It is not easy for me to notice change when I am in the midst of it. The accelerating rate of change is even harder for me to notice. Occasionally I am stuck by the way the rate of change is speeding up. I never know if it is my evolving sense of time, or if things are really going faster and faster.
It is easiest for me to see that we are all part of a changing world that is heading for an explosive crash. The rate of environmental change took on new meaning, speed and direction when humans began changing the landscape by organized agriculture. The rate of change has been growing ever since. It has never been accelerating more than today.
A retired professor argued in the paper today for the presence of chemicals in our food. Glyphosate is now part of just about everything we eat. This is certainly different from when I was a child, and definitely not part of my grandmothers diet. It is foolish to argue that the addition of chemicals like this has no biological effect. The rate at which farmers have been adding them to our food has been accelerating since WWII.
Our ability to see the effects may be improving, but in no way keeps up with the growing presence of foreign and new chemicals in our body. Our ability to see is highly influenced and prejudiced not only by our limited ability to understand the impact, but even by our notions of what we are looking for.
With all other environmentalists, I abhor and protest the damage likely to be visited on nature. Unfortunately, all we may affect is the accelerating rate at which the environment is altered. So much damage and change has already happened and has been happening at an increasing rate, that all we can hope to do is slow the change down.
Talk of reversal of environmental impacts such as climate change actually are a bit naive and uninformed. The changes have already taken place, and are heading in a direction we can hardly predict. We may be able to slow this train down a bit, but there is no changing where it is headed.
We have already so dramatically changed the ecosystem of the world that species have disappeared all around the world. They are not being replaced. The rate of evolutionary change is much slower than our ability to affect the viability of species and it will never be able to keep up with the impact of our destructive actions.
Population growth, of course, has a lot to do with the dramatic impact on the environment. The population growth curve is going upward at an exponential rate. It’s not even a straight line. At some point, it must crash or at least have a dramatic correction. I’m not about to say that humans are doomed, but any honest biologist or sociologist will predict that massive quantities of humans are doomed. Maybe many of them already exist.
It is hard to remember what technology was like before 2007 when the iPhone arrived. The rate of technological change has been accelerating so fast that everything more than a decade ago is a blurred lost memory. Again, the exponential growth is something amazing to behold. It is also impossible to predict where it is headed.
Environmental change, population change, technological change are all surrounding me. Some days it is hard to keep my feet attached to the ground and have a reasonable perspective where I am standing.
For me, I sometimes wonder if my notion of time and change are accelerating, or if the actual changes in the world around me are accelerating. Is my perspective speeding up, or is the world around me speeding up. Is this what entropy is all about? Is the world I have known rapidly dissolving into random chaos.
Or am I simply recognizing that all things are unpredictable and held together by my imagination? Change is hard to understand.