Category Archives: Biosphere

We need a culture map

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Every generation has its own lifestyles, a combination of habits, behavioral perceptions and historical benchmarks. For example, how many of us use pen and paper to write long letters? How many of us realize how much of a cultural shift is represented by Rosie the Riveter, the icon representing a shift of women in the workforce from 12 million to 20 million by 1944. Walk through the years with Benny Goodman, Ella Fitzgerald, Molly Bee, Frank Sinatra, Elvis, Nat King Cole, Peter, Paul and Mary, ABBA and Taylor Swift; how many of us have a microwave? How many years did it take to shift from calf-length skirts to black stretch pants?

And within just one generation, who stills types their letters on a typewriter? In fact, who still writes letters (200 words) to family members? Facebook takes care of letters today. Everything, every person from childhood to today is linked to you and vice versa. Want to know what’s happening with Uncle John? Facebook has it all. Just push a button and say, “Handle it”.

There is no avoidance of the fact that in the four most recent generations, each generation is living in a different world. Not just the normal generational shift that occurs as we age but so different that if, indeed, the world were a stage, a different show would be showing for each generation.

From the Silent Generation (1928-1945) to Generation Z (1997-2010), the entire planet has moved from an atmosphere of ‘war makes power’ where the west won control as the world’s political, social and scientific leaders, to an atmosphere of a planet falling short of resources, disruptive climate and causing economic stress to the point that it is a common opinion to stop raising beef because of its cost both to producers and to the environment.

Industrially, in just 75 years technology has moved human behavior to an unknown experience – promoting television in the 1940s to smartphones today. A central force that modifies human behavior is the Internet – a science which remains unbridled today and already evidences different behavioral values in human society.;

Metaphorically, we live on a world with no compass, no directional indicators, no rationality. We are encased in a fog. We have boarded a carnival ride about which we know nothing. Times are changing like they never have in living history.

Our emergency pack should include the basics: community participation; family allegiance and support; eliminate debt by living more frugally; be aware of resource management (less CO2 and avoiding plastic are big issues now); avoid depending on disruptive leaders who promise quick solutions – there are no quick solutions. FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) is broke and the climate is becoming more boisterous – have an alternative planned.

Ancient Mariner

 

 

Dog et al

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Another indoor today because as much as two inches of rain is due. Out his front window, mariner saw a man walking his dog on a leash down the street. For those who own dogs, it is a large, life-affecting experience. Mariner has sympathy for dogs that live in residential areas – most never get a chance to run and smell and explore like their ancestors and most never meet another dog to talk dog talk and to run and play together.

Mariner and his family have been fortunate over the years to live in rural areas. The family’s dogs were never on a leash except to go to the vet’s office. One of our dogs was so astute that mariner and the dog could go shopping together; the dog heeled without ever being taught to heel. More astounding, the dog sat and waited patiently at the door of stores mariner went into. Mariner was more afraid of the dog being stolen than running off.

Mariner’s experience with all the dogs his family has owned is, if you can take them to a wooded area in a park or on the back side of a farm that is several acres in size, the dog will run off and explore but always keep you within a range. Mariner would play hide and seek with his dog by hiding behind a large tree or shed while the dog was roaming about. Within only a minute or two, the dog began looking for mariner by using a talented smelling nose to find him.

Speculating about the complexity and depth of the dog’s thinking, mariner came to realize that dogs have a genetically embedded awareness of how to be a member of a pack. This natural process gets trampled on by fences, cages, gates, street traffic, insecure humans and leashes. But a dog easily adapts to a human ‘pack’ and tries to behave in an accepted way except that the dog is confronted by all these human contrivances – and perhaps many non-pack behaviors by family members.

It occurred to mariner that it may be a good thing for everyone to have a pet or two around, especially have mammals. Every creature, even giraffes, have to know instinctively how to get along with Mother Nature. Homos have forgotten Mother Nature and run amok like a Mexican drug gang. Perhaps we could learn something good from our fellow non humans.

Ancient Mariner

Kiss me, Joaquin

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Axios reported today on a recreation of Joaquin Oliver (school murder victim) as a fully functioning deepfake. His father has recreated his son’s likeness, behavior and voice as a tool to advocate against gun violence. See:

/https://www.axios.com/local/miami/2025/08/06/ai-joaquin-oliver-parkland-school-shooting?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axiosam&stream=top

 

Mariner doesn’t think this is what Jesus intended when he spoke of eternal life. Mariner applauds the aggressive attack on gun legislation but he is even more concerned that Matrix awaits us in the future. Today, Homos talk to an electronic fantasy called Alexa. Just think what dating sites can do with this technology in the future. Be sure your will has a notice to remove your electronic self from the dating service or, if your deepfake is interviewing other deepfakes, let Mark Zuckerberg know so they can date in his AI deepfake town.

Run, Neo, get out while you can.

Ancient Mariner

 

Rummaging for good thoughts

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Living with Nosey Mole for such a long time and sacrificing television news, and having a disinterest in social events, even the tunnels have their own negative shadows. To pass his time, he has revisited his library (remember books are telomeres; February 16 2025 post). His interests have turned to the influential subjects of his earlier years – most often philosophy, sociology and ancient political history.

He pulled off the shelf a DVD of Joseph Campbell’s famous interviews with Bill Moyers in 1988 (PBS). Joe Campbell was the foremost mythologist of his time. Don’t discredit the term because of street usage. Joe was a renown college professor of religion and mythology at Sarah Lawrence College and credited with identifying the ‘monomyth’. He is the writer who made the story of Jason’s pursuit of the Golden Fleece quite popular as “The Arc of the Hero” – a generalized description that suggests everyone marches in tune with a monomyth.

An outstanding letter by Native American Chief Seattle clearly represents the fact that we live within the limits of a myth, that is, a myth which by definition cannot have words; that is the theological part. See if you can identify the monomyth that allowed Native American civilization to survive for ten thousand years – until Europeans arrived living under a different monomyth.

Chief Seattle’s Letter
“The President in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land. But how can you buy or sell the sky? the land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?

Every part of the earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every meadow, every humming insect. All are holy in the memory and experience of my people.

We know the sap which courses through the trees as we know the blood that courses through our veins. We are part of the earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters. The bear, the deer, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the dew in the meadow, the body heat of the pony, and man all belong to the same family.

The shining water that moves in the streams and rivers is not just water, but the blood of our ancestors. If we sell you our land, you must remember that it is sacred. Each glossy reflection in the clear waters of the lakes tells of events and memories in the life of my people. The water’s murmur is the voice of my father’s father.

The rivers are our brothers. They quench our thirst. They carry our canoes and feed our children. So you must give the rivers the kindness that you would give any brother.

If we sell you our land, remember that the air is precious to us, that the air shares its spirit with all the life that it supports. The wind that gave our grandfather his first breath also received his last sigh. The wind also gives our children the spirit of life. So if we sell our land, you must keep it apart and sacred, as a place where man can go to taste the wind that is sweetened by the meadow flowers.

Will you teach your children what we have taught our children? That the earth is our mother? What befalls the earth befalls all the sons of the earth.

This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.

One thing we know: our God is also your God. The earth is precious to him and to harm the earth is to heap contempt on its creator.

Your destiny is a mystery to us. What will happen when the buffalo are all slaughtered? The wild horses tamed? What will happen when the secret corners of the forest are heavy with the scent of many men and the view of the ripe hills is blotted with talking wires? Where will the thicket be? Gone! Where will the eagle be? Gone! And what is to say goodbye to the swift pony and then hunt? The end of living and the beginning of survival.

When the last red man has vanished with this wilderness, and his memory is only the shadow of a cloud moving across the prairie, will these shores and forests still be here? Will there be any of the spirit of my people left?

We love this earth as a newborn loves its mother’s heartbeat. So, if we sell you our land, love it as we have loved it. Care for it, as we have cared for it. Hold in your mind the memory of the land as it is when you receive it. Preserve the land for all children, and love it, as God loves us.

As we are part of the land, you too are part of the land. This earth is precious to us. It is also precious to you.

One thing we know – there is only one God. No man, be he Red man or White man, can be apart. We ARE all brothers after all.”

• • • •

Mariner, for one, is speechless.

Ancient Mariner

It’s always somethin’

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Nature enthusiasts believed that by living off the grid and using homemade wells rather than using commercially dammed water and river-sourced urban irrigation systems, they were helping Mother Earth. No luck – Mother is an ODSC [see July 14 post]. It turns out Mother wants to keep in place all her water anywhere it is placed, thank you.

Here is a clip from Popular Mechanics:

“Pumping groundwater appears to have a greater consequence than ever previously thought. But now—thanks to a study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters—we can see that, in less than two decades, Earth has tilted 31.5 inches as a result of pumping groundwater. This equates to .24 inches of sea level rise.”

The article went on to say that loss of groundwater also affects orbit. When the dinosaurs became too much to handle, she called the Solar System’s ICE unit which dropped a meteorite on them. This time, it seems, Mother is using her own biosphere to compensate for a 123% growth in human population between 1800 and 1938.

Today mariner had a personal experience with Mother Nature and her water. His basement was filled with six inches of water because his town’s sewer system couldn’t handle 4+ inches of rain in one night. He always has wanted a pond but not all the way around the house! Now the ol’ one-two punch: the next several days are sunny and in the nineties!

No matter how we Homos squirm around the issue, it won’t go away. There are far too many Homos for Mother Nature’s liking.

Ancient Mariner

 

New child care services

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More chatbox memes – look behind you!

From  https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-ai-plus-438426cc-d0dd-4ebc-8704-6f8fc768bcac.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axioslogin&stream=top

What they’re saying: Interaction with generative AI could “fundamentally change the human brain,” says Dana Suskind, a pediatric physician and expert on early childhood and early language development.

  • Suskind says teenagers and adults are already forming relationships with AI companions. The same could happen with younger kids.
  • “The content and experience that kids are exposed to in early years isn’t just sort of changing things the same way social media impacted adolescent brains,” Suskind told Axios. “It is actually changing the foundational wiring of the human brain.”
  • “Children naturally anthropomorphize,” Suskind wrote in an email, “but with responsive AI, we’re entering uncharted territory for how this might shape their developing sense of reality and relationships.”

Between the lines: Some child development researchers worry that chatbots could reshape how children learn trust, empathy and connection.

  • A small study from 2024 showed that kids ages 3-6 were more likely to trust a robot than a human, even when that robot had proven to be less reliable than the human.
  • Trust is a particularly thorny problem for those who rely on AI, since many researchers argue that these tools might always be prone to making things up.

Chatbots also tell people what they want to hear.

  • They’re trained to please, which means they’re unlikely to say “no” — a word that small children need to learn to deal with.

 

Mariner recommends not using rapid fire weapons or shotguns. Your real loved ones may be close at hand. All these efforts to invade Homo’s anthropomorphic reality are just a step toward Armageddon. The next step is not to bother with babies – they’re too much trouble – AI bots may offer an age-seasoned teenage bot instead – or, if the reader is so inclined, adult bots (male and female) are available and quite charming.

We have come to accept robots in the workplace, despite union protests. Now the frontier is the home.

Ancient Mariner

 

 

Life on Earth

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This strictly is a metaphoric, allegoric, analogous, anthropomorphized  post.  So keep one’s imagination and lateral thinking at hand.

The Texas flooding disaster is a tragic, quick, painful experience for many innocent people. It is an example of how Mother Nature will strike out for no good reason – same is true for tornadoes and forest fires. Similarly, the blatant, instant firing of tens of thousands of Federal workers by Donald Trump seems quite similar to Mother Nature’s Texas flood. Both seem vindictive; both were quick and painful; both attacked a large number of people without individual judgment.

Do Donald and Mother march to the same drumbeat?

Their tools are persistent: Mother uses water and intense heat by eliminating or adding too much water or by popping off a volcano or by melting polar ice. Donald uses cash money by building channels of cash flow that flow only in his direction or to those who help him extricate cash from the rest of the population which needs it for their own well being.

But what is the motivation? At the bottom, for both of them, it may be survival. In Mother’s case, she has a bad case of lice. They are dangerous to Mother’s health and a constant itch and tickle. She has taken to harsh baths and showers and a bug spray of methane but the lice continue to exude CO2 which gives her a fever and bad headaches. Also, the lice leave scraped and cracked patches on her skin which kills other desired creatures on her environmental skin.

Donald, too, must survive despite damage to his brain caused by any source such as damaged at birth, parental abuse, peer condescension and bullying – or all of the above. In any case, Donald must survive in spite of his disabilities. He lacks many defenses that assuage life: self-confidence, compassion, communal bonding. Despite “winning” a situation, he is not secure in his confidence. He must win and win again. Where Mother deals with lice, Donald deals with security. Both are looking for survival.

Ancient Mariner

 

Does the reader have a map?

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Sitting in the tunnel with Nosy Mole where it is a lot cooler than outside, mariner received an email from Wayside Gardens. It was a big splash sale with huge price cutting on Hyssop.  “That’s odd,” he said. “I just mentioned hyssop in my last post – and as far as I know, I’ve never seen a sale ad for hyssop before – its an indigenous plant.”

Know the world you live in.

⊗

Here is a short clip from The Atlantic magazine: “Imagine an intersection at which American national security, defense spending, the rise of China, technological innovation, regional conflict, and the future of liberal democracy all meet.” Mariner doubts this intersection has a traffic light.

The old fogies still around remember the last two centuries where global wealth was more abundant and disruption was between selected nations. This century is different. It is not just international bickering, it is way too many people for the environment and way too little resources available from a disappearing biosphere. The global economic stress challenges all forms of government. Then, like hot pepper tossed into a soup, AI is attacking the anthropological role of everything – including Homo.

So, who else is watching old episodes of Lawrence Welk? Homo is on its way to Matrix.

Ancient Mariner

In the garden

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Mariner spent most of the day in the garden. For the most part, he was pulling weeds to see if he still had garden plants under the weeds. He seldom meanders among the gardens because more pressing tasks are calling but today he poked about, swearing at rabbit damage and on a positive note, discovering plants that had survived despite all the interference of weeds, rabbits and droughts – even some, like Hyssop and Spider wort, had emerged on their own.

He keeps a stand of Milkweed in support of any passing Monarch butterfly but has never seen any. Until today. A Monarch was bounding about in the Milkweed, seemingly quite happy. Small gifts bring great reward.

While hunting wild crabgrass in the Azalea bed, he met up with a chipmunk. He’s always considered the chipmunk a mouse that is in show business; they have pleasant shades of brown with prominent stripes running down their back. We stared at one another for a long moment then the chipmunk went about its business.

This kind of puttering in the garden beds, for mariner at least, is one of the top enjoyments that can be had from gardening. The gardens have their own relationship with nature, stay busy with their own lives whether ants, birds, flowers or even weeds. They are the grand biosphere for shrews, caterpillars, moths, toads, moles and snails. A summer’s night can be blessed with dancing lightning bugs.

Plants, from algae to giant oaks to moss, have been around for billions of years before Homo came along. They know something Homos don’t know.

Ancient Mariner

 

 

We all need new top down awareness

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Especially the world’s governments but that’s another story.

Even more important is that you, me and every individual around the globe must stop living by the daily ethics of life that may have been true forty years ago. Computers are no longer smart typewriters and no longer fantastic libraries; computer technology has created a subhuman species capable of telling us what we should know and what to think. In a few years, computers, as our medical advisors and primary care physicians, will decide whether you continue to live or not. What is scary is that computers already think for themselves – technicians no longer solve ethical positions. Today a majority of stock market trades never see a human mind. Who tells you the truth – Mom or the smartphone?

We must cast aside the romantic image of farming as a rural life style with cute lambs and mooing cows and amber waves of grain and purple mountain majesties above a fruited plain. Worldwide we keep clearing to make room for more farms to make more food. The image of a romantic farm should be replaced by the relentless spread of crops and pastures that already cover two of every five acres of land on Earth, obliterating the wild landscapes that soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.  Further, it is propelling the worst extinction since an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago..

We must look beyond a world made of nations. Any nation, including the US and China, is incapable on its own to stabilize industrial development, international supply chains, artificial intelligence, humanitarian obligations and, importantly – open warfare. At the least, smaller nations, especially in Africa and the Middle East, must adopt a model similar to the European Union. On a global scale, it is time to make war less important than management of the planet and all its human disasters. It is time for one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all – including Mother Earth. It is time for the United Nations to be authorized as the ethical authority – including the right to wage international war.

The ethics of human society must leave behind the age of nationally defined variations of humans; it is of no consequence whether Italian, Brazilian, South African, Indian, Polish, Chinese . . . The issue is eight billion humans and growing. There are only two choices: let the population grow until there is a tragic, horrible collapse of controlled civilization, or take control of birthrates. Sardonically, computers may help us with the population issue. The Dixie style of birth control is simplistic. The following is an extract from a post mariner wrote last April:

“A tremendous change occurred with the industrial revolution: whereas it had taken all of human history until around 1800 for world population to reach one billion, the second billion was achieved in only 130 years (1930), the third billion in 30 years (1960), the fourth billion in 15 years (1974), and the fifth billion in only 13 years (1987).

  • During the 20th century alone, the population in the world has grown from 1.65 billion to 6 billion.
  • In 1970, there were roughly half as many people in the world as there are now.”

Immediately, one grasps the idea that population and natural resources are the two issues that can’t remain under control given the ethical image we carry from the 1970’s. So, are we willing to go the way of the dinosaurs using our homemade asteroid or will humans have the wherewithal to live according to a new top down awareness?

Ancient Mariner