The Great Pause Week 31: The Inevitable Glide Path
"This week I am starting to build raised beds from street rubble and found bottles."
I gave a talk on Tuesday of this week at the Scaling Biochar Forum put on by the Sonoma Ecology Center in California. I canned the talk at the end of September and posted it to YouTube because I worried I would not have sufficient bandwidth to Zoom into the conference and give the keynote in person. Two hurricanes 5 days apart proved the strategy prescient.
My video is unlisted so it doesn’t appear on my YouTube channel page. It also won’t appear in YouTube search results unless someone adds it to a public playlist, but you can see it here:
Going back now to watch it I think, “Well, I could have taken that part out and made it tighter,” or “I wish I had said something more about that,” or “that scroll runs much too fast and you lose the information.” But you can get the idea. This is a work in progress, and it served its purpose. The audience was climate wonks, investors interested in carbon capture, engineers, activists, and agronomists. I immediately started getting mail from forum participants wanting to know how they could get more involved in our Belize Cool Lab.
In September the Lab applied for a round of funding from the Rasmussen Fund but I was notified Monday that we had not made the cut. Our chances going in were 1 in 10 and the house won. This is the latest of many such rejections this year, but we are far from dispirited. These exercises, even when unsuccessful, hone our fundraising skills and better define our project with each rewriting. Gradually, we elaborate our budget and time targets. We write more annexes to our white paper. This is something that will happen, if not as quickly as we’d like, or the world needs.
Parque San Bernardino de Sisal, Valladolid. Hurricane Gamma 2020
There is not yet good water pressure or reliable internet here, but our power and cell-service is restored so I can get on my laptop if I set up my phone as a hotspot. This is a great improvement over Hurricane Wilma in 2005, when I could only use devices that could recharge from my small portable solar array. Back then, with a MacBook, a 12V adapter, and no intermediate battery, I wrote The Post Petroleum Survival Guide in the 2 months it took to fully restore services. I sympathize with the folks in Southern Louisiana who are going through that kind of long-haul ordeal now, with the pandemic thrown in, but maybe a few of them have that book.
Covid testing and contact tracing is not something they do in rural Mexico, much like North Dakota. You may get tested if you are hospitalized, but typically once you lose taste and smell and your lips turn blue it is assumed you’ve got it. If you survive, you get tested on the way out of the hospital to make sure you are not contagious.
Our Covid support group of four people that used to meet every day to encourage each other to stay vigilant — our little “quaranteam” — is now 75% Covid positive. Sandra, who led the way, emerged and is presumed relatively immune after the ordeal. Diana nearly died but is out of critical care now. Anna took Diana to the hospital in Cancun when she developed blue lips and lost feeling in her limbs, per the protocol. That was during the Gamma/Delta evacuation I described last week, and now, a week later, Anna came down with early symptoms and is in home care. Of our four I am the only one still untouched.
Many of the residents here are quite angry with local officials who oversaw the evacuation because scores who may have been symptomatic and were forced from their home isolation were made to stand in the same long lines and board the same crowded boats and buses as hundreds of us with potential vulnerabilities of age or disease histories. We hope that this experience, and the angry response now, will change how it goes the next time.
But one could say that of the Spanish Flu of 1918. It had all the lessons we needed — a president (Woodrow Wilson) who refused to cancel War Bond parades or order masks and closures; how to expect and treat a cytokine storm; and a rewriting of history so that World War I is remembered for brutal trench warfare and poison gas until the doughboys arrived to save the allies with a daring exhibition of American Exceptionalism, instead of by the flu they brought from Kansas that so infected the armies it ended the war. Will this be the same: rebranded as our finest hour? Barring some miracle vaccine we may have a few years to think about that.
Stay safe and be prepared. We live in interesting times.
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