Ecological decline is looming above us. It is already beginning to happen in Indonesia, Mexico, and other places. It will not attack “quickly” and in that lies the danger. It will evolve slowly, adiabatically. It will creep in incremental changes.

We will acknowledge and recognize the individual problems, but due to their smallness, no one of them will raise our collective awareness of the danger to the needed level. All the while, hidden behind our apathy, an insidious calculus will be at work. The small problems will be (are) all interconnected, nonlinearly coupled. Some of the individual effects will be damped out and vanish, some will multiply linearly, some will magnify geometrically, others exponentially. And as in any sufficiently complex system, the symptoms of the underlying disorder that will eventually arise may or may not betray the true nature of the problem. The anti-intuitiveness of the symptomatic emergence will further frustrate public awareness and resolve.

December 30th, 2001 at 8:12 pm in Our Fault

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