6 O’CLOCK NEWS

I was watching the 6 o’clock evening news a couple of nights ago. The news anchors were saying that the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant has a desalinization facility that runs at only 40% capacity. They also pointed out that the people of San Luis Obispo county need more water. The excess 60% could go to a very thirsty county. Let’s suppose that this amount of water could take care of our needs for five years, or new technology could produce an inexhaustible supply of the wet stuff. Damn, I’ve already dated myself; it’s not San Luis Obispo anymore. It’s SLO. Like SLOW, but that’s not what’s happening. The kind of slow that is happening is the kind that out strips our resources, our native beauty, our quality of life, and you can add in a little bumper to bumper traffic to remind the many where they just came from. More water makes for more growth… but is it sustainable? With a finite amount of dry ground on the surface of our planet, and if global change is for real, then we can expect rising oceans. Subtract a few beach front acres from our tax rolls and maybe a city like New Orleans will submerge below an ocean wave. I know what I’m espousing is only given credence in the land of Polly-Anna, but I firmly believe that we must start debating a sustainable lifestyle where our population does not constantly expand, but remains static. Static populations are the rule for every other living thing. When they overwhelm their resource base, Motheer Nature reduces their numbers back to a sustainable level. And when she does that, it’s usually not very pretty. So this time around we need to include ourselves in the discussion for a sustainable planet. Because if we leave ourselves out of the equation, there can be no solutions that are workable.

See Ya,

Jack