Skip to main content

Leaving Alone

 I read this essay right after spending couple of hours working in the yard - not because I am growing a magnificent flower garden or the fruit trees are laden. That is just how much time it takes to take weeds out and bring some semblance of tidy. It is impossible to get a handle on the spider webs if I don't resort to chemicals. 

That seems to be the answer to most pesky problems in the yard - chemicals that can cause you a lot of harm or a lot of elbow grease. Nature is wild and ferocious in my yard, there are a lot of invasive plants and the rabbits don't live here any more. I am sure, this piece of land has been meddled with plenty and well before my time. People have tried to do things to it and with it that was never intended by nature, as is the case around the world and on much larger scale:

..a proposal to engage in the large-scale pumping of ozone-destroying sulfate aerosols into the atmosphere to cool it—a scenario various writers of science fiction have played out in recent novels. Also the dumping of iron dust into the oceans to trigger algal blooms and the genetic modification of crops to increase their carbon uptake.

There are also plans to block solar radiation by mechanical means that range from the deployment of huge, heavy sunshades to the placing of 55,000 orbiting, wire­mesh mirrors, each 40 square miles wide.

All of these schemes come with serious failure risk

It seems like all the proposals read like mistakes with effects that would become apparent as soon as they are implemented. If people could just get far away from where nature is distressed, chances are time will do the healing. We are not needed and our ill-conceived interventions most certainly are not.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...