Fire and Knowledge

Of the 3 percent of Earth’s water that is fresh, most exists as ice sheets. Only the tiniest amount – 0.036 percent – is found in lakes, rivers and reservoirs, and an even smaller part – just 0.001 percent – exists in clouds or as vapor. Nearly 90 percent of the planet’s ice is in Antarctica and most of the rest is in Greenland. Go to the South Pole and you will be standing on over 2 miles of ice, at the North Pole just 15 feet of it. Antarctica alone has 6 million cubic miles of ice – enough to raise the oceans by a height of 200 feet if it all melted. But if all the water in the atmosphere fell as rain, evenly everywhere, the oceans would deepen by only a couple of centimeters.

–Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003), 240-241

The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can’t quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances from us and each other we don’t altogether know, filled with matter we can’t identify, operating in conformance with physical laws whose properties we don’t truly understand.

–Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003), 153

For quite a while it has been possible for a free and thoughtful person to see that to treat life as mechanical or predictable or understandable is to reduce it. Now, almost suddenly, it is becoming clear that to reduce life to the scope of our understanding (whatever “model” we use) is enviably to enslave it, make property of it, and put it up for sale.

–Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), 7

Global warming: the final verdict

Excerpt:

Global warming is destined to have a far more destructive and earlier impact than previously estimated, the most authoritative report yet produced on climate change will warn next week.

A draft copy of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, obtained by The Observer, shows the frequency of devastating storms - like the ones that battered Britain last week - will increase dramatically. Sea levels will rise over the century by around half a metre; snow will disappear from all but the highest mountains; deserts will spread; oceans become acidic, leading to the destruction of coral reefs and atolls; and deadly heatwaves will become more prevalent.

The impact will be catastrophic, forcing hundreds of millions of people to flee their devastated homelands, particularly in tropical, low-lying areas, while creating waves of immigrants whose movements will strain the economies of even the most affluent countries.

I belong to a small, unconventional school that believes that no rat poison is the correct amount to spread in the kitchen where children and puppies can get at it. I believe that no chemical waste is the correct amount to discharge into the fresh rivers of the world, and I believe that if there is a way to trap the fumes from factory chimneys, it should be against the law to set these deadly fumes adrift where they can mingle with fog…

–E. B. White, “Sootfall and Fallout” (1956) in Essays of E.B. White (1977), p. 93

In another book I learn that ten percent of all the world’s species are parasitic insects. It is hard to believe. What if you were an inventor, and you made ten percent of your inventions in such a way that they could only work by harassing, disfiguring, or totally destroying the other ninety percent? These things are not well enough known.

–Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), p. 229

I am not convinced that atomic energy, which is currently said to be man’s best hope for a better life, is his best hope at all, or even a good bet. I am not sure energy is his basic problem, although the weight of opinion is against me. I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.

–E. B. White, “Coon Tree” (1956) in Essays of E.B. White (1977), p. 39

The egg of a parasite chalcid wasp, a common small wasp, multiplies unassisted, making ever more identical eggs. The female lays a single fertilized egg in the flaccid tissues of its live prey, and that one egg divides and divides. As many as two thousand new parasitic wasps will hatch to feed on the host’s body with identical hunger. Similarly—only more so—Edwin Way Teale reports that a lone aphid, without a partner, breeding “unmolested” for one year, would produce so many living aphids that, although they are only a tenth of an inch long, together they would extend into space twenty-five hundred light-years.

–Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), p. 167