Thank you for so clearly saying the things I don't want to hear and yet know I must. This is a hard time to be here but here we all are, and we must keep doing all that we possibly can to create positive changes.
“For one thing, this is outside the realm of their imaginations. For another, it isn’t in their interests to believe you. For a third, it is possible that we are not human beings to them.”
Jason- As always, I’ve had to meditate a while on your essay and all the threads you bring together. Carolyn Forche was influential on my worldview and personal formation in the 1980s. I read her poetry in a class on Latin America and attended her poetry reading when she came to campus. As a way to frame your thoughts and the studies on corn and ethanol- ears pressed into service for human non-food consumption, her poem is extraordinary. Already I feel the need to read your essay again so I don’t get any of the details wrong.
The power for me is heightened by having just last night finished Elif Shafak’s novel, “There are Rivers in the Sky.” I don’t want to give anything away but will say it reflects similar threads to what you have brought together. Beloved landscapes and waterscapes, beloved people, the cruelty that humans are capable of, the beauty that humans are capable of.
Thank you, Laura. I'll put Shafak's novel on my ever-growing list. It was a bit of a high-wire act to thread together her poem and life's work with my rant about ethanol. I'm glad you feel that it came together well enough. I think I'll also add her memoir to my list...
Good lord, that information about ethanol is infuriating. Of all the ways we’ve enshitified the world that has to be one of the stupidest! Though it’s becoming almost impossible to rank all the stupidity going on around us.
Honestly I have never felt more like a stranger in a very strange and hopeless land…
I've known that the energy density of ethanol is much lower than gasoline, too. You need to use more ethanol to get the same amount of energy. The entire corn to ethanol system doesn't make efficiency sense unless the goal is to support corn production.
Exactly. Those solar conversion numbers tell the tale. We can attain the same energy from a tiny fraction converted to solar, all while using that fraction for agrivoltaics or pollinators, etc.
Jason, isn't it passing strange that we have been brought to speaking of this industrious wasteland? We carry the PFAS and ethanol, methane and carbon in our cradle as surely as blanket and nook. They are our blanket and nook. We leave the cradle carrying them. We write in the language of the cradle and we teach blanket and nook and so we have fashioned our world. But we, the cradle and its contents, are transforming as does our world. We become stranger every year, less intelligent, less intelligible to each other and preceding generations. Our numbers are mutating us to something strange and terrible, something quite comfortable in the wasteland of its diminished world. It is incomprehensible this future, glorious and dark. I fear the future.
Thank you, Michael, for this deep response. Yes, the abstractions we've built are now large enough to contain us and to breed new layers of abstraction from the real world. Our newest tools make their own tools, at a speed we're really not equipped to handle.
Thank you for so clearly saying the things I don't want to hear and yet know I must. This is a hard time to be here but here we all are, and we must keep doing all that we possibly can to create positive changes.
Thank you for listening, Mary. It's not always easy to write these things either, except that I feel compelled to do so.
“For one thing, this is outside the realm of their imaginations. For another, it isn’t in their interests to believe you. For a third, it is possible that we are not human beings to them.”
That quote does resonate across time, doesn't it?
As always, Jason, you are my source of outrage and hope and, perhaps above all, faith in integrity and ideas expressed here week after week.
Thank you, Bryan. That's very, very kind of you to say.
Jason- As always, I’ve had to meditate a while on your essay and all the threads you bring together. Carolyn Forche was influential on my worldview and personal formation in the 1980s. I read her poetry in a class on Latin America and attended her poetry reading when she came to campus. As a way to frame your thoughts and the studies on corn and ethanol- ears pressed into service for human non-food consumption, her poem is extraordinary. Already I feel the need to read your essay again so I don’t get any of the details wrong.
The power for me is heightened by having just last night finished Elif Shafak’s novel, “There are Rivers in the Sky.” I don’t want to give anything away but will say it reflects similar threads to what you have brought together. Beloved landscapes and waterscapes, beloved people, the cruelty that humans are capable of, the beauty that humans are capable of.
With appreciation,
Laura
Thank you, Laura. I'll put Shafak's novel on my ever-growing list. It was a bit of a high-wire act to thread together her poem and life's work with my rant about ethanol. I'm glad you feel that it came together well enough. I think I'll also add her memoir to my list...
Me, too. I’m glad you referred to it. I’d forgotten that she’d written a memoir.
I remember that poem. A brutal reminder of the kind of brutality we face.
Yes, it's always stuck with me, not least for teaching me the potential power of a prose poem.
Good lord, that information about ethanol is infuriating. Of all the ways we’ve enshitified the world that has to be one of the stupidest! Though it’s becoming almost impossible to rank all the stupidity going on around us.
Honestly I have never felt more like a stranger in a very strange and hopeless land…
*sigh*
Strangers in an estranged land, indeed. And yes, after a while the ranking process seems useless. An eraser and a reset button seem more appropriate.
I've known that the energy density of ethanol is much lower than gasoline, too. You need to use more ethanol to get the same amount of energy. The entire corn to ethanol system doesn't make efficiency sense unless the goal is to support corn production.
Exactly. Those solar conversion numbers tell the tale. We can attain the same energy from a tiny fraction converted to solar, all while using that fraction for agrivoltaics or pollinators, etc.
Jason, isn't it passing strange that we have been brought to speaking of this industrious wasteland? We carry the PFAS and ethanol, methane and carbon in our cradle as surely as blanket and nook. They are our blanket and nook. We leave the cradle carrying them. We write in the language of the cradle and we teach blanket and nook and so we have fashioned our world. But we, the cradle and its contents, are transforming as does our world. We become stranger every year, less intelligent, less intelligible to each other and preceding generations. Our numbers are mutating us to something strange and terrible, something quite comfortable in the wasteland of its diminished world. It is incomprehensible this future, glorious and dark. I fear the future.
Thank you, Michael, for this deep response. Yes, the abstractions we've built are now large enough to contain us and to breed new layers of abstraction from the real world. Our newest tools make their own tools, at a speed we're really not equipped to handle.
"We become stranger every year." Yes, we are becoming alien to our only home. And we call it progress.