Word Prisms

I travelled with my family to Mexico back in the summer of 2009.   We hadn’t been and airline tickets  Puerto Villarta - hot, hot, hot to Puerto Vallarta were less than $500 each.   The summer can be hot with temperatures reach over 40°C with levels of humidity over 90% but we weren’t going to stay on the coast.   Our plan was to rent a car and drive up to Tequila on the high, inner plateau where temperatures would be more moderate for this time of the year.   From there we would move down the plateau to Guadalajara onto Mexico City and down to Oaxaca on the southern end of the country.   For some reason, we were oblivious to the scale of the drug war being waged between rival cartels and between the police and the cartels.   We certainly had no idea of the animosity felt by the people toward the police.   As far as I can remember, the Government of Canada hadn’t even placed warnings on its website regarding travel to Mexico.   How qu...

Anthropocene is a pretty darn recent word.   That’s because humans haven’t had the impact on the environment that they do now until pretty darn recently.   And it’s pretty darn depressing.   In fact, it’s my most depressing topic of contemplation and conversation next to death and disease.   The Anthropocene epoch is a term popularized by scientists in the 1980s to represent a new geological epoch based on the huge environmental impact we, the homo sapiens species, have had on this the planet.   Its recognition would put an end to the Holocene epoch, the epoch we normally consider ourselves to be in but scientists argue is fast disappearing.   The level of atmospheric C0 2 has increased about 40% since the mid-18 th century, glaciers and a ready supply or fresh water are disappearing, the disintegration of coral reefs, perilously reduced fish stocks, the extinction of species between 1000 and 10,000 faster than the natural rate, massive deforestatio...