Back in the day, I only knew it as a fanzine. Friends, who were mostly interested in Punk Rock, would print pages of information about bands that they loved and shows that they had seen for other fans, friends and other punkers who might appreciate the mix of art and ideas brought on by their favorite bands. Punk music was great. The angst and direction pointed at by the movement was great, but the music that stirred me then and continues to stir me is that music of the spheres, the hum of the big bang and the cyclic murmurings of nature, once extant across the entire surface of the planet, yet drowned out by our human creations. The fanzine that I produced spoke in the tones and tunes of the Great Lakes. Trying to write about what a tree might care about, or what the fishes of the Freshwater Seas that surround and define my home region allowed me to write reams of stories and insightful prose that helped other fans of natural areas and phenomena associated with the state of nature.
Oddly enough, I have always had fans, so the writing that I did about the Great Lakes was designed to share with them the concepts and ideas that I was developing as the result of my own independent research. I have been more or less engaged with studying the atmosphere for most of the last fifty years. What I have seen repeatedly is the creation of upwelling over vast areas in which fuels are burned. The mass balance study that I put together back in the nineteen-eighties showed the ability of all fuels burned within, Brown County Wisconsin, to expand and super-heat hundreds of billions of cubic feet of air to roughly sixteen times their original size. These massive boluses of hot air are discharged through both horizontal spreading into adjacent areas, heating them, and venting through vertical columns, vortecies, capable of jettisoning massive amounts of hot, dense air into the stratosphere. Destabilization of the atmosphere has been real in my mind for decades and the relatively recent push for a non-scientific approach that infatuates climate change deniers has baffled me. I completely understand that big money wants us to continue to burn through the fossil record at a record pace, but we are at the end of the age during which doing so can continue.
I may call the writing that I do by a different name, a generation ago it was produced in a print shop, laboriously shrinking hand-written text to fit a few thousand words onto a flyer, but the issues that I write about are the same. Instead of working for week to have a few dozen of these "zines" in the hands of those who cared enough to read them has been supplanted by having a thousand readers per moon "tuning-in" from around the planet. I cannot say how proud I am of those who read me, those who care enough to listen, but without my readers, I would be nothing. I would be a ne'er-do-well, raving to a wall somewhere. Instead, I feel that there are those who understand at least part of what I am saying, folks who can express some of my meaning in their own way to others whom they care about.
We really are all in this together. Whether our tribes of peaceful loving people will prevail depend on our ability to educate, elucidate potential beneficial choices for behavior and wrest from the collapsing petro-chemical age to one that can sustain life rather than destroy it. We have been blessed with the ability to study and understand what is going on around us and the longer we forget to pay attention, the more likely it will be too late before we all get on the same page about climate science and the need to change our trajectory.
Burning our way through millions of years of the fossil record, which stored solar radiation safely under foot over geologic time, in just a few hundred years will undoubtedly make life on this planet untenable. Learning to mimic natural systems with our own may provide just the needed ability to stop the climate crisis. Many of the technologies and practices are awaiting our re-discovery. Organics, bio-char and permaculture are but a few. Bio-dynamic agriculture, hugleculture and aquaponics are others. There is plenty of territory that can be brought into production if we develop the will and skills needed to change our culture from the grassroots up. This is why I often urge people to contact ECO-Tours of Wisconsin to arrange an ECO-Tour immediately. This is my pet organization that plants trees, provides eco-education to all ages and which brings the ideas presented in this blog into a practical life process. We share techniques to lessen ecological damage and solutions to pressing ecological issues. These have been the primary goals of ECO-Tours since their founding. As far back as the eighties, we have been taking folks into wild areas, as well as those that had been denuded to get in touch with what can be done both save them and re-create more natural areas that support diverse sets of organisms.
Oddly enough, I have always had fans, so the writing that I did about the Great Lakes was designed to share with them the concepts and ideas that I was developing as the result of my own independent research. I have been more or less engaged with studying the atmosphere for most of the last fifty years. What I have seen repeatedly is the creation of upwelling over vast areas in which fuels are burned. The mass balance study that I put together back in the nineteen-eighties showed the ability of all fuels burned within, Brown County Wisconsin, to expand and super-heat hundreds of billions of cubic feet of air to roughly sixteen times their original size. These massive boluses of hot air are discharged through both horizontal spreading into adjacent areas, heating them, and venting through vertical columns, vortecies, capable of jettisoning massive amounts of hot, dense air into the stratosphere. Destabilization of the atmosphere has been real in my mind for decades and the relatively recent push for a non-scientific approach that infatuates climate change deniers has baffled me. I completely understand that big money wants us to continue to burn through the fossil record at a record pace, but we are at the end of the age during which doing so can continue.
I may call the writing that I do by a different name, a generation ago it was produced in a print shop, laboriously shrinking hand-written text to fit a few thousand words onto a flyer, but the issues that I write about are the same. Instead of working for week to have a few dozen of these "zines" in the hands of those who cared enough to read them has been supplanted by having a thousand readers per moon "tuning-in" from around the planet. I cannot say how proud I am of those who read me, those who care enough to listen, but without my readers, I would be nothing. I would be a ne'er-do-well, raving to a wall somewhere. Instead, I feel that there are those who understand at least part of what I am saying, folks who can express some of my meaning in their own way to others whom they care about.
We really are all in this together. Whether our tribes of peaceful loving people will prevail depend on our ability to educate, elucidate potential beneficial choices for behavior and wrest from the collapsing petro-chemical age to one that can sustain life rather than destroy it. We have been blessed with the ability to study and understand what is going on around us and the longer we forget to pay attention, the more likely it will be too late before we all get on the same page about climate science and the need to change our trajectory.
Burning our way through millions of years of the fossil record, which stored solar radiation safely under foot over geologic time, in just a few hundred years will undoubtedly make life on this planet untenable. Learning to mimic natural systems with our own may provide just the needed ability to stop the climate crisis. Many of the technologies and practices are awaiting our re-discovery. Organics, bio-char and permaculture are but a few. Bio-dynamic agriculture, hugleculture and aquaponics are others. There is plenty of territory that can be brought into production if we develop the will and skills needed to change our culture from the grassroots up. This is why I often urge people to contact ECO-Tours of Wisconsin to arrange an ECO-Tour immediately. This is my pet organization that plants trees, provides eco-education to all ages and which brings the ideas presented in this blog into a practical life process. We share techniques to lessen ecological damage and solutions to pressing ecological issues. These have been the primary goals of ECO-Tours since their founding. As far back as the eighties, we have been taking folks into wild areas, as well as those that had been denuded to get in touch with what can be done both save them and re-create more natural areas that support diverse sets of organisms.
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