Earthlings
A couple of months ago, in the middle of December last year, just before "Mayan doomsday" on the 21st, my favorite text editor asked me to approve its regular update. I clicked the link to see what's in the new package, and it immediately redirected me to the page describing new features and fixes. My fellow software developer of great Notepad++, Don Ho*, conveniently named the update "New release (v6.2.3)—End of the World Edition". It brought a series of chuckles to my face that simultaneously morphed into a big smile when I read the description below the title. Referring to the Mayan prophecy, he wrote exactly this: "Even though I don't believe this bullshit, I'm not against resetting our shitty world". Well, I don't know what exactly he meant with the word "reset", but certainly there are days when I can completely agree with him and describe our world exactly the same way.
Anyway, today is another edition of "Earth Day", and at least today we should try and put away all the pessimism (or realism, if you will) and remember those other days capable of filling our lives with at least a small amount of happiness and try to find all the optimistic thoughts we can pack into a message for the future world that will have no need of rebooting itself every now and again. Those who follow my blog probably know that my son was born on Earth Day, so I have another reason to celebrate today. He is turning 6 years old, and recently his childhood has been successfully extended with his first year of school, lots of new friends, and his first new obligations. I can see he is exiting with all the changes, and I truly envy him. Childhood is something special. Every day is bringing something new, and the empty bucket in his head is permanently filling slowly and inevitably. Also, a child's mind is pure and not burdened with adult stuff. I can't remember exactly in which episode, but I think Yoda once said, "Truly wonderful the mind of a child is", when he was trying to explain how children perceive reality very differently and sometimes much better than adults. We simply tend to complicate the world around us without any possible need.
Just to prove my point, let me add a small glimpse ofone of our annual things we do. My wife is a schoolteacher, and with other teachers, every year she is taking her class to the nature resorts, usually mountains, for one week. Viktor and I hook along every year and spend wonderful time with hundreds of other children. Believe me or not, these weeks recharge my batteries better than any vacations at the seaside or any holiday days off. During these weeks, the adults are severely outnumbered, and you can feel it. The air is always full of joy, optimism, happiness, and pure enlightenment. This week is one of those weeks. I took days off and drove six hours to this distant mountain in western Serbia to join the class, and the feeling is again there. Even at this very moment while I am writing this sitting alone in our hotel room, children are loudly singing in the discotheque situated a floor above, and I don't mind at all. Just the opposite. Silence would be disturbing.
Sometimes I truly wonder what goes wrong with people when they grow up. Why do they change that much over time? I don't know. Is it in our genes, written somewhere, how to spoil all the magic happening in the first decade or two of our lives, or is the society we live in the one to blame? I don't think anybody has a valid answer, so I will just quote my favorite astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, who once said, "Children do not read horoscopes. Children are perfectly happy counting through the number 13. Children aren't afraid to walk under ladders. They see a black cat cross their path, and they say, 'Look! Kitty, kitty,' and want to pet it, not run in the other direction. Children are not the problem here. You say you’re worried about children? I’m not worried about children; I’m worried about 'grown-ups'. Kids are born curious. They are always exploring. We spend the first year of their life teaching them to walk and talk, and the rest of their life telling them to shut up and sit down." Keeping all those optimistic words like this one in mind and also all those pessimistic tales like the one from the beginning of this post, I decided to use suitable wallpaper I found online and put it as the background of the montaged image honoring this year's Earth Day and, of course, Viktor's 6th birthday. The image represents two very distant parts of humanity, or, metaphorically speaking, the dark and Jedi parts of the world as we know it. Of course, in the middle is one of Viktor's most cheerful recent photos with a clear message representing the innocent childhood of all Earthlings out there.
This year Earth Day 2013 is themed as "The Face of Climate Change". I am sure our planet, looking at her as a living organism, has her own cycles and climate changes that are sometimes simply unavoidable events, but humans over the years have grown up to the point of being a big player, fully capable of selfishly contributing and producing climate changes of their own. Following the motto where one picture is worth a thousand words, please see the official video:
"Climate change has many faces. A man in the Maldives worried about relocating his family as sea levels rise, a farmer in Kansas struggling to make ends meet as prolonged drought ravages the crops, a fisherman on the Niger River whose nets often come up empty, a child in New Jersey who lost her home to a super-storm, a woman in Bangladesh who can’t get fresh water due to more frequent flooding and cyclones… And they’re not only human faces. They’re the polar bear in the melting arctic, the tiger in India’s threatened mangrove forests, the right whale in plankton-poor parts of the warming North Atlantic, the orangutan in Indonesian forests segmented by more frequent bushfires and droughts"
I've already posted about this topic, and if you are eager to learn more about Earth Day and Biodiversity, please follow the blue links. The problem is not only complex, but also, even though awareness is there, the solution seems to be as far as the distance from here to the horizon itself.
Are we too late to act and already stepped over the edge? I don't know, but like today when I am in the company of one hundred and thirty children visiting the highest peak of the mountain 'Maljen' near to the small ski settlement called 'Divčibare' and looking at the world with children's eyes, I have little faith.
*Don Ho
http://notepad-plus-plus.org/contributors/author.html
**Neil deGrasse Tyson
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDFgLS3sdpU
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_deGrasse_Tyson
Earth Day 2013: The Face of Climate Change
http://www.earthday.org/2013/about.html
Divčibare
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divcibare
Viktor and his 6th Earth Day
Anyway, today is another edition of "Earth Day", and at least today we should try and put away all the pessimism (or realism, if you will) and remember those other days capable of filling our lives with at least a small amount of happiness and try to find all the optimistic thoughts we can pack into a message for the future world that will have no need of rebooting itself every now and again. Those who follow my blog probably know that my son was born on Earth Day, so I have another reason to celebrate today. He is turning 6 years old, and recently his childhood has been successfully extended with his first year of school, lots of new friends, and his first new obligations. I can see he is exiting with all the changes, and I truly envy him. Childhood is something special. Every day is bringing something new, and the empty bucket in his head is permanently filling slowly and inevitably. Also, a child's mind is pure and not burdened with adult stuff. I can't remember exactly in which episode, but I think Yoda once said, "Truly wonderful the mind of a child is", when he was trying to explain how children perceive reality very differently and sometimes much better than adults. We simply tend to complicate the world around us without any possible need.
Just to prove my point, let me add a small glimpse ofone of our annual things we do. My wife is a schoolteacher, and with other teachers, every year she is taking her class to the nature resorts, usually mountains, for one week. Viktor and I hook along every year and spend wonderful time with hundreds of other children. Believe me or not, these weeks recharge my batteries better than any vacations at the seaside or any holiday days off. During these weeks, the adults are severely outnumbered, and you can feel it. The air is always full of joy, optimism, happiness, and pure enlightenment. This week is one of those weeks. I took days off and drove six hours to this distant mountain in western Serbia to join the class, and the feeling is again there. Even at this very moment while I am writing this sitting alone in our hotel room, children are loudly singing in the discotheque situated a floor above, and I don't mind at all. Just the opposite. Silence would be disturbing.
Neil deGrasse Tyson**
Sometimes I truly wonder what goes wrong with people when they grow up. Why do they change that much over time? I don't know. Is it in our genes, written somewhere, how to spoil all the magic happening in the first decade or two of our lives, or is the society we live in the one to blame? I don't think anybody has a valid answer, so I will just quote my favorite astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, who once said, "Children do not read horoscopes. Children are perfectly happy counting through the number 13. Children aren't afraid to walk under ladders. They see a black cat cross their path, and they say, 'Look! Kitty, kitty,' and want to pet it, not run in the other direction. Children are not the problem here. You say you’re worried about children? I’m not worried about children; I’m worried about 'grown-ups'. Kids are born curious. They are always exploring. We spend the first year of their life teaching them to walk and talk, and the rest of their life telling them to shut up and sit down." Keeping all those optimistic words like this one in mind and also all those pessimistic tales like the one from the beginning of this post, I decided to use suitable wallpaper I found online and put it as the background of the montaged image honoring this year's Earth Day and, of course, Viktor's 6th birthday. The image represents two very distant parts of humanity, or, metaphorically speaking, the dark and Jedi parts of the world as we know it. Of course, in the middle is one of Viktor's most cheerful recent photos with a clear message representing the innocent childhood of all Earthlings out there.
This year Earth Day 2013 is themed as "The Face of Climate Change". I am sure our planet, looking at her as a living organism, has her own cycles and climate changes that are sometimes simply unavoidable events, but humans over the years have grown up to the point of being a big player, fully capable of selfishly contributing and producing climate changes of their own. Following the motto where one picture is worth a thousand words, please see the official video:
"Climate change has many faces. A man in the Maldives worried about relocating his family as sea levels rise, a farmer in Kansas struggling to make ends meet as prolonged drought ravages the crops, a fisherman on the Niger River whose nets often come up empty, a child in New Jersey who lost her home to a super-storm, a woman in Bangladesh who can’t get fresh water due to more frequent flooding and cyclones… And they’re not only human faces. They’re the polar bear in the melting arctic, the tiger in India’s threatened mangrove forests, the right whale in plankton-poor parts of the warming North Atlantic, the orangutan in Indonesian forests segmented by more frequent bushfires and droughts"
I've already posted about this topic, and if you are eager to learn more about Earth Day and Biodiversity, please follow the blue links. The problem is not only complex, but also, even though awareness is there, the solution seems to be as far as the distance from here to the horizon itself.
Divčibare, Crni Vrh, 1098m
Are we too late to act and already stepped over the edge? I don't know, but like today when I am in the company of one hundred and thirty children visiting the highest peak of the mountain 'Maljen' near to the small ski settlement called 'Divčibare' and looking at the world with children's eyes, I have little faith.
*Don Ho
http://notepad-plus-plus.org/contributors/author.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDFgLS3sdpU
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_deGrasse_Tyson
Earth Day 2013: The Face of Climate Change
http://www.earthday.org/2013/about.html
Divčibare
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divcibare
