People You're Killing Me!

People.
I'm disturbed by people.
Not so much by you or your auntie, but by the billions and billions of us.

From my life in BJ and my visits to other cities, I've seen people everywhere. And ok, the Olympics cause lots of probs w/ booming real estate developments and constructions and w/ the insane amounts of energy and natural resources used to make them. But it's not just the Olympics in BJ and Vancouver. F'ing everywhere i go i see insane amounts of massive new developments. It's really disturbing me. I see insane numbers of beat up old cars. I see huge numbers of flashy new cars. i see massive amounts of garbage. i see (but can't see through) hazy skies.

Sometimes i see bikes, and that's good. But mostly i'm disturbed by my observations.

Also, i learned a lot about fish populations from A Short History of Nearly Everything, and about how quickly and how badly humanity has screwed up ocean ecosystems. ie, for every lb of shrimp harvested, 4 lbs of other aquatic life are destroyed. It really makes me want to redouble my efforts to not eat seafood.

And particularly from my visits to some seafood hotspots, i saw countless crazy exotic fish on display daily to be consumed daily. I saw the largest lobsters and other sea creatures i've seen in my life, and some of those things take years, even decades to reach that size. How the hell can we keep yanking them out of the sea on a daily basis? It boggles my mind.

i was really happy to be on holiday where i could make a pretty decent effort to exclude animals from my diet, but i'm just one tiny little skinny boy, amongst millions of people who want to eat prestigious, protein (and mercury) rich conscious life forms.

i really think that humanity is going to have one hell of a time turning itself around before we've done ourselves and much of the rest of the planet in.

On the plus side, after reading that book, i can put life on Earth into a broader perspective where animals always end up going extinct. Yes it may be 50x faster now than ever before, but in the end we are but a blip in the millenia which have and will pass before the planet itself reaches its inevitable conclusion. Unfortunately, that's the only solace i can glean these days.