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The Heat is On

Just the other day, the sun was blazing a little more than usual. The temperature in my room reminds me of a sauna, where I had some pleasant memories, enjoying fun chitchats with my girlfriends. But there's nothing pleasant with this one. When I checked the temperature, it was 26 degrees Celcius. Twenty-six degrees at the end of November?

It must be climate change.

And so I did what any curious individual would do: google for more information and did my investigative pursuit and found out that the global gas emissions have been reaching around 33 gigatons.

The emissions had been steadily rising since 1994 but because countries like the US, Germany, Japan, and the likes, had invested in renewable energy, the figure stabilized for 2 consecutive years starting 2018 plateauing at 33 gigatons/year, which is equivalent to the overall weight of 30 million 10 wheeler trucks.

Now let that thought sink in for a while.

It is not a surprise why climate change is taking place.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world could increase its temperature from '2-5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century'. How does that look like? Well, the Arctic becomes ice-free, sea level rises between 1-8 feet; there are more intense and stronger hurricanes, and more droughts and heatwaves. No wonder why Peter Kalmus, a scientist from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in his tweet that the '#1 priority should be the reduction of gas emission'.

This is indeed a crisis, waiting to unfold in epic proportion.

And more and more world leaders have blown the whistle.

Senator Bernie Sanders said that we have a global crisis;

Pope Francis said that we are on a suicide course.

And so it is becoming clear to me that we might be on the right track to damnation! I think we all know by now that there's a problem and that the problem is dire.

It hasn't been a surprise to me, I know it's bad, I just do not want to dig on to how bad it is apart from what I have presented for my sanity.

But the message is clear, we need to move urgently, and boldly. Again, something we know already, but where do we begin?

There is a rise in demand for anything 'green' for the past years. Anything tagged as green is a viable investment.

One industry to note here is the renewable energy industry, which is estimated at 928 billion dollars and might even reach 1,512.3 billion by 2025 stringing along with it, and in no particular order are the green products, services, systems, and designs, etc. Anything green is being supported by banks through loans, the national government through tax breaks, credits, and other legislation, the local government through connections and implementations.

All types of enterprises from micro to corporations may be eager to be part of the green wave, and rightly so. However only in the capacity that they are able to.

The downside may be that there's no multi-sectoral standard for everything and a stark lack or insufficiency of support from the local and national government, information, funds, expert person, these factors are bottlenecks, making it difficult to implement.

Regardless of the problem, there has been some movement brought by the pressure coming from the stakeholders, the whistleblowers, legislators, the consumers, government, the market demand, and environmental organizations, etc.

While everybody is having certain challenges in adapting to the change of times, on the big scale of things, what can a person like me, the individual, the very basic unit of the community can do?

Well, I can easily think of a few.

I can help by:

limiting my use of electricity
minimizing consumption
segregating my garbage,
taking care of my things,
buying from local enterprises and professionals

Each posing a challenge on its own. However, I may be putting more emphasis on limiting the use of electricity as it has a direct effect on GHG emission particularly those coming from coal plants, the biggest share of the pie in terms of emission.

I did a rough inventory of my consumption, and I may hate to say it but I am almost always using electricity within a day - I am usually on my phone, on my laptop, while either the fan, AC, and or lights are on.

And most likely the majority of the people in the world are the same. So how do I live in a way that will decrease electricity when my smartphone has become an extension of my body? More useful than some vital parts of my body such as appendix, tailbone, wisdom teeth, and pinky toes to name a few.

Humans have a natural aversion to pain, and I believe it to be true in my case.

I position myself in a way that I can escape these signs of a burning house, like residing in a flood-free, earthquake-free area, have an AC or electric fan turned on, or not going outside during a hot day. To add to that, I distract myself with things I see online.

I spent a crazy amount of time online, like many people in the world.

The latest digital report says that an average human being spends 6 hours and 42 minutes online, and half of it is spent on mobile devices. That's an insane amount of time. Filipinos, like me, tend to spend the most time online with 10:02 hours a day, and the least is the Japanese with 4:38 hours. If I may be honesty, the survey may be accurate, and I hate to say it, but I could be spending longer than the average.

Apart from my tendency to escape reality is that my reality, for the most part, does not exhibit burning house symptoms, the climate still seems pretty tolerable if not escapable.

This makes it hard for me to apply urgency and stringent measures, and again, this might be true for many people.

However I may not be stringent in my ways, but I'm intentional in finding my place to somehow help. As an artist, I could paint better pictures of the world and tell better stories and better endings, not to delude but to inspire. Though great is this problem, each person's contribution is valid and is important, and that's how I treat my small contribution.

The good news is that the Green wave is real and it's gaining momentum with time. With this wave rising, and more awareness moving in that direction, soon things would be more favorable. I hope.

Here's what I know to be true, that despite what humanity has gone through, we humans in the end we're still able to survive. We have gone through terrible famines, plagues, wars, and pestilence and here we are still surviving, still and at some degree, thriving.

History proves that there's a silver lining seen in human resiliency and resourcefulness. And that may be something I'd have to hold on to despite seeing or smelling the house burning.

That somewhere in this house we call earth, someone is putting the fire out, and as long as more and more people are standing up for the task, it should be okay.

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The Future and the Creatives

One day, I noticed that my pulse rate increased, my breathing rate increased, my heart rate increased, I had trouble focusing, and I felt like breaking a sweat - it appeared to me that I was in a state of anxiety.

I was worried because I am seeing a trend of supercomputers.

Now and then, I would read articles upon articles of developments on Artificial Intelligence, and robots, and ways that these have replaced humans in certain job positions. It has elevated in terms of mental, and logical capacities and now creeping into the creative and emotional faculties.

One young lady I met in an introvert gathering, yes, we introverts gather as one too. At one point in our conversation, she mentioned this book which talks about man's evolution and how we humans would further evolve to be as humanoid, part human, part robot.

And I wonder if that's the reason why there's a trend of wearable technology popping out in the market such as google watch, google glass, VR to name a few.

Is this really happening?

Will this new era of robots come within 20 years, and at some point, will turn against us and annihilate us all? And to my surprise, last week a stumbled upon an article implying that this ridiculous storyline is ancient! This started with R.U.R (Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti - Rossum's Universal Robot, a Czech science fiction play written by Karel Capek back in 1920, and these two lines below were its opening quote.

Robots of the world! The power of man has fallen!
A new world has arisen: The Rule of the Robots! March!

That triggered me, and of course, a lady like me blurted: No fuckin' Way!

This was followed by the play War of the Newt, where it carries the same theme - where humanity gets destroyed this time by newts! And so I searched for more creations that have a post-apocalyptic theme, and I was dumbfounded, and to some degree, disgusted to have found a long list of films, music, literature, video games different forms of art, that humanity will be gone, and in varied ways imaginable: pestilence, aliens, comets, asteroids robots, virus, zombies. Dating from the time Bible with the story of flood and Noah's arc, up to this day.

And true enough, somehow we are seeing it slowly coming true in the following forms: the rise of supercomputers, climate change, population density, pestilence.

It's as if we're slowly living what was once only read on a paper or seen on the screen. And my first reaction is, why? Why would they want to envision the annihilation of humankind?

And my brain started crunching up reasons like:

because it's intense and riveting and those things sell;
because it's magnanimous in scope, and so it's impactful and those things sell;
because it's maybe they want to give people a sense that time is short, things can turn out really bad, and so we need to live life the best way we can.

Whatever their reasons maybe, I'm sure they meant well, more like, I hope.

But I feel it has not really done us good because I believe that by putting an idea out in the universe, soon it will crystallize in the material world.

I truly believe that and I see it slowly happening to my dismay.

And so I went to check to see if there's an opposite of post-apocalyptic, and truth be told, google gave me words like blissful, preapocalyptic, heavenly, idyllic, out-of-this-world, serene, perfect, and the likes. There's no exact term for it, but base on the words, Utopia came to mind, which for me was the closest to have embodied that description.

Utopia is a science fiction play by Sir Thomas More with its first edition released in 1516. His original story wasn't exactly how we have come to understand it to be, the idealistic qualities that we known as utopia have been used by a number of authors in creating their work, with the notion that humans are thriving.

And in celebration of its 500 years of conception, in December 2016, Ecotopia 2121 was launched whereby an artist came up with a utopic vision of 2121. Allan Marshall presented different pictures of countries that look at how technology can merge with nature.

He quoted to have said:

"But to study utopias – and formulate alternative scenarios to how we now live on this planet – is not an escape into fantasy. It is an active response to the many technological fantasies cast about with extravagance and excess into our lives right now.
These fantasies bind us to an unsustainable and unlivable future. If Ecotopia 2121 is but a collection of fantasies, at least they would do less harm to the planet we live on.

Although Allan Marshall was right with finding better visions, the idealist in me would not accept it as fantasy but a possibility.

And maybe with more creatives chipping into this idea which Allan may have coined as something that 'would do less harm to the planet' then by God, let's vote in. And maybe by doing so, we could see a better shift down the road, given that it is still not too late.

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Sustainability and the Survival

Why do you do what you do?

One might ask me. Well, I have twin 3-year-old nephews, and that by the way things are going, I'm afraid that I'll leave them with a world that's toxic and harmful, and I want to make sure that I did my part so that they're not having to live with that.

I can't look at their eyes knowing that what I have left them is going to kill them. That is one palpable fear of mine and so I chose to act.

A completely similar statement or idea, with Peter Cole, a former professor of respiratory medicine, who was seen wearing a paper board with huge prints saying 'I am a Rebel so I can look at my grandchildren in the eye.' His are ages 2 and 4. He among other grandparents assembled in central London in October 2019, with the intention to fight global warming through a friendly protest.

Knowing that your loved ones can be in danger because of this problem, makes the fight more important- more personal. And so people have tried to scour over the last few decades for an answer, a hero to save us all, and out it came in the form of the word - Sustainability.

Sustainability is one superhero without a cape.

It is idealistic, always fighting for the good, but since it is idealistic, it is quite elusive, as it means fighting the crooked system which is almost an impossibility. But hopefully, people like me, are holding on to this as it could mean our only saving grace, the only thing that would get us out of the trench we, as humans have dug ourselves in. And questioning sustainability means questioning our only way for survival. The world as we know has fallen victim to our own deeds.

It has existed for over 4.5 billion years, and humans for 6 million years. The pressure towards nature has soared since 1970 and now we are seeing the effects of it. In just a short time, we have caused a colossal damage. For all 7.6 billion humans, which represents only 0.01% of all living forms, we are the cause of loss of 83% of all wild animals and half of the plants.

The very same thing that we have been trying to somehow kill, could be the very same thing that could make us live.

Nature is full of wisdom, it has reached perfection and equilibrium, and systems and designs that comprise this have been widely studied by scientists and engineers for years, thinking that it bears the key to modern innovation. Case in point, the molds, termites, and mushrooms can teach us about resilient and innovative communities.

But I truly believe that the world is full of good intentions, but the problem lies in the implementation. The economy operates in stark contrast to nature - it thrives in competition, in consumerism, and somehow lacks accountability.

Unless we come as one, we won't get so far.

This is however a resounding promise of the United Nations SDGs, not to leave anyone behind in its 2030 Agenda. The idea of everyone coming together towards sustainable growth and development, the idea of everybody coming together and moving together as one in one direction. Slowly this idea is creeping out into the world.

And this is a beautiful thing.

People, organizations, governments, everyone doing their part, finding their roles in the whole SDGs sphere to gain more traction in the direction for a better world. As for me, I'll continue writing about it in this blog, be an advocate, anything, just so I can look at my nephews in their eyes and not having to feel guilty because I know on my end, at least I did my best to safeguard them and their future.

She-Ba

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The Heat is On

The Future and the Creatives

Sustainability and the Survival

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