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What do I mean by willy-nilly?
Spending trillions of dollars on replacing infrastructure with no
green
plan in place for the United States, much less for the planet. Here's the Webster definition of willy-nilly:
without direction or planning, haphazardly.
Hypothetically, imagine that a scouting team of aliens are observing life on our planet. No doubt those visiting aliens are far superior to us in terms of intelligence and knowledge - so just imagine what they might be saying about us Earthlings:
Look at those so-called human beings down there, busily going about the process of destroying the most-perfect planet in the known universe. They have a total of 195 so-called countries, none of which are seriously engaged in protecting the ecosystem that gave them life.
The only thing they all seem to have in common is something they call GREED, an attitude of recklessly grabbing whatever you can, for as long as you can, from nature and from each other.
The question for us is, do we take them out now, or do
we just return to claim this planet for ourselves in
about 75 years when those stupid Earthlings will have driven themselves extinct?
So what is our plan?
The simple answer is that we have no "big picture" plan. In the United States alone, we're spending hundreds of billions of dollars on hurricane relief in the same areas where we know there will be many future storms along with permanently rising sea levels.
And we're applying trillion dollar bandaids to a plethora of decaying infrastructure and transportation systems that are all part of a grossly unsustainable system of living.
One example in NYC. Have you heard about the new $10 billion subway line? Here's how David Wallace-Wells described it in his 2019 book,
Uninhabitable Earth.
It took New York City forty-five years to build three new stops on a single subway line; [yet] the threat of catastrophic climate change means we need to entirely rebuild the world's infrastructure in considerably less time.
Now don't get me wrong, I have ridden the trains and visited the new stations on the Second Avenue Subway. And they're all very well done and will be enjoyed by many New Yorkers - but they are simply a new piece of an overall way of life that has no reasonable chance of coexisting sustainably with nature for much longer.
A few more examples.
I took a look at two other areas that are accounting for much of our spending in the USA.
- According to a recent piece on Bidnet.com, the annual cost of road maintenance in the USA is running well over $400 billion.
- Also, according to a 3-9-19 piece on Business Insider, the ASCE says that we need to spend a whopping $4.6 trillion on overall infrastructure in the USA by 2025 - an average of about a trillion bucks a year.
And still no plan. The problem with all of the above is the absence of a master plan for how our nation's populace can be living sustainably by 2050. All this spending is based on a continuation of those same wasteful habits in perpetuity.
But a truly GREEN habitat will not be able to sustain habits like those - the kind that developed long
before
we knew what it would take to live in
harmony
with nature.
- 275 million registered vehicles are on the road in the USA, although 250 million of them are parked at any given time.
- To accommodate all those vehicles, there are four million miles of roads in the USA, most of which are paved.
- The FAA is forecasting strong growth in domestic air travel in the USA over the next two decades - going up from 840.8 million passengers (2017) to 1.28 billion in 2038, an increase of more than 50%.
- Obviously, all of the above means more houses will be built and more people will be buying more stuff.
Bear in mind that hardly any of these wasteful features of our current lifestyle would be part of a plan like Gratola, where I envision 80% less cars, 80% less roads and 90% less domestic air travel. And where all homes would be ultra-efficient and the new green economy would reward citizens for consuming less stuff.
The Bottom Line. We must open the conversation about the perils of "willy-nilly" planet stewardship with the world's most influential people.
In last week's post
, I appealed to a group of ten very well-known, capable and highly influential American billionaires.
Although it is not likely, I believe that if they all decided to instigate a serious global conversation about a "GRATOLA-like" solution to our sustainability crisis, that the entire world would be talking about it within weeks. And they wouldn't have to spend much of their combined net worth to make that happen.
To be clear, Gratola is the first of four envisioned corridors in the USA under the oversight of a future agency, AGRA (American Green Region Authority). When completed, those corridors would house some 300 million Americans in an area about the size of Oregon.
But, I am not trying to sell the GRATOLA idea to anyone.
I am just trying to
use
the Gratola idea
to help open the brains of highly influential leaders
everywhere w
ho can build on the idea and eventually catch the
vision
necessary to bring the entire global community up to nature's requirements in far less time than anyone would've ever imagined.
As for the remaining 194 countries, I think they will need a model for how a truly sustainable living arrangement might look. And I am convinced that America is the place to create that model.
I often think about what the late
W. Edwards Deming would do in a time like this - a time when billions of people are trying their best to do helpful things for the environment.
But in the absence of a realistic plan, they have no chance of success. Here's what he says about "doing your best."
The wisdom of "what to do" can only emerge after an overall global plan for a sustainable human habitat has been developed. And to my knowledge, no such futuristic habitat is even being discussed.
As a preview of next week's post that will feature Dr. Deming, I provide here the succinct advice he gave me privately in June of 1992 at George Washington University:
"Keep on learning. Study optimization of a system."
W. Edwards Deming
For now, I shall end this piece by providing links (in chronological order) to seven Gratola BSBs (out of
some
25 posted) that
may be helpful in jump-starting a process of thinking outside the box on this most crucial of all topics in human history.
Read all twenty-five of them. That would take far less time than reading the Mueller Report and might be a great deal more satisfying.
As always, I will continue to focus on all of the above - in my research, my writing and my speaking.
As for speaking, I am still looking for mainstream audiences who may have an interest in learning more about a realistically hopeful vision for our future - and their role in making that vision come true.
As such, I will travel anywhere for an opportunity to speak to one or more groups in each city that I visit. I only ask for travel expenses and a modest honorarium.
As for the specifics of my topic, I invite you to
contact me directly
about how I might tailor my presentation to best suit an audience you may have in mind:
Universities,
churches, think-tanks, legislative bodies, environmental
organizations, alumni associations, leadership clubs,
and/or civic groups who may appreciate a message of reality and hope for our future.
Or maybe we'll see you at the world's first Plant-Based EXPO next week. We'll be there under the 4Leaf flag and will be administering 4Leaf Surveys to the public. Click on this image below for more info:
What can you do to help?
Three things:
1. Live as greenly as possible while doing all that you can to raise the awareness of "big picture" solutions that are crucially necessary to saving our civilization.
2. Share this BSB and my
"Mama Ain't Happy" BSB with prominent journalists, thought leaders and/or elected officials whom you respect. They need to learn a lot more about the many reasons why
Mama ain't happy.
3. Here are a few more GRATOLA-related blogs that you can share with your most powerful friends, leaders, journalists and movie producers.
Until next time, just remember...
Humanity is on a collision course with Nature.
A damaged Nature will survive. We may not.
We must change course to avert an ecological disaster.
Be well,
J. Morris (Jim) Hicks
CEO, 4Leaf Global, LLC
(now contains 5-minute video of me speaking in Tucson)
In the past 12 months, I have spoken at a
VegFest in
Promoting health, hope and harmony on planet Earth
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