working to Conserve Traditional Lands: The Narwhal
COP 28 UNCCC: Climate Change Conference: what was achieved.
COP 29 UNCCC: Climate Change Conference: November, 2024
COP 16 UNCBD: Defending Biodiversity at Risk and the Path to Regeneration: International Press Agency
COP 16 UNCCD: United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification.
The AMOC Collapse: Just Have a Think, Oct 27, 2024
Should We Go Extinct: a philosophical dilemma for our unbearable times. The Current, interview of Todd May by Matt Galloway
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