"I'm pushing against a cultural dogma that's been mainstream doctrine for generations, but I really find all this blather about adventure and the indomitable human spirit of exploration quite tedious and idiotic when it comes to space colonization. Weave got creatures swimming in our own oceans with brains many times larger than our own, and were killing them all off before weave even developed any kind of real theory about what they're doing with all that extra gray matter. There are parts of the moon that are better explored than vast expanses of our own seas. We don't even know what consciousness is, and science is largely uninterested in answering this question. I don't believe the spirit of exploration and adventure is what's driving our longing to break for the stars. I think it's nothing but garden variety escapism." --by Caitlin Johnstone  (More from her at:

> https://consortiumnews.com/2019/08/21/the-oligarchys-plans-for-our-future-keep-getting-dumber/

* Ms. Johnstone makes a good presentation of her thoughts, which are close to my own --especially about our frontiersman-in-space notions. IMO: we're supposed to be contemplative, humble adults and stewards on this planet by now. The time for rude growth and expansion is waaay in the past.

That said, some future "extinction level event" is assured --unless we smother in our own overpopulation and effluvia first. In the meanwhile, we clearly have a basic need to see a path toward securing the salvation of sentient life and our thoughts. This "will to live"/survive is an essential part of our consciousness and it animates all life. It's Johnstone's main point (I think) that the path should not be a fatal fantasy (although we'll readily grasp at fantasies in the place of nothing and no hope). However, our physical human salvation, alone, and without the Earth's supportive and defining fabric of life, makes no sense to Johnstone.

By "survival", we're really talking about knowledge, wisdom, aesthetics and awareness --the stuff we pass on generationally, the stuff we try to put into time capsules. The continued existence of living thought is an article of faith, even if it must endure gaps and dark ages along the way. We all die as individuals. We can reluctantly accept that, as long as the dream of life we've shared and contributed to survives us. We badly need the affirmation that others will at least continue the journey of consciousness, should our own experience of it come to an end. Should us "Earthlings" come to a collective end --it would be nice to know that others, elsewhere, are contemplating life and that they might take something of who we are along for the ride. (Our dog Sammy understands that.)

One possibility would be if we turn out to be "the aliens", that life on Earth was seeded by just such an effort to expand life and consciousness in the Universe. (Perhaps somewhere in that "excess" DNA we and other creatures carry around is a message of greetings?) Then we'd at least know that others will likely survive us, and that they're made of the same "stuff".

8/31/2019: In that vein (Johnstone's suggestion that we're not done exploring and grasping what we have on our Earth), we've long been aware of nagging historical anomalies presented by artifacts from our ancient past. Because of the inconvenience they challenge us with, and because of the de classe cranks they attract, the tendency is to simply ignore the problems they present, along with the people who present them.

I concede that an advanced society troubling with the precision surfacing of 3 to 100 ton blocks of granite makes little sense --to us, but --well: those happen to be "facts on the ground". Also: I offer our civilization's example. We're very advanced technologically, but not socially. Most of us cleave to mythologies anchored in the same past as ancient Egypt's.

* The point of this --in the context of time capsuling, is the capacity of our artifacts and texts to transcend our times and our limitations --to speak and to affect the future --perhaps to even make a (social, sentient) future possible. What might our artifacts accomplish? If looked at with clear and unbiased eyes, could ancient artifacts have the capacity to move us?

* Web sites (thanks Neocities!) have tremendous potential for reaching people. I'm only limited by my inabilities to grasp the essence of subjects, then to articulate a compelling presentation (fat chance). Since getting my first typewriter (over 60 years ago), it's weighed upon me that if I could just figure out which keys to press, in which order, and then who to mail my letters to, the world might change for the better. We're at such an advantage now in that the right people can find their own way to our thoughts --hopefully: worthy and moving thoughts.

* Peter B. Collins' 4/29/2019 interview of Guy McPherson is a dreadful reading of the climate change tea leaves. McPherson's prediction of unavoidable, multiple^ catastrophes within 11 years (and no survivors) is over-the-top, but it might rattle the willfully ignorant and wake up those who sleep. You can also stream the video version from here. Here's more, more & more.)

I think there will be (bedraggled) survivors --life boats into the future. We wish them well! Sadly, sensitive, thoughtful, cultured folks are not likely to go on having children --but the other kind will, and I suppose that sort of bull-headed toughness is what'll be needed to weather adversity, survive and make a safe place for civilization 2.0 plus.

^ McPherson's assessment is unusual in that he's aware of the potential follow-on catastrophes presented by nuclear power plants. There are over 400 around the world and in the event of shutdowns (due to accident, power grid failure, worker panic, solar flare/CME, extreme weather, flood, tsunami, civil disorder, wild fire), they rely on a week or two of emergency diesel power, then outside power (for at least a year) to keep their over-packed "spent" fuel pools from boiling, igniting and breeching what little they have by way of containment --Fukushima style. The crews running these plants must not walk away from them.

* This presentation by Professor Dan Britt (and thanks to David) is getting old (2012), but that gives us the advantage of seeing how the projections/predictions of his graphs are working out. A few years ago I compared a simple graph of glaciation (ice age) cycles --to ominous predictions of global warming, and that raised an obvious question: "Is carbon dioxide and its global warming --all that's standing between us and the next ice age? Answer: "yes", but this "solution" is going to drown Manhatten, Florida's premium beach front properties, and all similarly located low lying properties and island nations around the world.

* On May 6th (2019) a United Nations body --the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (which becomes the initials: IPBES) --issued a dire assessment --the product of 150 experts from 50 nations, with contributions from 250 other entities. It emphasises the destruction of our planet's biodiversity, with tens of thousands of species being immediately at risk and upwards of a million to follow. It's likely that our human populations will crash as well, along with much of our culture and the basic infrastructure which distributes our food, labor, goods, and energy.

Example: "--a new study in Antarctic Science says the world's second largest emperor penguin colony, which once hosted up to 25,000 pairs of penguins, has seen virtually no births since 2016, when thousands of chicks drowned after the collapse of an Antarctic ice sheet."

The IPBES' report, as covered by the news I watched today (5/6/3019), was mum on over-population. To his credit, Brent Goff --the host of Deutche Wella (DW.com), twice asked an IPBES presenter to comment on the projected world population's growth to 9 billion, but she wouldn't go there. Today's PBS News Hour host (William Bringham) and ABC's didn't bring it up at all. I expect that this report's faint ripple upon international waters will quietly pass.

** For years we've offered to "piggy-back" on others'/elsewhere time capsule projects, for which we'd ship a complimentary set of our tiles. That offer still stands --until our remaining tiles are gone --and whether or not you have a stable site in which to place your capsule, since it can't be any worse than here (the subducting, potentially volcanic American west coast).

* We looked into taking David's advice --to simply seal our sets up (say: in heavy duty plastic PVC plumbing pipe, with interior padding against mutual abrasion) and toss the packages into our trash pick-up bin --over a period of months, such that our packages would get widely distributed as to depth and location in a regional landfill.

* But this approach has problems. The old dumping days are over. While our local trash does go straight into a suitable landfill (well above the water table and well inland from the coast), in order to extend the landfill's capacity and life, they run a pair of 60 ton, vibrating, monster crushers over it --per:

A mighty Bomag BC 1172 RB-4 at work

--which is a common practice now. It's also common for a landfill operation to pick over the trash (for recyclables), to incinerate, or to grind it up.

* Second thoughts --and see below for alternate interment and legacy options. I've backed away from the shallow burial of capped plastic pipe capsules because they look too much like an explosive device (in these sorry times of ours). I'm going back to simply packaging the padded tiles, such that they'll be held together until consolidated by the surrounding soil and/or sand. It still seems a good idea to add a chunk of iron (say: an old railroad spike) and a strong magnet (but not a dangerously strong neodymium magnet) as clues. A sprinkling of hardy, anomalous plant seeds (wild violets? Onions?) might become a very durable clue. A stout, 2-handed tool called a "garden claw" is just the thing for tearing a shallow 3+ inch diameter hole through grass and weed roots.

Some kind of a buried cover or "roof" over the tiles might be added, both to announce that something's been found and to protect the tiles against that first strike (with whatever tool is being used to dig). It should be a heavy guage artificial item (a pipe cap, stove lid, railroad cleat plate). If made of ferrous metal (ie: magnetic iron), so much the better.

Sand is abrasive, glass wool is too hazardous for the finders, organic materials will decay. --I suppose that pieces of thin, cellular packing plastic or polyester fabric would be as good as anything for padding between the tiles. I don't think the escaping platicizors will hurt the tiles. (I welcome opinions on that.)

Updates: * There's one operation making ceramic time capsule tiles, and I occasionally read about other types of time capsules being placed. There must be many more which don't make the news. (See this update.)

* The consequences of climate change should now be apparent to everyone (except the Trump administration and it's proud supporters). For details, see the United Nation's IPCC report and dire warnings. I expect another Y2k type surge in time capsuling to take place as climate change becomes manifest.

* This page is intended to be a positive, inviting, "crafts" approach to time capsuling. I'm a "project person" and a technician by occupation and orientation. Although I enjoy working with clay, I can't pass myself off as an artist. Surely, you can turn out more appealing tiles.

* I made our most recent tiles from a 25 pound block of Georgies' grogged, low temperature, "Wonder White" sculptural clay (CC547SC) --purchased through a nice local pottery shop ("High Tide Ceramics"), which also fired them for me --to cone #06. I've fired a batch in my Woosh kiln as well and tested both batches for porosity, hardness, freeze-thaw tolerance, shrinkage --and for survival in my rude home kiln. The electric kilned tiles are cleaner and a tad harder. They all came through, but High Tide's firing costs me half as much per tile.

* The status of tile #8 has been settled. Hearing two approvals and no objections, Tile-8 has been added as illustrated. The stamp for it arrived from Stamps On Sale and the impressions look good, although sculptural clay is a bit too rough to make out the expressions in eyes and mouth. (I might back off to Georgies' lightly grogged clay, now that I have access to a real kiln.)

** I'm persuaded that the tiles need to get hot enough for "permanent dehydration", but not hot enough (and/or not "soaked" long enough --at temperature) to become stone hard and vitrified (like our earliest tiles, which were medium fired to cone #6 = 2232 degrees F.). Grogged clay stays more porous, especially if fired at low temperatures (cone #06 = 1816 deg. F.), which seems to help it survive freezing (contrary to my own expectations and much opinion).

* Time capsuling is a worthy civic undertaking that I try to encourage and support. It's a good idea in socially healthy and optimistic times (whenever that was), and in the (should be normal) expectation that our inheritors will be "our own" --generations hence. In doubtful times like ours, time capsules have vastly more merit and urgency, not the least of which is to act as a coping activity.

** You might have some input to offer: corrections, perspectives, placement alternatives, perhaps something out of your own knowledge and experience with ceramics. My contact information is listed at the top of this page. If you've posted something relevant elsewhere, I'll link to it; otherwise, please indicate if I can directly quote (in this space) what you send me --and whether I should attribute it to you by name (or your nom-de-net).

Inputs --from out there:

1) Earlier this year I called (ceramics supplier) "Georgies". The woman I spoke to didn't think I stood much of a chance to make headway with my charcoal kiln, but suggested that I use their low temperature, grogged, "Wonder White" clay (CC547SC). After I concluded that vitrification isn't such a good thing for freeze-thaw survival, I spoke with her again and she stands by her advice, adding that I might want to try their Timberline Sculptural (CC550SC --a cone-4 to 7 maturing clay) as well, which seems similar to the old SP-770 I've been testing.

1.2) We also discussed what's going on (or not) in my Woosh kiln. It was her estimate that the tiles aren't spending enough time at peak temperature to really cook --which does seem to be the case --although the results (with sculptural clay) seem gudenuf. Since reading the temperature of a tile in my kiln is problematic (compared to the rather uniform temperature and re-radiation within a standard kiln), she suggested that I go by one of the results: shrinkage. It turned out that my Whoosh kiln, after trying several configurations, finally drove tiles to the same shrinkage as in an electric kiln fired to cone #06 (yay!).

2) Georgies gives a shipping estimate at the point of purchase, but the actual cost might be at variance. (They don't pad their shipping costs.) The clay itself is very affordable: maybe $15 a 25 pound block, which can be sent at a reasonable cost via USPS flat rate Priority Mail. There's a $3 handling fee (only) if your order amounts to less than $50 (sans shipping costs).

3) Martin Kunze, ceramicist, inventor of ceramic microfilming, and founder of the "Memories Of Mankind" project (and see below), told me about the "Arch Project" (and see just below), which has already partnered with Elon Musk to place a copy of their microscopic, eternally archival library --in orbit around the Sun. It's in the glove compartment of that red Tesla that Musk launched (as a proof demonstration of SpaceX's "Falcon Heavy" rocket).

Time Capsule Activity Elsewhere:

* I can relax a bit, now that the Arch Mission Foundation, a non-profit organization, is creating multiple repositories of human knowledge "around the Solar System" (including on Earth, and one has already crash landed on the Moon). Arch was founded in 2015 and incorporated in 2016. See the Wiki. (Yay!)

* Oh my --so much legendary time capsuling has been going on! Via Arch's (pronounced "Ark's") home page we get to a presentation telling us about the first placement of a copy of their "Arch library" --into a permanent orbit around the Sun! Fittingly, it contains the Isaac Asimov Foundation Trilogy, which was the inspiration for the Arch Mission Foundation, years ago . This little object:

--was part of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy payload and travels in the
glove compartment of that red Tesla roadster. (Thank you, Elon Musk!)

With enterprise, donations and manifest support from co-operating institutions, it appears that this effort is well on its way to becoming a mighty bridge into what could be a very distant future and point/s of recovery.

Although MOM's main point is the ephemeral nature of the world's digitally stored information, they've also pointed out that the way this message reaches you --the Internet-- has become one of the many scourges devouring our environment. That's one I missed in my litany of woes.  The world wide data flow is doubling over periods of only 18 months. Anything with such a torrential rate of increase becomes a cancer on the environment --and one with a surprisingly large carbon footprint.

Here are three good stories about MOM's work:

https://www.gq.com/story/memory-of-mankind-time-capsule

http://mediahub.unc.edu/making-memories-time-capsule-project-mankind/

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20161018-the-worlds-knowledge-is-being-buried-in-a-salt-mine

* Further down on this page find my citation of the "Long Now Foundation's" expansive efforts to preserve the world's many languages and cultures by way of archiving parallel texts --"Rosetta stone" style. A would-be key to all our languages is MOM's inclusion of a huge "Pictionary", which associates our words with things, activities and concepts. The two organizations are already in contact, so I expect that MOM will be including one of Long Now's Rosetta Discs, and that Long Now will add a copy of MOM's pictionary to it.

A thumb of a page from the Pictionary at MOM's web site.

Hey: they managed 25 cities --pretty darn good.

* I follow the news every day from mainstream and alternative sources, with ears and eyes very attuned to time capsule news: ZERO coverage! It happened 3 months ago and I only recently stumbled upon news of this multi-state, political theater event. Poor kids!

* As reported in Nature: on September 17th, 2017, a stainless steel "science time capsule" was interred some 5 meters down into a bore hole on an Arctic island at Poland's Polar research station. It contains a little bit of everything: many DNA samples, seeds, text, electronics devices, mineral samples, a 4.5 billion year old meteorite, etc. It's expected to re-emerge in about 500,000 years. (Unfortunately, it's close to sea level --and stainless holds up poorly in salt water. Thick maritime bronze, as is used for ship fittings, would have been a better choice.)

Now let's get straight at it.

* To make and sequester time capsules, there are several ways to go:

    ~ Some sort of a generational document keeping, oral history that's passed along, or a mnemonic way of preserving culture.

    ~ Any of a raft of sealed, actual "capsule" approaches, ranging from buried, sealed tubes, to sealed off chambers, to space probes in orbit, to maintained beacon-like radio or laser transmissions. Some have suggested that we ourselves are DNA time capsules, which arrived upon the Earth long ago as basic but diversification capable life forms --part of an ancient civilization's, or even Nature's interstellar "panspermia" project.

* My page presents a humble, simple, easy, but time proven approach of dispersing clay tiles --"tablets", like those which turn up during archaeological "digs":

A Sumerian cuneiform clay tablet
(Possibly, this is just a note of credit, say: for a delivery from some "farmer Jones".)

To be making tiles (which need a bit of mechanical protection, but no special encapsulation), there are more ways to go. Although those ancient tablets I'm emulating were mostly just Sun baked, let's give ours a much better chance of survival by at least firing them to the point of permanent dehydration: 932 degrees Fahrenheit --or a thousand plus to be sure. (Do I "hear" objections --?)

Depending on which of the following options you take, higher temperatures will harden our tiles and that's just fine, at least up to the point of seriously reducing surface porosity. (Good, intact vitrification and glazings are, of course, essential for "functional" pottery --that which is intended to hold food and beverages.)

TCT Option 1) You have a kiln, so read the tile making stuff below, then go to *here*, although that section was/is oriented around firing past maturity and into vitrification.

My tests and research are (so far) indicating that firing from 1300 degrees Fahrenheit to a temperature short of vitrification (cone #06 for low temp clays) --works. That would allow the use of more affordable "test", "enamel" and "student" kilns, capable of firing several tiles at a time. These plug into a regular 120 volt outlet and cost about $300 new (a lot less used). I'd use one (well attended by an adult) --outside on the porch or driveway. It is essential that you plug it into a "GFI" protected outlet when used outside or standing on a concrete floor.

Option 2) You have access to a kiln. Find out if the kiln facility (be it a friend, a club or a commercial enterprise) sells a grogged clay. Buy some and use it, since you want to support that ceramics activity --plus: the kiln operator best understands how to fire the clay you purchase --at least to the low fire or "bisque" temperature you want your tiles to reach. "Paint/glaze your own pottery" shops routinely fire to cone #06 (1820⁰ Fahrenheit), which seems to be optimum for the normal sculptural clay I've been using lately (assuming one wants to leave it porous).

Option 3) You either have no access to a kiln, or the available ceramics operation has no grogged clay and would be uncomfortable firing clay that you sourced elsewhere. So read about making tiles, then fire it yourself.

Objections department: For visitors to this page who've worked with ceramics, it's likely you're concerned that I should be firing meant-to-last ceramic items to some point of "vitrification". However, my tests and the experience of others indicate that porosity is important, and possibly more important than high firing to any particular degree --as long as it's beyond the temperature of permanence, and short of a glass-like vitrification. (Click on the temperature chart to enlarge it.)

* So far, the downside of this low firing range has been softer tiles --about equal to the hardness of a copper penny (a "3" on the Mohs hardness scale), whereas my earlier cone #6 fired tiles couldn't be scratched with the point of a pocket knife (so they were harder than 5.1 Mohs: rock hard).

* Surprisingly, Seattle Pottery's "heavily grogged", high fire sculpture clay (SP770) tested well, despite that I've been low firing it (but well above the point/range of permanence).

* I do 5 freeze-thaw tests on tiles and have yet to crack a porous tile. Despite thawing tiles by splashing them into a bowl of water, no cracks developed.

An October 3rd, 2016 post at Ceramics Monthly by David Scott Smith points out that terracotta roofing tiles stand up to the weather just fine --despite having a lot of porosity --and that they answer to quite a different (in fact: a codified, CSA/ASTM^) standard. The ASTM makes a distinction between straight cold water absorption (they specify a 24 hour soak), and the absorption which fills steam exhausted pores/capillaries --after a tile or brick has first been boiled (for ASTM's specified 5 hours). A maximum ratio of 78% (former to latter) is checked for --unless the brick or roof tile alternatively qualifies by being under 5% absorption/porosity.

^ American Society for Testing Materials

The sense of that is: when normal cold water absorption fills the open ended pores and subsequently freezes, the expanding ice must then have places within the ceramic item to go --like into branched off, internal, closed end pores that did not get filled through ordinary soaking.

David tells us of his disillusionment with the durability of low porosity, vitrified ceramics for outside installations --after witnessing a dozen of his works breaking up during severe cold weather. It seems that just a minuscule amount of water absorption can result in the demise of a ceramic creation when exposed to winter weather, in the same way that freezing water can enter small fissures and eventually split solid rocks.

* Again, and per the Digital Fire web site, that 0.78/1 ratio only applies to structural ceramic materials which exceed an indicated porosity (by water absorption tests) of 5%. That somewhat contradicts David Smith's sorry experience, but this Digital Fire article (by Tony Hansen) then goes on to add a number of caveats (which also speaks of bad experiences), and finally suggests the use of a "secret weapon" (aka: cheating :-) --by whipping out a big can of Rust-Oleum "Paver Stone Sealant".

And we're still not home free, since others demur, saying that sealants might make matters worse (abrasions above, trapped water below --ya know), and that an application of water repellent instead would allow a ceramic item or stone work to breathe. (But such repellents have to be re-applied at 5 year intervals. That means digging up my time capsule tiles 2000 times over the next 10,000 years --!  :-))

* It seems that, by firing to vitrification, thus making the artifact hard, brittle and sealing many pores which were open to the surface, or by applying glazes, or by using sealants --that outside ceramic placements are thereby made more vulnerable.

* My uncontrolled kiln heats up to maximum temperature in half an hour. That in itself requires grogged clay and well dried "green" tiles in order for them to survive their uneven thermal expansion shock. I think the grog's effects are not only due to the added strength of a "two phase" clay and perhaps stopping the progression of cracks, but due to grogged clay being much more porous.

* ^ I read in Frank Giorgini's (1994) book that at 1063 degrees^ Fahrenheit, a chemical change called "quartz inversion" takes place. He stated that at this stage, the clay becomes "irreversibly hard". I like the sound of that, and 1063⁰ is low --less than cone 022.

^ However, a 2017 article by Ash Neukamm at the "Ceramic Arts Network Daily" web site tells us about a lower, wide ranging stage (up to 932⁰ F^), through which clay achieves "permanent dehydration" by way of a chemical change, and that the "quartz inversion" point is, in itself, more about a troublesome jump in the rate of thermal expansion. Cooling back down through quartz inversion (or doing a subsequent firing) is even more likely to result in cracks, since the quartz crystals are by then tightly anchored. Consequently, the advice is to go slow --which the slowly dying embers of my Whoosh-Be-Gone kiln seem somewhat able to do.

* ^Georgies emailed me a PDF chart indicating stages of firing versus temperature (emphasizing that some of those stages require extended/"soaking" time to be accomplished --something my WOOSH kiln doesn't understand :-). That chart pegs the inversion as being in a narrow range (about 1000 to 1100 degrees) and that the release of chemically bonded water has been accomplished by by 1112 degrees. Their chart makes no mention of permanent dehydration or hardness, but their verbal advice is to caution that my fast fired, low temperature tiles might end up being too mechanically soft to hold up well (and they are somewhat soft). All sources tell me that hardness increases with firing temperature (and heat "soaking") until fully vitrified.

* Hardness: "Rock hounds" (amateur mineralogists) measure hardness on the "Mohs" scale, and in comparison to a kit of graded standards. For those of use with less than a full kit, the tip of a pocket knife makes a handy reference at about 5.1 Mohs, for sorting "hard" from soft rocks (say: prior to tumbling them together). Glass is 5.5 Mohs. A copper penny can just scratch a substance of "3" hardness. "6" and above will scratch your knife and glass.

I've two samples of "floor tiles". The newest one can be scratched on the back side with my pocket knife, but not on the top/glazed side. More-over: its glaze melted in my Woosh kiln. The old floor tile can't be scratched, the knife point leaves a streak of wiped off steel on the back side's mat finish, and the glaze has yet to melt. My older time capsule tiles, which were properly fired in my electric kiln to cone #6 and 3.5% absorption, and can't be scratched with a pocket knife. My latest tiles came through at about hardness "3".

Clearly, the "sands of time" could abrade and wear my Whoosh kilned tiles smooth, so best they be bound up face-to-face, perhaps with some sort of soft but durable protection between.

** Getting the top tile hot enough to burn off the soot (from Kingsford charcoal's starting fluid component) is a just reachable reach for my Woosh kiln. I can't cover the tiles with coals (too much thermal stress). Also: it turned out that I had to place a neat layer of charcoal beneath the tile stacks or they wouldn't get hot enough. I placed a ceramic grill to space the bottom tiles a wee bit above those coals, since they'd been getting a few hair line cracks.

** The point at which starting fluid soot burns off is telling. Doing it on the burner of our kitchen range (easing up the heat, waiting, then a bit more and waiting), the soot came off when the burner (that part of it under the tile, with soot side down) --appeared orange in color. That was as viewed in the dark. We couldn't see any color with the room lights on. Orange is about 1800 degrees Fahrenheit, or cone 07 --if this is a valid comparison to kiln peep hole viewing.

* Yes: I'll break down and get an optical pyrometer one of these days, but it would be difficult to accurately read the surface temperature of either the range top element or the bottom side of the tile. The way to do it might be to take a torch to the bottom side of a ceramic tile, then be reading the sooted top side when it starts clearing.

* I bought a $20 Walmart special (17-1/2 inch diameter) --instead of a $50 Weber:

* I learned to avoid bags of charcoal briquettes which had been stacked outside the store during wet weather --hard to start up. Dry Kingsford briquettes are excellent and they don't need starting fluid --but I do use a common torch to make sure my rather deep stack of charcoal all starts together (in order to get it all hot enough).

* The way I stacked the bricks and briquettes required about $3 worth of Kingsford charcoal for each firing (of 9 tiles). Presumably, I could add another 4 firebricks and be firing 17 tiles at a time, for maybe $5 worth. That would probably also result in a faster and hotter fire --with possible problems.

So I ended up using eight fire bricks, "rated to 2200 degree Fahrenheit". They cost about $3 each at our local True Value Hardware store. (I bought 10. Two of them cracked.)

** The advice from Georgies is to go slow and bake out ("soak") the tiles at temperature --but: the experience here has been that getting the tiles glowing hot requires a fast burn --like only about half an hour at orange hot heat.  So far, by using well grogged clay, that seems to be working, and I do like the speed.

Make sure your green tiles are "bone dry" to the touch before pre-baking them. In the winter, a normally heated room should be sufficient. It takes about 48 hours here to look dry, another day to be dry^. When it's hot and humid, a small room with a dehumidifier might work.

Although "touch" is quite telling (not as much due to the temperature as to the higher "specific heat" of a damp tile), you can quantify the indication of dryness by comparing the tile's temperature to the ambient temperature of the air in its vicinity^ --per:

That white insulation is a cosmetician's cotton ball --seen here in the right image covering the sensor and pressing it down against the bottom tile. You can't use two thermometers --leaving one always against a tile, since that would prevent the tile's evaporation in its vicinity, resulting in a false reading. The tile's temperature will descend to a minimum, then it starts to rise again.

Pictured here about 12 hours after I made them, some of the tiles were already turning white-ish. The one being read checked 5 degrees (F) colder than air temperature. 10 hours later they were all less than one degree colder, so I popped them into the toaster oven.

^ However: you might instead simply wait until the tiles turn white, then give them another 24 hours in the heated drying room. That's how it's been going for me.

After my early tiles whitened and dried, I use to slowly ramp up their temperature through the boiling point in my kiln (with the lid propped open an inch). Now I do the same, but using a toaster oven --10 minutes each step: 200 degrees, 225, 250, 300, 350 --with indeterminate cool-down periods between (I set the timer and walk away).

For the sake of not providing overly conservative advice here, I decreased the pre-bake time from 15 minutes to 10 minutes --which went okay. Then I tried advancing the temperature directly from 250 to 350 degrees --and the face of a tile popped off.

The strength and porosity of well grogged sculptural clay helps to keep tiles
from blowing up in the oven or kiln, then from cracking in freezing weather.

* Before or after the prebake, I've been using my pocket knife to scrape off any sharp edges and loose ridges --while wearing a good dust mask --catching the scrapings in a waste basket --and being careful to clean up my work area afterwards (using a damp cloth). Safety Sam would tell you to instead smooth any sharp edges or roughness while the clay is still moist, thus avoiding dust altogether --but at risk of messing or bending the tiles.

* Testing for porosity/absorption is more a matter of idle curiosity, now that porosity seems desirable and vitrification is unattainable (for me).

I only boil for 5 minutes (instead of ASTM's specified 5 hours), then displace the boiling water with cold water and soak for another 5 minutes. These defined periods are important. As it turned out, "The Big Ceramics Store" uses nearly the same procedure and my porosity numbers are well within expectations.

* Key features of my tests: always starting with a 15 minute bake-out to 350 degrees Fahrenheit (unless the tiles have been freshly kilned) --then 15 minutes of cool-down in the oven, before writing down their dry weight.Keep the test tiles submerged between boiling and quenching.

For the two clay bodies I've been using, that 15 minutes in a toaster oven reliably runs a water saturated tile back nearly to a well-baked dry weight --and without (so far) blowing the tile up. (Of course I'm talking about tiles which have been fired/bisqued, not greenware.)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The "Woosh-Be-Gone" kiln:

Starting fluid flames
This is my WBG kiln's final configuration.

* Here we see an 8 brick kiln, held together with bailing wire. Above and below the bricks are pieces of 1/4 inch hardware cloth. (I only had a few scraps of hardware cloth handy. It should span the outside dimensions of the bricks, above and below.) Under the bottom bricks and hardware cloth screen are 6 pieces of broken firebrick. Two adjacent pieces in the middle support the screen's center plus the 2 tile stacks above it. This configuration allows good air intake and space for ash to fall.

* Using Kingsford briquettes, there's about a 30 minute start-up, then 30 minutes of bright orange heat, followed by a long slow down and afterglow. I placed an even layer of briquettes on the lower screen, then stack up 9 prebaked green tiles, using pieces of broken ceramic flooring tile to space them from each other and from the lower coals --per:

That top tile stabilizes the stacks

Working with all 8 firebricks in place, I gingerly fill up the sides with briquettes --well above the level of the top tile. Finally, I torch start the coals. (The charcoal would start with a single match, but I want all the coals to start at the same time -in order to attain a orange hot temperature.)

Runs with Georgies' heavily grogged, low temperature, "Wonder White Sculptural" clay went well --

Coals lightly  packed high around the tile stacks, plus a layer beneath.

I did several runs this way, each with 9 tiles, all of which came through without breakage. The first 3 runs rested directly upon the bottom layer of charcoal, which resulted in a few hair line cracks in the bottom tiles. I made some "H" shaped, high fire ceramic bottom spacers to avoid cracks and to better support the tile stacks.

* Again: all of my porous tiles have stood up to boiling water saturation, followed by 5 freeze-thaw cycles.

** My kiln seems just hot enough to burn starting fluid soot deposits off the top tile. My tests to duplicate that by using an electric range top burner indicate that I'm reaching at least cone #07 (orange heat).

My (and borrowed) advice/conclusions about clay and firing:

Note: Your typical, commercial, pottery activity shop --the kind which sells you a variety of bisque fired clay objects to decorate with glazes-- will fire to cone "06" --maybe to "04" for the bisqueing. Cone 06 is plenty high enough for permanent dehydration and 04 is high enough to fire special low temperature clays to their alleged "maturity" (meaning: still porous enough to meld with an applied glaze). Both my Woosh kilned and hobby shop kilned tiles check at about a "3" on the Mohs hardness scale (equals the hardness of a copper penny).

* A fine "clay body" takes the best impression and shouldn't feel gritty between your fingers, but most any clay takes impressions well enough (for me) and gritty "grogged" clay holds up best.

* If you decide to go for vitrification, cone 9 temperature is very near the limit for an electric kiln's heating elements, so talk with your supplier and get an honest-to-gosh cone 6 clay body (if you have access to a kiln). The Georgies "Salmon-White" that I fired to cone #6 checked out at 3.5% absorption --using my method. (As of 2018, I've long ago given away my small electric kiln.)

* Porosity/Absorption^ test steps:
(This is just to recount what I did. I don't see why you'd need to test your fired clay for absorption.)

1) Unless very recently fired, bake the test tiles (or any such 3/8" thick clay test pieces) in (say) a toaster oven at 350 degrees for 15 minutes --plus a 15 minute cool down.

2) Weigh the freshly baked tile (to one tenth of a gram or better, assuming your test piece weighs 50 to 90 grams) and mark the tile with its weight, using a pencil.

3) Bring a pan with an inch of water to a boil.

4) Drop in one or two test tiles and boil for 5 minutes (submerged and covered):

6) Weigh and mark the tiles again in pencil, then divide the wet weight by the dry weight to get the porosity/absorption gain as a percentage. (For instance: 56.75 grams wet, divided by 54.85 grams dry, equals a ratio of 1.0346. That's about a 3.5% gain in weight. Expect porous tiles to run 10 to 13 percent.

^ The more recent term "absorption" (to absorb) makes more sense than "porosity". We don't know what the actual porosity is. We're only accessing and we only care about the pores which haven't been sealed off from the rest and/or from the outside. (Expect to find confusion about these issues in the literature.)

* I reran some of my absorption tests, finding that extended boiling (for an hour) increased the indicated absorption of a particularly porous tile by an additional 1/2 of 1 percent: from 16.3% to 16.8%. Curious, and in order to see if there's a "pumping" effect: I tried boiling another tile for 5 minutes (16.1%), then another 5 minutes (16.2%), and then for a final 5 minutes (16.3%). It's my guess that extended boiling dissolves partitions which lead to a few additional capillary pores. It seems safe to say that a 5 minute boil is sufficient

* The best fired item I've so far tested is an old piece of commercial floor tile --at 1.1%. That piece blew apart when I tried to use it as a kiln shelf. I've read that only porcelain reaches zero.

* Again: most ancient tiles recovered during archaeological digs were simply sun baked or barely fired, but let's give our tiles their best chance at survival --with resources you can easily afford.

** The Portland Georgies is well equipped and you can see their detailed test results posted along with their clay descriptions *here* (take the low temp clay, drop-down menu option).

* Always use a dedicated pottery oven or kiln that's equipped with an exhaust hood. If it is a kiln, it probably doesn't belong inside your house --and maybe not in a residential neighborhood --even with a high stack. (Check zoning, building/electrical codes and with your home insurance carrier's long list of exclusions.) A gas fired kiln must be installed by a contractor who is licensed to work on and install gas fired appliances.

        * Keep your clay in a plastic storage box with a sealing lid. One with a gasket is best.

        * Don't buy more clay than you anticipate using --then do use it up.

        * If it's hard to work, put in a moist sponge for a few days --using a plastic separator between the sponge and the clay. Afterwards you'll have to "wedge" the clay to make it uniform --by repeatedly tearing it in half, then slamming and kneading it back together (arghhh) --or: try waiting a few more days (without the wet sponge) and see if the moisture content simply evens out.

Reclaiming clay:

* Firsterly: don't get into this fix. Buy the clay you need and use it up.

* All clay, as long as it hasn't been fired --even old hardened, small pieces that were trimmed off, can be reclaimed by covering it with water in a covered container, then waiting for it to "slake" into a slurry. Help it along by stabbing and dividing large pieces with a table knife as it begins to soften up.

This batch of years old fine stoneware clay took several days to slake, then several days to dry.

After it's become a settled slurry, gently remove excess water with a baster, then use a large plastering spatula to lift and spread the clay slurry onto a piece of sheetrock. Place 4 small wooden blocks under the sheetrock, such that air circulates beneath.

If you're in a dry climate, the clay might be ready to turn after 4 hours.

So when you can lift the clay, turn and spread it onto a freshly dried piece of sheetrock, then wait until the clay is dry enough to no longer be sticky. After that, pop it into a sealed lid container --until you have time to "wedge" it a bit for uniformity. (Over time in the container, the moisture content distributes more evenly.)

There's no hurry. If you have limited room to spread out your projects, just spread out part of the slurry onto a single sheetrock square at a time.

        * You might be going for beautiful, finely worked tiles with colorful glazes. If so, working, kneading and wedging the clay is more important. Me: I just stamp/impress, fire and bury --leaving aesthetics to others.

Conclusion: Use a well grogged clay --maybe a lightly grogged terracotta, fire your tiles to at least a dull red temperature (1100⁰F. if you have an optical pyrometer) --and then: don't worry about them.

Of Note:

12/24/2017: * Scientists from UCLA and the University of Wisconsin-Madison have (as much as) discovered the extraterrestrial origin of life --by determining that there are fossilized life forms (retrieved from western Australia), which are too old and too complex to have evolved on the Earth. Consequently (IMHO): biological life (as we know it) is likely to be distributed throughout our galaxy, and maybe the Universe.

This has long been suspected (if not widely suspected). Francis Crick (co-discoverer of DNA/RNA) speculated in 1981 (page #51 of his book: Life Itself) that there simply hasn't been enough time for the extremely improbable outcomes of an Earthly evolutionary process.

* While intelligent, sentient life could exist elsewhere and elsewhen, while it's been proven that many birds, dogs and simians can reason, remember and meaningfully "speak" (or sign), we must remember that there's only one species which makes culture and (what passes for) civilization. While this (we/us) might be a freak outcome, I'm betting that sentience is biological destiny --however uncommonly reached. Its realization (somewhere) is augmented by there being billions of galaxies, each containing billions of stars/suns and planets. Perhaps thinking beings are implicit in the basic elements, forces and energies of the material Cosmos.

12/13/2017: * For decades I've humbly followed, and to a much lesser extent, participated in astronomical pursuits (astrophotography, observational astronomy, amateur telescope making, correspondence with other ATMers). However, my night sky here has very poor "seeing", and I seem to have now followed my astro-bliss (or what's within my reach)  to several conclusions: *I'm not doing much good at it. *I really don't like stumbling around in the cold, damp and dark. *I want to stay closer to my good wife at night. (It's too bad about www.telescope.com. I'd hoped to do my "seeing" from Mount Teide.) So: it's time to get back into "timecapsuling" and another round of tiles --to which I'd like to add one which clearly warns against nuclear power and weapons.

The only materials I can think of are ceramics and relatively inert metals like lead, stainless steel, platinum, and gold. Lead is hazardous and the other metals are too valuable, too likely to be melted down or hammered out. However, a ceramic item, especially if it's too small for construction, fairly pretty and/or interesting, might be kept and taken care of for its own sake. It's likely to get hoarded into yet another hiding place --even if not at all understood.

Before switching to copper mesh, we wrapped our small tiles in fiberglass bats for mechanical protection, secured them with copper or bronze wire (stainless steel wire does poorly in the ground or under water), and interred them with a tethered marker consisting of a Cupro-nickle Jefferson five cent coin near the surface.  A foot long steel rod, shelf bracket (which reaches close to the surface) or railroad spike is sometimes included as a clue for finding our package with magnetic anomaly detection gear. (Click *here* for our tile/capsule content)

Just what to do with a TCT package is the toughest issue to resolve (assuming one already knows what messages to place on a tile --and why to bother doing so). Do you live or travel into the southern parts of the North American Craton? If so, we'd sure like to mail you a set or two of our tiles for interment or some other way to sequester them.

Time capsules aren't always "buried", and burials should not be at all deep (since time keeps sending them deeper). Secreting them (but with a clue) in an on-ground emplacement, an above-ground monument or stable rock face has worked well. We need to use imagination.

* Our coastal areas are very unstable, what with volcanism, tectonic plate pile ups, subduction, tsunamis, a rising ocean; the normal attrition due to riparian run-off, ground water effusion, storms and wave action. Most of the coastal area where I live is less than 10,000 years old. (Since we've so far interested only one couple in the midwest to help place our tiles, we've been burying nearly all of them in our coastal Oregon-California region anyway.)

* Much of the "Craton" --the old, original North American tectonic plate, has been bouncing around the world for millions of years. It gets glaciated and its surface ground to bits during periods longer than 10,000 years. The southern part of the Craton, which extends as far as Texas, hasn't been glaciated in a long time, but go back far enough (according to the latest theories) and not only has the Craton turned around (90 degrees), but there've been big geodetic pole shifts (as distinct from the many magnetic polar shifts).

I'm sure that a student of earth sciences could pick a spot for us (and this be her/his invitation) which would be stable for 100,000 years, but 10,000 or so is the best I can come up with in the United States --and that opens up a lot of terrain. The Long Now Foundation thinks that the best bet (again: for 10,000 years) is a cave, high up on a mountain. Mountain caves are a Biblical place of at least short term refuge --and for good reason.

Although Long Now's cave (plus they own 180 acres around their mountain location) --has walls of chalk or limestone, meaning it was a sea bed at one time, the location is considered geologically stable. You can find ancient fish fossils in the caves of eastern Oregon's mountains (my state). They might be worth looking into as well.

* Another possibility is to ship our tiles for interment in a place like Australia's "Ayers Rock": a formation which has been stable for a half billion years. (Ayers Rock itself is protected from non-native access.)

*Click here* to bring up a set of geology maps for long term timecapsuling.

* David (a member of our amateur astronomy group) added more protective wrappings to the glass wool around his tiles and placed the package into a local landfill. His reasoning is that at some point in the future, today's landfills will be mined for the stuff we've thrown away: metals, plastics (and other petroleum based products), even to recover cultural/historical information about our era.

Perhaps such waste burdened landfills will remain distinctive features for a long time to come, due to out-gassing, giving off heat, sinkage, electrical magnetic & density anomalies, pollutant run-off, oils and solvents rising to the surface when flooded, poisoned and deformed wildlife, oddball vegetation growths, and an on-going oral history about strange old things being found. However: the modern landfill gets hammered pretty bad.

Time Capsule Tiles
Cover Letter

Dear TCT Caretaker: Thank you accepting a set of time capsule tiles. The backs are blank so you can add your own entries, for which ordinary pencil is best. Penciled text will hold up as long as the tile isn't badly soiled, so take care how you seal these tiles up.

If you include the latitude and longitude of where you bury them --and the date, it might be of some use within the next 50,000 years, even if those numbers are initially meaningless to the finders.

A coat of exterior spray varnish over your text might peel your words away when it eventually decays and falls off. The best ways I can think of to protect your own penciled-in contributions are to either insure that the tiles stay dry and above ground/water, or place your tiles inside of a metal canister made of bronze, lead, stainless steel or aluminum.  The first two can be easily soldered shut to seal them, while the other two can be brazed or welded by someone experienced in such work. However: for that much effort and expense, it might be easier to just make your own ceramic tiles (which see).

I've decided on just using a chunk of iron (that old railroad spike) near the surface as a finder's clue, should s/he be using a metal detector. I topped the spike with a magnetic disk, but that might not stand the test of time.

Again: a stout, 2-handed tool called a "garden claw" is just the thing for tearing a shallow 3+ inch diameter hole through grass and weed roots.

Our tiles have text and graphics that are simply impressions: no fired underglaze coloring/ink and no overglaze finish is used. We're no longer going for that "dirty look" (photo),  which was achieved by rubbing silted mud into the text impressions to give them some contrast, and later with brown paint. They're now sequestered and shipped natural. We think they look better that way, but feel free to fill in the text impressions. (They'll look more like the below photo in a hundred years either way.)

This sort of project (not necessarily as represented by our humble efforts) is too important for just one couple to be doing it, especially with my limited personal resources and skills, so consider making your own tiles --or some other durable object.

There are many ways to make your own archival object, especially if you own or have access to a kiln and ceramics materials, or someone offers ceramics classes in your area. Failing such resources, it could be something so simple as typing (with an old mechanical/electric typewriter) --your contribution onto heavy duty aluminum foil (with the typewriter ribbon off ["stencil mode"] using the heaviest setting). (Don't use anything valuable like gold foil.)

1) They'll never be found by intelligent, sentient creatures. 2) The finders will incompetently lose or damage them. (Many pages of the Coptic Bible trove were used to start fires in a cook stove.) 3) Fundamentalist religionists will decide that they're "works of the devil" (like what happened to the Library of Alexandria, most of the pre-Columbian Aztec codices, nearly all Gnostic writings, much of the culture/s which invented writing, plus other vanished luminaries and societies of the past which we'll never know about). 4) Some well intentioned society will put them in a museum --which will get looted in short order. (Witness: the utter contempt of the U.S. armed forces and the Bush administration for protecting museums and their priceless antiquities in Baghdad.)

Perhaps the best outcome is that your tiles will be found by educated common people --who will be delighted to know we existed, but who already hold the social/spiritual messages of these tiles in their hearts --out of their own cultural experiences and understandings. The memory of us would then find a warm new home. If not, we can only hope that their culture would still be in its formative stages, such that our tiles would become a catalyst of positive discovery and cultural development.

There are traditional alternatives to interment --like: simple "show and tell", such that the tiles' contents becomes preserved in living memory --and passing them down to subsequent generations, as will be the mode of safekeeping for several of "Long Now's" Rosetta micro-disks --which were to be given to tribal entities. (See their project, run out of Stanford University at:

    https://rosettaproject.org/

If you opt for burial, a concrete cap, or interment in a cliff face; then place a "clue" --as to the existence of a tile set. It shouldn't be so easily found that kids and animals would soon get at it, but it should be apparent to the discerning eye, a survey, or if anyone is digging/excavating in the area. We've thought of:

* A vertical length of attached bronze or brass wire (ours are topped with a very durable US coinage Nickel) --which terminates within a few inches of the surface.

* A Vertical ceramic rod or line of ceramic beads (noticeable, interesting enough to encourage the recovery all of its fragments, and extremely long lasting)

* Some type of legal/safe radiation or radio frequency emitter (which depends on the tiles being found by an advanced civilization --so it might already be too late for a social-spiritual message to do them any good?)

* A dense "corner reflector", either for ground penetrating radar or a seismic survey. (Again: this depends on your tiles being found by a technologically advanced civilization.)

* A mechanically, electromagnetically, or atomically resonant device of some kind --which would act like an emitter by giving a good return  when scanned --possibly indicating a valuable mineral. (Advanced civilization --etc.)

* Some kind of a durable substance which would slowly release an odor attractive to dogs --hopefully: dogs being kept and run by intelligent beings. (A race of intelligent dogs themselves :-)  --who inherit a sort of Gary Larson style "Far Side" Earth?)

* A natural attraction for archaeologists are refuse piles, dumps, and landfills. It follows that if you just throw your new tile set straight into your curbside trash pick up, then a city trash hauler will bury it for you in a good spot.

* At the geometric/natural center of some huge but abandoned military emplacement --like old coastal gun battery foundations, an existing archaeological site or monument (but don't damage anything!).

* Inside someone else's substantial time capsule project (with permission --"of course"-- but maybe a "stow-away" object tile would be quite a kick for future finders to discover :-)))

* Inside a huge, abandoned piece of durable junk --which will one day be considered a rare historic/cultural artifact.

* If you live near the coast and your property is less than 90 feet above mean sea level, there's a chance that the soil you bury your tiles in will get washed away by a tsunami.

* If your property is less than 40(?) feet above MSL, it's subject to inundation when the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps melt (not long off now, according to some experts). Eventually, of course, the waters will recede. Perhaps your tiles will be all the more secure for having been submerged in the interim --and likely to be dug up when your coastal area gets redeveloped --by the sort of wealthy fools who build on beach sand.

* Again: you want to provide some kind of a "clue" that the tile set is where you buried it (and see other comments).

* If the area you live in freezes, digging down 3 feet should minimize destruction from freeze-thaw cycles. Otherwise, something shallower is preferable, since "the ages" are going to add soil depth anyway --so consider, instead, a heavy cap of insulating (air bubble mix) concrete, such that the ground below it won't freeze and heave.

How will finders know how old the tiles are? That doesn't matter a whole lot. Your tiles might be all the more appealing for their age remaining a mystery. What's important about these tiles is their cultural content. The finders will have their own means to determine age and there'll probably be lots of remnant cultural artifacts from which to piece it together what "Year 2018" means --should you write that on the back of a tile.

* Treasure hunt clue:  What if you were turning over dirt and found an ancient coin? What are the chances you'd even notice the dirt encrusted old thing? But: what if it had a stout piece of wire attached:

--which went deeper into the soil --and was anchored to something?

You'd dig deeper --and probably with some care.

U.S. Jefferson nickels are made of pretty good stuff: solid 25% nickel plus 75% copper, or "Cupro-nickel".  Similar alloys are used for maritime fittings and I read that as coinage, the metal is supposedly balanced so as not to corrode in salt water. I measured for a potential difference (in "electronegativity") between common bronze 1/16" brazing rod and a handful of nickels in salty water, finding one year and mint which balanced almost exactly --but there was quite a bit of variation --even between different nickels: as much as 200 millivolts. Two nickels of the same year, but of different mints, balanced closely. I concluded that they'd not react with a brazing rod/wire tether any more than with each other.

Best lay in your supply of nickels now. The value of their metal is approaching 10 cents, so they'll start disappearing. (In December of 2006 it became illegal to melt them down --pennies too.)

The Messages on Our Tiles
 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

* We've changed our tiles many times over the years. The main reason for that graphic on the first greeting tile is to act as a recognizable "hook" and starting point for deciphering the text, assuming that English will one day become an ancient dead language --or very hard to read, like "Olde English" is today. We anticipate that our varied alpha-numeric fonts could also present problems, thus that second tile, which at least conveys that there are only 10 numeric and 26 alphabetic symbols to contend with.

The most important message --and of all the tiles, is that we seek to stand in a state of mutual grace ("namaste") and forward communication with those who find them.

* Our set now consists of eight small tiles measuring 2.5 x 3 inches (or 2.25 x 2.75 if trimmed to their borders). Past tiles were directly fired to vitrification: kiln cone #6, 3.5% absorption/porosity^ (for the tiles made from Georgies [brand] Salmon White clay). Our new tiles are fired well short of that mark --maybe cone #06 and for 10% plus absorption (which seems to help their freeze-thaw durability).

** Missing from our set had been a tile warning against nuclear weapons and energy generation. It's a complicated message to get across. Hopefully, we've come up with an understandable graphic (see Tile #8).
 

Tile #1:

Tile #2:

Tiles #3 & #4:

Advice from the GeorgiaGuidestones

                                                 (a stereo pair, and see) (more)

1) Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 and in perpetual balance with nature.

2) Guide reproduction wisely, improving fitness and diversity.

3) Unite humanity with a living new language.

4) Rule passion, faith, tradition, and all things with tempered reason.

5) Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.

6) Let all nations rule internally, resolving external disputes with a world court.

7) Avoid petty laws and useless officials.

8) Balance personal rights with social duties.

9) Prize truth, beauty, love, and seeking harmony with the Infinite.

10) Be not a cancer on the Earth.  Leave room for nature. / Leave room for nature.

Tile #5:

Tile #6:

Tile #7 (but produced with sidewise text):

Tile #8:

Hopefully, this tile's message is plainly obvious. It will be part
of the tile sets produced and delivered after March 18th, 2018

Bon voyage to our TCT bundles, and fare thee well in our all too brief lives  {{{hugs}}}

Craig & Peggy

In the seventh century B.C. Esarhaddon, king of Assyria, wrote: “I had monuments made of bronze, lapis lazuli, alabaster and white limestone and inscriptions of baked clay … and I deposited them in the foundations and left them for future times.”

Making Tiles

* Our first designs for the tiles were expansive. The greeting tile was going to be two-sided and in strong relief, featuring a naked twosome waving and looking out from the front and bare behinds on the other side. Instead, our final greeting tile shows a modestly clothed couple: "creatures of words", with hands raised in a wave of greeting.

We like to think of our tiles as being in the tradition of Sumerian cuneiform clay tablets:

Stanford University, the "Long Now Foundation", and the Rosetta Project are producing a similar item, but vastly more encompassing and in microscopic fonts on a photo-etched disk:

In November of 2002 A prototype disk was attached to the Rosetta space probe, which has recently (September of 2016) landed upon Comet 67p --where it will spend thousands of years in a stable orbit around the Sun.

The first production disk was scheduled to be interred high on/in a mountain along with Long Now's giant ceramic(?) analogue clock --which might "tick" but once a year and "cuckoo" each 1000 years (per co-designer Danny Hillis' original essay on the project). (They made an earlier clock: "Prototype 1", which ticks each 30 seconds and is now installed in a London Museum.)

* There's a border around the rubber stamps I'm using to make impressions in the soft clay --per:

* Currently (January, 2018), a rubber stamp measuring 2.5 x 3 inches costs about $23 (but with free shipping) from www.stampsonsale.com --where I've had well over a dozen made and with no problems. Have a good digital image^ of what you want ready to upload. Your image should (of course) be rather heavy "line art", per my examples here. (I contacted them about minimum line width, but they didn't seem to know what I was talking about, so I'm going with 0.4mm (0.016 inch) --to judge from the stamps they've made for me. Also: 14 to 16 characters of numbers or text per inch is about the limit, using a fine grade of clay.

^ They want a one bit, black-white digital image at 300 dots per inch resolution or better, but if you send them a sharp, black and white image in (say) a JPEG, Giff, or a PNG format, their automatic utilities will convert it to what they want --and then show you the results for your approval. If something's wrong, you can simply try again later.

* If you plan to work with plaster molds (instead of rubber stamps), oily release agents aren't a good idea since they interfere with the water absorption from clay to plaster (as the clay body shrinks slightly, effecting release), so use "Murphy's Soap" instead. It's my guess that most release agents won't affect the subsequent application of glazes to your tiles since they burn off when you do the bisque firing (before applying glazes). (We don't use glazes on our TCTs.)

The culinary release oils I've used (corn oil now in 2018) haven't interfered with reclaiming scraps of clay, if well kneaded together.

* Again: ordering your stamps with a border around the edge helps with trimming and preventing surface/impression flow as the clay gets displaced.

* January 17th, 2018 update: Until now, I thought that a clay's "Softness" had a lot to do with the fine-ness of the clay. Having reclaimed the two clays ("clay bodies") that I was using some years ago, I realized that softness (alone) is mostly about moisture content. (I'm no expert  :-)  This is more like: "here's what I did".)

The New Method:

Tools of the trade

* Here (above) you see a "non stick" rolling pin (still needs a light coat of corn oil) and a "rolling way" (sparingly painted with corn oil) for making several tiles at a time. I use that carpenter's square and the scribe/needle for both the long and the cross cuts --before lifting out blank tiles with that (corn oiled) black plastic spatula.

* When the clay is fresh and in a block, I use the draw wire to slice off longest, over-thick slabs, then I bear down with the (lightly oiled) rolling pin to make it smooth, longer and of uniform thickness (3/8ths of an inch). You can "steer" the clay as you push it along and heel any cracks or dimples with a moist finger tip.

* Go sparse with the corn oil, but apply it every time --and to the stamp's face.

* Scrape off the tiles and excess clay off the ways with the spatula. Use the bottom side of the tile if the top gets messed up.

Ready to "roll" the stamp

Some say to cover the clay with a piece of canvass, but that leaves a pattern in the clay and you need to clean the canvass afterwards.

~ Don't let the bits and streaks of clay dry out. Round them up and return them to your sealed plastic bin for raw clay --lest they scatter, dry and turn into dust --which, over time, can cause silicosis of the lungs.

~ Never sweep up clay and dust. Be careful when using a fan. Coral your mess and use a damp cloth or paper toweling for clean ups. A vacuum cleaner with a 2nd hose that exhausts outside also works well, provided you don't have a close neighbor. (Same goes for your kiln's hood exhaust.)

* An advantage in using a charcoal grill is that it looks somewhat normal to your neighbors --but please answer their trust by making sure no acrid fumes blow into their house or garden activities.

* The next step is to lift each rough tile out onto a curved backing (as illustrated), so that you can "roll" the stamp over it --using moderate pressure (more than you'd think) --which you'll quickly get the "feel" of. (I got 9 for 9 good tiles on my first run.) So far, using these new methods (100 good and 6 bad tiles later): I've several times pushed down too lightly as I rolled the stamp, but I've yet to push down too hard.

* Then trim away any grossly excess or lop-sided looking clay, either staying well clear of the border impression, or cutting into the border impression (with your needle/scribe).

* Sparingly brush corn oil onto your stamp, curved backing and spatula --just enough to keep the stamp, spatula and the curved backing surfaces from sticking. If clay sticking and transfer remains a problem, let your clay dry out a bit. When the stamp is properly oiled, the clay tile doesn't lift up as you roll the stamp --and the impression comes out looking fairly dry. (However, over-oiling doesn't seem to interfere with drying.)

Advantages of the current general method:

* With no glazing, no glaze problems, and left porous, our tiles should (hopefully) end up being more archival.

* We like the traditional "clay tablet" look.

* Text impressions will last a lot longer than skin deep, underglaze fired "ink".

* We need not concern ourselves as to whether these tiles will dry flat. I just leave them set out face up until they're dry enough for firing, never turning them. Only one tile out of hundreds has seriously curled.

* I once had a fine minimalist kiln: a 115 volt, 15 Amp, Olympic HB-89T --which uses a beefy but normal looking electrical plug and outlet (and you want to run a separate, dedicated circuit for it like I did). I used it to work through my on-going embarrassing mistakes and misconceptions about ceramics --in the privacy of our own home :-)

It was equipped with a traditional, mechanical "Kiln Sitter" auto shut off plus a timer shut off --instead of the newer type electronic/programable controller. I cycled it through scores of firings and was very happy with it. You can buy a similar item from:

    http://www.continentalclay.com/

--which is probably your most flexible supplier, or you can get the HB-89T itself from:

    www.Big CeramicStore.com

--where we got ours. (Big Ceramic communicates best via e-mail. They like having the time which allows them to give a considered response. Click "contact" at their web site.)

* Later on we decided it's much saner to have our tiles fired for us, than to risk fire, noxious fumes, and invalidating our home insurance.

* You really need a separate, isolated, fire resistant shed on your property to run a kiln. Everything should be up to building and electrical codes. (Ask your insurance agent for sure.)

Our local ceramics activity center will be bisque firing our tiles, but I wanted to try doing and proving a "Weber" alternative --for the sake of folks living out in the Boon Docks.

If you do decide to set up your own kiln, it's a good idea to get all the shelves you want with the initial kiln order (especially if it comes from BCS). For making tiles, I stacked 5 shelves 6x6 inch (and 1/2" thick --suitable for up to cone #6) --thus: three 1/2" posts off the floor, full size shelf, 1" posts, full shelf, 1" posts, full shelf, 1" posts, full shelf, 1" posts, half shelf (and I had to cut a shelf to half size myself).

The reason for that half shelf was so there'd still be enough head room for a standard size Orton cone (with which one visually judges the kiln's temperature) if it's placed on the exposed portion of shelf #4. Each shelf, including the half shelf, held two of the new type tiles (2.5 x 3.5 inches).

* You want to use shelves that are no closer than one inch to the walls, particularly when adjacent a heating coil (and avoid that if you can). Big Ceramic sold me 7" shelves for my 8" square kiln interior, but now I have a full set of 6" shelves. (I had to cut them down myself).

* If you're going for vitrification, running electrical kilns only to cone #6 is somewhat forgiving and it seems to get good results. My old, home kilned tiles recently (2018) checked at 3.5% water absorption and over 5.2 on the Mohs hardness scale (harder than a knife blade).

** Again: I'm now --year 2018-- going for porous tiles, using grogged clay --which can be accomplished at a much lower temperature --perhaps cone #06.

My little kiln measured 8" square by barely 9" tall inside. You'd think that would be large enough to make 6 inch square tiles --but no, since you need room for the posts. With standard post supports and shelves, I don't see how you could make a set of cone 6 fired tiles larger than 4-1/2" square with this puppy --especially if you need a 2nd (glaze) firing (the tiles have to sit flat on a shelf for that). (You can stack them up to 3 high on top of each other for bisque firing, however.)  Low fire tiles (cone 06 to 04) can be stacked up (with corner supports for glazing), so one could go up to 6" square on those.

* The most recent sets (2018) consisted of eight, durably small (2-1/4 x 2-5/8 inch) tiles with blank backs --available for additional contributions (ordinary graphite pencil) by the caretakers of each set. (The back side is fairly rough, now that I've since switched to 30% "grogged" clay. I'll try backing off to 5% grog --next clay order.)

* The shelves and floor of the kiln should be painted with "kiln wash", a flake-off-able surface that will stop molten drips from sticking, ruining the shelves and blocks. Although regular kiln wash was perfectly satisfactory in my experience, a ceramics expert has suggested to me that the product "ITC-100-HT" is much better than standard kiln wash --and that you want to apply and use that from the first day you set up and run your new kiln.

    ** Help is as near as your local/regional medium to high fire ceramics supplier. Often the advice you get from practicing, vending ceramists is worth more than the products you order --or don't order, as has happened several times when someone at the store suggested I was making a mistake. Here in Oregon, you want a relationship with (also clay and glazes from) Georgies (stores in Portland and Eugene):

    http://www.georgies.com/

--with whom you'll get good traction person-to-person by calling: 1-800-999-CLAYs.

Another helpful and friendly voice/source has been the Continental Clay Company in Minnesota at:

    http://www.continentalclay.com/

--where I bought my accurate pyrometer, a set of AMACo underglazes, and a variety of their affordable in-house made glazes that can be used from cone 06 to cone 6 (all given away, long ago).

    * Again: and my having gone the route of setting up a kiln room (and you'd do better/safer with an outside "kiln house" --a building well separated from your home --perhaps just 4 laid-up concrete block walls), I strongly advise that you consider taking another route --at least initially: maybe ceramics classes. Your community college might have a well equipped program of ceramics education. (Originally, this wasn't an option for us since our foster care work kept us fairly homebound.)

I've emphasized important items that Giorgini covers, but will otherwise only detail my own variations of what's in that book --and what's peculiar to this archival project.

One would then expect that our modern, made-to-last, fired-to-maturity (or vitrification) tiles will surely stand the test of time. The problem with their survival then becomes a matter of them "sinking" ever lower into the Earth as glaciation, sedimentation, alluvial sand, and the "carbon cycle" deposits layers above the original place of interment. Eventually the Earth's "rock cycle" (subduction here on the west coast) will also drag our tiles down.

(edited to here - 4/2/2018)

Then I went to a minimally propped open lid (1 inch or so) and enough heat to reach 250 to 300 degrees. Next I fired for half an hour or more on medium heat --to 500 or more degrees, closed the lid and switched to high heat. At that point I fired directly to cone #6 (no bisque or glaze firings), which required 3 to 4 hours with a full kiln. (Going slowly through the whole range is a good idea.) Vegetable matter gasses release at about 400 degrees Fahrenheit, there are carbon and sulfur releases between 1300 and 1650 degrees (cone #010), and chemically bound water releases along the way.

After that I let the kiln cool with its lid closed --over night, until the temperature was less than 200 degrees, at which point I propped the lid an inch or two and waited another 2 hours.

Fahrenheit  -  Centigrade
1832  -  1000
1742  -  0950
1652  -  0900
1562  -  0850
1472  -  0800
1382  -  0750
1292  -  0700
1202  -  0650
1112  -  0600
1050  -  0566
1000  -  0538
0950  -  0510
0900  -  0482
0850  -  0454
0800  -  0427
0750  -  0399
0700  -  0371
0650  -  0343
0600  -  0316
0550  -  0288
0500  -  0260
0450  -  0232
0400  -  0204
0350  -  0176
0300  -  0149
0250  -  0121
0200  -  0093
0150  -  0066
0100  -  0038
0050  -  0010

- Have tiles and furniture in place, kiln sitter probe coated, & cones set (cones #6). I placed my pyrometer probe into the kiln for the whole run time.

- Start the evacuation hood and bake with the kiln lid propped 2 inches open on the lowest heat for 4 to 6 hours (for a slow "bake out", assuming your tiles were not "bone dry") --to about 200F, then the lower lid to 1 inch and go to 300F at medium-low heat (#2 setting on my kiln).

- Turn heat up to 4.5 (middle setting) and bake another half hour or so to 500F to 600F.

- Close the lid and switch to high heat, setting the kiln timer to the anticipated firing time (about 4 hours for me, but find out for sure how fast your kiln goes up).

- Estimate completion, set a bell timer 1/2 hour sooner and the kiln timer 1/2 hour later

- When the temperature reaches cone #6 (2232F) (you can use a cone #5 [2185F] warning cone --I didn't), be sure the kiln sitter (or other control) turns your kiln off --or do it manually.

Note: the top peep hole is encumbered with my pyro probe, but good practice is to bore a separate hole for it if you plan to leave it in. You can, of course, poke it in and out, but I think that's harder on both the probe and the peep hole. To monitor the cone's fall, remove it when the reading gets close to the finish temperature.

* I feel that a single #6 cone gives plenty of warning as it slowly falls.

- Cool over night to 200F, then prop the lid a bit and cool for 2 more hours before opening.

Ready To Fire

The Next Morning
These photos were taken when I was using underglaze ink stamping --instead of inkless impressions.

* I re-gauged the Kiln Sitter after over 35 firings and found its setting not to have altered in the slightest. It trips within a few minutes of a downed standard cone and it's often a "photo finish".

The kiln chamber still looks pretty good after 100 firings with just one crack opening up a bit near the top --close to a heating element.

Wrapping the tiles:

* I was placing thin "bats" of fiberglass insulation (separated from standard rolled wall insulation) into gallon Zip Lock plastic freezer bags for our own burials, then folding the bags around my small tiles --but I've since decided that sending this hazardous material into the future was a bad idea. They are now wrapped (for mechanical cushioning) with an undone "chore girl" expanded copper sponge. (I imagine that after a few decades the tiles will be protected by compacted/consolidated soil.)

* While we'd like to ship a few sets of tiles to addresses in the crayton region, we also encourage others to make their own --or maybe to legend the backs of commercial tiles using ordinary pencil (then good protective wrapping).

The bundle should be tied together with durable copper electrical wire. While brass or bronze would be best, it's really hard to work with (in substantial gauges), so we use common #12 gauge copper TFNN electrical wire. That probably won't go the distance (thousands of years), but I think it unlikely that the tiles would become disassociated, once buried in a stable area.

Again: you might want to leave a length of that copper or brazing wire sticking up toward the surface, perhaps topped with a Jefferson nickel (made of durable "cupro-nickel") --as a teaser to encourage folks to dig deeper.

7/28/2017: * Richard Heinberg contributed an article to Common Dreams: Are We Doomed? Let's Have a Talk  (and please see that article's top comments as well).

Whereas I emphasize coping with and attempting to bridge over the looming torrent  of catastrophes, Heinberg seeks to manage and optimize our collective crash landing. It's good to know that others are seeding this cultural awareness and (at least mental) preparedness. Although most such efforts are likely to be over-run and annihilated by mobs of crazies in the short run, traces of today's sanity will survive and eventually blossom anew (however long from now) --perhaps even to become culturally dominant.

* The thrust of this long page is that we might want to hedge our bets on this (our) instance of civilization --by "kicking the can down the road" --toward "the next time around".  While it seems likely that "panspermia" (and/or the life force implicit in the very inorganic chemical elements we're composed of) --has made life abundant in the Universe, we hope against hope that these same factors ultimately leads to consciousness. Are there, and/or will there be, follow-on creatures who think about thought itself, about meaning, the nature of existence, and who care about it all?

* It's scary to think that our our human culture here on Earth is unique --and that the continuity of --at least its better aspects --is up to --humble, blundering --us.

* However: Google recent "panspermia" articles (as of May, 2018 and later). You'll find a growing crop of research and informed speculation indicating that life on Earth has been seeded  --probably from hundreds of large Interstellar/rogue asteroids, leading up to the "Cambrian explosion" (re: the "Burgess Shale" deposits).

Back in 1976, Julian Jaynes made some educated inferences about human consciousness, some of which proved out, as brain/neuro science and mental process imaging advanced. While it might be debatable whether consciousness caused or was a consequence of our cerebral hemispheres knitting together into coherent thought --or even whether the cause was associated with more hemispheric autonomy, what legends and textual records we have (Old Kingdom Egypt, early Old Testament, the Gilgamesh epic, Hindu Veda) --suggest that, while ancient folks might have actually been more intelligent, they don't seem to have been very introspective --previous to about 1000 BCE. As to why seemingly unconnected civilizations worldwide came "awake" at about the same period (which led to the phenomenal "axial period"), some attribute it to a common factor --perhaps climate change. I suspect (and hope) that the capacity was/is latent in all life, needing only a contagious trigger.

Perhaps life itself is latent in matter and energy. Call it "design" if you will, or even "the hand of God", as long as we also humbly admit to having not a stone's chance of divining the nature of "God" and his/her/its "intents".

From my/our own perspectives, we can only wish for the best of such consciousness and caring as we've experienced. While its continuity on Earth seems increasingly doubtful, again: it would be comforting to know that its recreation (here or elsewhere) is inevitable. Bridging our consciousness to that of others (however distant) would be a heckuva bonus --don't you agree?

4/10/2016: * 21 young people (ages 8 to 19) walked into history last week by going up the steps of the Eugene (Oregon) Federal Courthouse. Their lawsuit: kids (along with climate scientist Dr. James Hansen) wanting a future --versus government, was ruled valid by U.S. Magistrate Judge Thomas Coffin --rejecting objections by a considerable array of defendants that this legal action would be (oh dear!) "bad for business".

If successful, it could turn out to be the best opportunity to gin-pole humanity out of the dark ages since the Gutenberg Press. (If you hadn't noticed, it's still pretty damned dark.)

(December 2017 update: this play is still in the cards. Those kids have just cleared another legal hurdle.)

Not only are we carelessly trashing our children's environmental heritage, we've also been mindlessly messing with our kids' genetic heritage You might be aware of a Dr. Busby: a strident fellow who uses coarse public language and wears a silly looking tam hat. He has, of course, much to be angry about --as do we all. Governments and energy corporations have been carelessly releasing radioactive isotopes into the environment since the Manhattan Project. (Google up his statement/paper: "It's Not Just Cancer" at Counterpunch.)

And It's Not Just Radiation  --or that loathsome "company man" mentality of well kept scientists who stuff their white shirts and lab coats. It's a general cultural malaise which permits respectability for all those stuffed shirts --often in the face of common sense and factual refute.

~~~~~~~A court win for the kids could result in a far reaching precedent.
(lightky edited to here: 11/09/2022)
"The Rights of the Unborn":

(What comes next is my picking up on the above plus some old refrains --and it has nothing to do with any notions of pasty-faced "racial" superiority.)

Remember the old right winger refrain about "the rights of the unborn"? I've long wanted to cram that one right back down their throats. Some day --if this era's civilization survives, or if a better one follows, there'll be a permanent commission which really does advocate for and advance the "rights of the unborn" --protecting the little ones who are now voiceless in our discussions, and for whom some of us so casually presume to speak.

Babies need qualified, professional advocacy --that they should come into this world by considered and responsible intention, that to the best of our efforts^ they arrive healthy, whole, wanted, loved, provided for --into an uncrowded world --one that's not running out of air, water and decent places to live --into community settings designed for their safety and development. (To some extent, this can at least be personally gained and modeled within "intentional community".)

^ Let us not mix definitions, confuse emotions with logic, or allow (no doubt well intentioned) fellow victims of our cultural mind sets --to stopper our mouths and our thinking --by broaching that taboo word "eugenics", quickly followed (of course) by "Nazi". It's simply cruel and senseless that a heritable disease or serious defect is allowed to be passed on to a new generation. Human sensitivity and reason alone should be enough to stop it, without recourse to (say) "wrongful birth" lawsuits on behalf of stricken children.

This weekend's (12/23/2018) installment of the TED Radio Hour was devoted to our next "frontier": the transportation of pioneers to Planet Mars. It was a fairly well balanced hour (even from my perspectives). I was struck by how easily one of this show's presenters could venture talk about "volitional evolution" (adapting the human body for the rigors of space travel through genetic engineering). Of course the far less invasive practice of negative eugenics is always challenged, and notions of limiting population growth are ----hopelessly off-the-table.

* The legal system and the force of law isn't the best route for challenging folks to try on some common sense for fit. For that purpose, progressives badly need more music, poetry --and leadership with a spiritual component^^.

(^^In ancient times, "seers", muses, oracles and gods spoke to us in poetically metered cadences. Attic Greek and "Linear B" is understood to have been quite "tonal", the text remaining to us being diacritically marked as to pitch, so this speech probably sounded song-like as well.)

4/8/2016: In an issue of Nature (magazine/journal) we're once again reminded that the root material problem of humanity is our own fecundity. Senior author Elizabeth Hadly describes us as an "invasive species". Since we have cultural advantages and better tools, we're able to leverage the environment --far beyond what limits the advance of other creatures. The more we're able to gin up our numbers, the more scarce become the resources (energy, clean water and air, fertile land, carbon sinks), the more fragile becomes the infrastructure (continental and international shipping) which sustains us. Let one component get interrupted and our "house of cards" falls.

1/18/2016: Topics of "community" were once on my main web pages and were my main personal pursuit, but size-wise and update-wise, the largest efforts of late have been going into my amateur astronomy page --and for some time now.

Although I here-and-there encourage (and applaud) others in the pursuit of intentional community and social ideals, my own communitarian/relational failures^ and the dreadful prospects our civilization faces --have persuaded me to personally stand down on community, in favor of the coping strategies to be found on this page. (I'm "fair to middling" at coping.)

^ I'm just not very "apt", or the best person to defend and advance these issues.

* However: I do want to at least witness --that the quest for and the enjoyment of community, peace, place, belonging and identity --is essential to being fully human. The spiritual hunger of loneliness/aloneness, unanswered by the grace of others, erodes the social animal which is our archetype. Such grace is born of empathy, and empathy is basic to a fully realized social creature.

I feel this to be more than a matter of my own assertions and belief. These are things that a whole human being simply is, simply knows, and is resonantly drawn to.

* I thank the Dalai Lama and Dr. Howard C. Cutler for reminding me to so witness --through their: "The Art of Happiness In A Troubled World" (which, I gather, is humanizing/socializing the expression of Buddhism and psychiatry).

* Fukushima Daiichi's Tepco is, of course, a symptom of how inappropriate the technologies of our infrastructure have become, how badly civilization muddles along, identifies authority, concedes prerogatives of ownership, and selects its leadership (our "deciders", as GW put it). Not only on account of poisoning our oceanic food chain, from the plankton on up, but for a host of dreadful, corporate capitalism and over-population driven reasons. It's time to check our "knee-jerk" group-think (both in its "liberal" and "conservative" versions), then get real about optimizing what circumstances we might, and coping with what's beyond our reach.

"Realistically", my efforts will go nowhere and civilization will face its catastrophes with little or no meaningful preparation --but I want to have at least done some "due diligence" here (this page, our buried tiles). I also want to offer what sympathy, companionship and comfort --that my words-in-a-row here might afford you.

We need --not only a very different political movement, but many and diverse initiatives by individuals, small groups and service organizations --some open and public; some personal and private, a few dedicated, modern, "monastic" groups would be nice; reclusive and secret groups are probably also in order --if only to cope with and cope through perilous times.

* But let's keep this precious present moment of ours in perspective.

    ~ Even in a perfected world community, we'll all pass away as individuals, so what we're concerned with is conserving what's worthwhile from our heritage and contributions --if not as part of a cultural continuum, then at least through our best efforts to bridge the best of it into a hoped for future (however distant).

    ~ This won't be the first time humanity has bridged over the darkness, from one empire and era to the next, and it might not be the first time intelligent life on Earth has tried to do so --and failed.

* While it's certainly our duty to bear some witness and warn against the catastrophes which loom ahead, let's not lose a bunch of our personal time and effort in waiting for the bulk of society to figure that out. The general populace can absorb terrible conditions, morbidity and death --while their leadership minimizes, covers up and denies "inconvenient truths". In the time it takes for consequences, scourges and awareness to reach our society's "deciders" and opinion makers, let's not allow valuable opportunities (and our own simple pleasures) to have escaped our grasp.

* But relax as we might, stress only as we must. Our culture, without your efforts or mine, is unlikely to be totally lost --given all the durable detritus we're leaving behind, plus the many mementos we've buried and launched into space.

> http://davidszondy.com/future/timecapsule/voyager.htm

What we can and should add to that, individually and collectively, are humanly "warm" things:  greetings, heart felt apologies, encouragement for our inheritors' struggles, and our own personal "neediness" --of our successors' grace  --that we might be taken in, held, and kept in living memory. Such spiritual hunger is an empowering gift.

* In the meanwhile, there's a chance (very slim) that we could get lucky --in that a visible, "concrete", time capsuling effort (or something like it) could capture the attention of interested others --that a fashionable "VIP" or influential group might take notice. --And when it comes to fashion, the world can "turn on a dime". A popular celebrity, saying the right words at the right time, especially given the considerable existing discontent and skepticism about government, corporations corruption and lies in general --could initiate a tidal wave of change.

* Whatever's in store for us, there'll very likely be survivors and an eventual recovery --and one that's a lot less energy happy (since we'll have used up most of the easy to tap fossil fuel --*urp*).

* Note well that our biosphere extends miles down into the Earth and its oceans. It has already recovered from some gawdawful "extinction level events". Even though people haven't been around for very long, we too have managed to survive catastrophes: asteroid hits, years of endless winter, ice ages, many (humanly long) periods of cosmic radiation bombardment, the "dark ages" (still upon us, IMHO), and tyrants without end.

** My wife and I once watched a Dr. Andrew Weil video. He spoke of leaving a spiritual legacy to our survivors, citing a Jewish tradition of the "ethical will", and suggesting it as an appropriate rite of passage to undertake in one's late maturity. He then more appropriately characterized that formal sounding term as writing a "love letter" to your personal and familial descendants. Of course, today's ethical will might be a more expansive and inclusive document than in the past --amounting to, in essence, our "Time Capsule Tiles" project.

"But first, what is it? An ethical will is a modern incarnation of an ancient patriarchal tradition that men first transmitted orally and later wrote as letters to their sons to pass on their values to the next generation. 'Well,' I thought, entranced when I first learned about the ethical will, 'I, too - mother and ancient hippie feminist - have wisdom, values and love to express to my children and grandchildren.' What I wrote that day is the most important message I have ever written." --Rachael Freed
> http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/ART03027/Why-Write-an-Ethical-Will.html

An excellent expression of this tradition was presented by Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull, minister (then) of the Unitarian Church of All Souls in New York --as they prepared to sequester a somewhat conventional, era documenting time capsule to represent their parish and congregation. It was dedicated to their future generations --per:

"Dear whoever you are: (..no, scratch that. Highlight. Delete. Start over.) Why not begin like my grandmother began her letters?"

"Dear ones:  //  And dear ones you are. I know you, and you are but seedlings in the womb of this great family of All Souls. Uncertainty is such a staple of the time in which I write, who knows if there will even be a great family of All Souls, let alone an All Souls, New York City, to open this gift of time? We can only hope so."

"It goes so quickly, as my 91-year-old mother told me recently. It's barely the blink of an eye. It's as if we offer our gift of this Time Capsule one day and you open it the next, and in that interval we live our lives and craft the legacy that is yours, out of which to craft a legacy for your dear ones."

"I know that not too much will really change, and yet the substance of everything changes. When I was maybe eight or nine I sat on the edge of my bed one morning looking down at my bare feet, at my still child-chubby toes,
and thought that many years hence, when I would have grown into adulthood, in fact, well before then, not only those toes but my entire body would be other than it was at that moment. The cells that formed me would have worn
out their welcome and new cells would have arrived, and this sequence would cycle and re-cycle throughout my lifetime. So what was it, this sense of self, this me, that continued anyway? As I write you, I trust that this fragile thread of who I am, of who we are, will find its way into your lives from ours."

"Just as I am proud of so much that we do through this church, I am also embarrassed and ashamed for so much of what you will undoubtedly contend with that we have left undone, or that we have simply messed up altogether.
In our larger world, Cain is still slaying Abel, brother against brother in so many renditions of that story from Genesis. Ishmael is still the child cast aside, the one of every five children of poverty. All Job's questions still stir within us as we are jarred and wrenched by the harshest of life's surprises. And we are still seeking to understand and practice some facsimile of the gospel of love and compassion."
> http://www.allsoulsnyc2.org/publications/sermons/jcbsermons/souvenirs.html

9/9/2012: Peggy and I had previously decided to post this page again (see next entry) and restart our tiles project, but life has been full of distractions. As before, we don't present it as only a result of our despair about the paths our corporate world are blindly taking, but as a positive and hopeful activity which would be worthy of pursuit, even in an idyllic world. We'll slowly review and revise these pages over time, as we once again get out our clay and tile stamps.

7/30/2011 (updated 6/3/2013): One of the television serials Peggy and I enjoyed watching together was: Star Trek, The Next Generation, which is now a human generation old. "ST-TNG" presents us with refreshingly thoughtful and worthwhile morality plays. I'm glad (now) that our busy lives made us miss most of the series, as that left so many "good cookies still in the box" --via DVDs, purchased and from our good local libraries.

One memorable evening we watched "The Chase" from 1993 (episode 20, season 6; or "Episode 146", and see:

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chase_%28Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation%29 )

--which reminded us of our unsatisfactorily "completed" "Time Capsule Tiles" project. Straight away, Peggy urged that we resume it, along with some fresh ideas for TCT placements. (We need to place our long-haul tiles into geologically stable locations.) Despite our previous and lengthy outreach efforts, most of the tiles we've produced have been buried, sequestered, or otherwise placed --up and down the the west coast, which is unfit for the really long term time capsuling we're trying for.

* It's interesting that the gloom and doom of our times has not been sufficient to motivate a new beginning --that it took the positive inspiration of ST-TNG's "The Chase" to crank us up again. A better effort should come of that.

* We've enjoyed a small but generous audience and good feedback, thanks to friends, friends of friends and the immediate community.  The City of North Bend accepted a set of our tiles for inclusion in its own time capsule to mark the City's 150th anniversary (1859 - 2009). However, and despite a great deal of outreach (well over 100 postal letters and a multitude of emails, many to U-U fellowships and ceramics groups), we've gotten almost no traction or even responses, and nothing from east of the Cascades --with one exception: a nice couple who are building the intentional community "Solstice Dawn". They troubled to visit us and take home a package of our tiles to Nebraska --which is a nicely geologically stable part of the United States.

It seems odd that timecapsuling is now such a hard-sell (for me, anyway), only a decade after the time capsule craze going into Y2K. I thought that the advent of the hyped year of 2012 (end-of-time Mayan Calendar, etc.) would result in another such go-round, but people seem to favor virtual/cyber over physical activities. I'm trying to interest the Internet community which monitors and prepares for the growing Fukushima disaster --in making tiles (and as a way to help cope), while Peggy attempts to interest the arts community that she's a part of.

Field Up-dates:

* In the course of burying our own tiles (we so often "learn by doing"), I realized what would be an excellent "marker", and one which would stay on the surface: plant life. The trick is to choose a self-renewing, persistent, non-indigenous species, such as has often revealed the location of long vanished pioneer homesteads. You don't want to be planting state listed "noxious weeds", so find something that works in your region, won't be the subject of an eradication program, and is hopefully beautiful and/or of food value. We chose "Egyptian (walking) onions", even though they're likely to spread too much. When harvested in the short term, the roots/bulbs will likely bring up our packages --which is okay.

* In the mid term, the magnetized 6 inch galvanized spike we're including might trip a metal locator or magnetometer. In the long term, it's up to luck --and whatever visible trace of the spike and package might be noticed when digging in the area (perhaps to cultivate and harvest a large field of wild onions).

* We're doing shallow burials now --just under the sod, since our packages of tiles will keep "sinking" beneath the accumulating over-burden of soil.

Positive notes:

* Our "Time Capsule Tiles" and "Transcendence Ceramics" project has actually been a thing of optimism and hope. While it's with heavy hearts that we watch civilization lose its way, the point of this project is to look beyond our failures, to imagine and bridge to a better future. Such imagining is actually the first step toward a new reality.

* To judge by the ability of biological life to recover and diversify, --in the unlikely event that humanity gets completely wiped out, sentient, civilized life will eventually re-establish and right itself. My suspicion is that life is hard wired to get there through our DNA. Possibly, a destination of consciousness is explicit at the atomic level.

When you think about it, humans are a pretty tough part of the biosphere. We've survived epic migrations, ice ages, mega-volcanisms and space rock hits. We also need to find hope in the fact that our concepts of love, grace and justice have made it through dreadful periods in the past. Although the "dark ages" were nothing like the die-off which awaits us, although we have so much further to fall (from the heights of our high population, technical development and the great hopes we so recently held out for human progress), at least "next time" (the next recovery/renaisance --perhaps among the next sentient species), we'll have lessons from the past --much to pick over and think about, from among the ruins.

* A determining factor for the future is that we'll have pretty much spent the world's reserves of easily tapped fossil fuel energy, which is a positive thing (yes) --and which, alone, might prevent our planet from ever again becoming so obscenely overpopulated and polluted.

* Perhaps the most positive note is the possibility that, as conditions deteriorate, people will likely become more spiritual --or "religious" (please: I mean that in the best, socially coherent sense of that word). Such "death bed conversions" are more than just a coping mechanism, and religious behaviors can be much more than misdirected spirituality and regimented thinking. In losing nearly everything, without the encumbrances of our false prosperity and "techno-tronic" claptrap (an Eric Fromm term), there's an opportunity to see each other and ourselves more clearly and more simply as the needy social creatures that we really are. We might at last be open to each other's grace. The art of living during this period will be to build upon such social-spiritual insights and to nail down "lessons learned" --lessons of the heart.

From the Long Now Foundation and from Googling up a patchy little education about modern geological awareness, I've been persuaded of how difficult it is to place time capsules such that they stand a chance of connecting with a future more than (say) 10,000 years off. We should try, of course, but just as time-capsuling is itself a "plan B" hedge against the likelihood of our civilization failing, time capsule jumps of 10,000 years or less are a hedge against the likelihood of more ambitious projects failing.

* If you decide to make tiles --or somehow scribe messages onto finished commercial tiles (floor tiles are the most durable), keep or make them small. Large tiles break easier and are harder to bury or otherwise inter. Our last batches measured about 2-1/2" x 3-1/2", which easily drop down a post hole, wrapped in a layer of copper sponge (an unrolled kitchen scouring pad) for temporary mechanical protection. (We stopped using glass wool. Although it's ideally durable, the finders might not appreciate that it's a health nuisance.)

* If you try to write upon or ink stamp your tiles (say: with genuine laundry marker ink), the tiles should be light complected and have a mat-like surface texture to hold the ink.

See below for information on making your own tiles, in which case you can skip the ink trip and scribe or press rubber stamps directly into the soft clay --making impression which are forever. (Your town might well have a pottery club or class to not only assist you, but also to fire your finished tiles.)

* While I've gotten acceptable results at up 20 characters per line inch and 6 to 8 lines per vertical inch when stamping soft clay impressions, I think 12 to 15 characters per horizontal line inch is what you want to aim for.

* That means you're not going to have much space in which to make a statement --plus: you want to speak in plain, basic English terms as much as possible. (When one really speaks from the heart, I like to think it comes out that way.)

Content:

The Long Now Foundation, based in San Francisco and Stanford has the basics of language preservation well in hand --per:

        http://www.rosettaproject.org/
        http://www.longnow.org/

Assuming that Long Now's contributions and other's clues/remnants about our languages go the distance, the rest of us need only support Long Now and otherwise concern ourselves with particular social and spiritual messages --perhaps something akin to messages on the "Georgia Guide Stones" (see:

Our culture has this cult-of-individualism thing about having to be "different" and "original", but if someone else has eloquently articulated what's in my heart, I simply quote those words.

An idea whose time came --and went:

* "Time-capsuling" became a portentous trend, especially since the end of World War Two and leading up to "Y2K". It peaked at the turn of the millennium with a reported 50,000 durable, direct burial containers being sold, some costing $5000. Here's a typical time capsule company:

* To some geologists, the geological record indicates we're headed toward a significant, 26 million year extinction event. Past (bad enough) events have had declining peaks (percentages of the Earth's species destroyed), followed by a boomer of an episode. This could be volcanic in nature or be due to significant meteor impacts.

* There's good evidence for the repeating nature of "super volcanos", of which there are several around the world. In these parts (the pacific northwest of the United States), Yellowstone is the one to watch --which is now overdue. Its caldera measures 8x32 miles and has the potential to initiate years of winter on Earth.

* The "Sixth Extinction" is that of our on-going "Holocene" era --the past 10,000 years of civilization, to which overpopulation (3x sustainable level now), volatized carbon and radioactive wastes have been signal contributions.

Some say that measuring our impact upon the extinction of known species (27,000 per year, or 3 per hour) exaggerates our effect (relative to past extinctions) since so many that are now being counted (subtracted, rather) --would not have been visible in the geological record (due to their perishable nature, lack of fossilized remains or ephemeral appearance).

* Human augmented Global warming is real (in my humble opinion) and some say it might prevent the next ice age. However, an ice age appears to be 10s of thousands of years off, while the killer effects of global warming and climate changes are mounting with each news report.

* No doubt I've missed other concerns --like anti-biotic resistant pathogens wiping us out, or World War Three. (Hillary Clinton seemed so intent on goading the Russian bear, and now we've got Trump --!)

* The upshot of all this: even without these known threats, precious life (people and the biosphere), human culture, and our long historical struggle to arrive at this point --needs to be "backed up" --as best we can. I'd like to see many more Voyager deep space probes, flagged caches of records placed on the Moon and the outer planets, our biological spore sent into deep space (which might have been our own cosmogenesis, re: "panspermia").

Never give up on our society (completely):

*** Even though a poor outcome for our era seems certain now, we owe it to our heritage and to ourselves to advocate for "Plan A" solutions: cultural changes, population control, peace initiatives, sane political parties and candidates, noble intentional community efforts ("just do it"), and especially for those inter-personal social alternatives which could build an every-day life of intimate caring and keeping --something which we're now hardly able to even fantasize.

When we die:

Daniel Quinn's "Ishmael" is a socially good book (though I'd have edited it down quite a bit). Its story divides the world into "takers" and "leavers". While people are made up of both components, I think that's a pretty good way to sort ourselves out as to what's predominant.

Even if our nation/society somehow gets through what lies ahead and ends up being that imagined beacon to the world, all the "I"s that make up "we" are still going to die as individuals. Whether we can be at peace with our mortality when our time comes depends a lot on how much we've been able to leave, whether our bequests have been well received, and whether we've individually and collectively managed to improve the chances of there being some kind of a future and a chance for cultural continuity.

So, far from neglecting traditional "died and gone to heaven" stuff here, I'm proposing that the social (not "secular" --which I find a vain and distancing term) --that the social "we" is how salvation actually works. To the extent that we've lived in a state of mutual grace and caring communion, what we've shared and held in common will endure. We'll then (at least) have not stood in the way of our own salvation.

I'm not very good at it, but I'm attempting to talk about ministry: to ourselves and to others. "The Kingdom of God is within you" --a heavy responsibility! Humble though it may be, the light (of communion) within us might at some point become the last chance for someone to glimpse it --someone who our life touches; and long from now, perhaps the messenger of our tiles will carry a bit of nourishing grace to a hungry soul.

Why Time-Capsuling? Why This Project?

* "The stage is now set for direct competition for grain between the 800 million people who own automobiles, and the world's 2 billion poorest people." --Lester Brown from the Earth Policy Institute speaking at a briefing to the US Senate, per:

* From: http://www.organicconsumers.org/organicbytes.htm

CORN-BASED ETHANOL ADDS TO GLOBAL FOOD CRISIS: In -- 12 months, the global corn price -- doubled. Because corn is the most common animal feed, this affects the price of milk, cheese, eggs, meat, as well as corn-based sweeteners and cereals. In the U.S., milk prices -- nearly doubled. Butter prices in Europe -- spiked by 40%. Pork prices in China [went] up 20%. In Mexico there [were] riots in response to a 60% rise in the cost of tortillas. / In six of -- seven [recent] years, global grain consumption -- exceeded production. As a result, world grain reserves -- dwindled to 57 days [at one point]. This [was] the lowest level of grain reserves in 34 years. [At a time when] the UN [listed] 34 countries as needing food aid, 30% of next year's grain harvest in the U.S. [was to be] converted to ethanol to fuel cars.

http://morrisberman.blogspot.com/

This book articulates and documents most of our laments. Although depressing, finding a kindred spirit and awareness like Berman's is the essence of community (through literature) and the essence of our time capsule tiles project --a way to cope with and transcend defeat in our era, the "blessing -- of knowing each other".

We're afflicted with a "cult of individualism". When we speak of "civil rights" and "freedom of expression", it is, of course, the individual we think of, even though we're unable to fully realize and express ourselves except in community and in conversation with our personal others (if only in one's imagination).  Berman examines this growing aspect of our culture in terms of the "tribal" --meaning a life wherein the individual's life is very much his/her community's business, versus the secular liberal democracy in which we live.

I like to think that later on in our social-spiritual evolution (or that of our inheritors) an easy, "indiscriminate" empathy will obtain, making things like "getting ahead" and "the profit motive" a big "huh?". But for the current era, we'll have to hobble along with but trace amounts of such spirituality to sustain us.

It's unfortunately "normal" (circa 2006) for the advantaged (by virtue of strength, birth, wealth, looks, intelligence, --lack of scruples, empathy) to leverage and exploit those advantages such that I can make my "others" subordinate: willing to trade (say) several hours of their time for only one of mine --as we bargain for goods and services.

Adam Smith cautioned^ that consortiums of well placed, advantaged people tend to maintain and even create situations of necessity, addiction, and above all: scarcity --if only of one's own personal favors. When an option for ending scarcity arises (proposed or in fact), the comfortably advantaged will deride and stamp it out, using some convenient pretext.

Addictions are paired. The larger groups --needy addicts, are paired with smaller groups: the addictors --predators who've grown accustomed to an easy living by managing the lives of the less advantaged and keeping them profitably needy. (Unfettered population growth is, of course, the best driver of scarcity.)

Unchecked and unenlightened, the institutions of civilization will succumb to such systems of alienating "advantage", building a body of laws and customs around the basics: food, medicines, education, intimacy, pleasurable and pain relieving substances --such that supply competition is minimized and pricing is stiff. The disadvantaged then experience the "market discipline" to work harder in order to purchase what is needed. The most manageably crimped society is one in which most everyone feels that they have some precious crumb of an advantage, favoritism, some kind of a chance in the lottery, and/or who dwell in states of petty illegality --sufficient to keep them quiet.

^Adam Smith's contention that "People of the same trade seldom meet together but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices" is considered "human nature", a term which is nearly always used in a pejorative sense. We might call this state of affairs "capitalism". --No, not theoretical "free market capitalism", but capitalism as it's usually pursued: "cornering the market", gaining a monopoly, bullying, buying/pedling influence, rewriting the rules to advantage yourself.

Yet: compassion, justice and equity are also human concepts. They reside no where else but in this same "human nature" of ours --or are attributed to that human concept of a God or Goddess.

Again: what's basically wrong are our unexamined notions of individualism --and the distances we have to maintain among us in order not to see/feel the negative consequences of our behaviors. By turns we act charitably, then self-agrandisingly competitive, despite our (United States) society having a dominant (Christian) religion which, in principle at least, instructs us to share all and be compassionate.

Individuals who imagine themselves to be "self made" or see a lonely "rugged individualism" as an ideal, have to live with and justify being a distortion of the "social animal" we're really supposed to be. Living outside of a state of mutual (social) grace and remaining willfully ignorant of its blessings is, in my opinion, a sure bet for developing mental illness, individually and collectively.

Many and better people than I have made such statements. John Gray tried to help supporters of the (United States) Republican Party see themselves, by writing his "Day In the Life --" piece (linked below).

Others have spoken most eloquently about our lonely want of a shared soul.

My "Plan B" attempts to face catastrophe (which seems to be assured) while remaining human --by facing it together --or (at least) in a felt "solidarity" with possible future inheritors of the Earth and, possibly, conservators of whatever we can transmit about our culture. This is partly about the practical considerations of contriving ways to send some worthy part of our essence to those inheritors via archived messages in "time capsules" --love notes in a bottle, cast upon the sea of time.

First, the dismal part: it's not likely that we're going to make it this time around as a civilization (and see *here*). There will probably be a terrible "die-off", and then a new edition of "the dark ages", perhaps after some sort of an environmental-social catastrophe over-turns our precariously stacked "apple cart".

But: I really am trying to be positive about how best to cope and play the hand we're being dealt. We should be able to hold and comfort each other in the meantime, do our civic duty to forestall the catastrophe and send "life boats" through it, while also doing our best to leave helpful thoughts, warm greetings and remembrances onto that "next time around" --however distant.

To do our small part towards that goal, my wife and I have produced ceramic tiles with over a dozen messages. These tiles are meant to survive at least 10,000 years, which precludes inks, paper, plastics, and low fire ceramics. Hopefully, these have been fired to the point of durable vitrification, since they're directly interred with only a bit of mechanical cushioning/padding (which will eventually get replaced with soil/sand).

Again: the prospects for such a package to survive much more than 10,000 years are not good.  We've come to realize how dynamic and impermanent nearly all of the Earth's terrain is.  A time capsule is liable to get buried by watery sediment, the forest's "carbon cycle", subducted by the "rock cycle", melted and blended with volcanic basalt, or turned into a pathetic smear at the base of a moving glacier. Let's trust that a new and better civilization will have emerged long before that much time passes.

We originally tried to make our tiles pretty with carefully selected glazes and decoration such that they'd be kept and preserved if found by uncultured, incurious peoples. However, after determining that our messages would be far more durable as simple impressions, and that glazes presented problems without adding protection, our tiles now look much more like those classic cuneiform marked clay tablets which turn up from the remote past.

* We're all going to die anyway, but only as individuals. Under normal circumstances we'd be "okay" with such a death, as long as we're able to imagine that family, community, society, and civilization will continue on, that what we've conserved and added to this life will somehow benefit our collective future. For me, the hope that "my kind" might be remembered and referenced by distant inheritors also amounts to a kind of "salvation".

Time capsules are not enough, of course, but providing some kind of a bridge to some kind of a posterity, will have to do.  Assuming that our efforts to provide a living memory succeed, the greatest loss to us isn't that our individual lives will come to a close, but that communion in true, personal community (aka: "heaven on Earth") will remain unknown to nearly everyone in the here-and-now. (I keenly regret my failed attempts to realize "intentional community" over the past 40 years. If you're still young enough, do yourself the favor of looking into Web venues like:

These words-in-a-row would have come out much better between us, had they been the product of give and take correspondence or conversations.

There have been marked increases in global warming and pollution effects, but I think it's clear that the dominant/ruling and ever so pervasive culture of our society has learned almost nothing of consequence from those portentous, population driven run-ups. I've pretty much given up hope of our getting any traction about growth issues --or anything else.

It was hard for me to accept that most folks who fight the good fights, variously advocating for better stewardship of our planet, can go no further than such pathetic measures as high density developments and emissions controls --which measures will only serve to make our hour of Gaian atonement that much more catastrophic. There's an across the political spectrum endorsement of growth, jobs, population, consumption, and GDP which carries over into time-honored "progressive" political slogans, speech, and mindsets. Nearly every city council serves in search of more ways to "grow ourselves out of our problems".

But why re-invent wheels? The human spirit has triumphed over long periods of darkness in the past, so let's study what worked and how it was done.

Our period in history is now closing on the end of an --at times-- hopeful era that most recently got restarted with the Renaissance. While we're going to need a lot of independent innovation to complete the human social journey, it's best not to leave notions of cultural hibernation (ie: what measures might accomplish the survival of civilization as both living and dormant spore) --entirely to amateurism.

** Peg and I would like to see the development of a new family of formal studies which would expand the concept of "permaculture" to include humanity --and its eventual recovery.

(There's a remote chance that, seeing the advent of such dark and pessimistic disciplines as credible degree programs, the general populace and it's turn with the wind "leadership" would come to grips with the gravity of our situation.)

8/27/06> Hey: life, hope, culture, and Love will go on --or eventually return. I believe that the great Gaian genome is hard wired for that.

* The potentially most effective approach toward an effective "population policy" (aka: efforts toward population control) that I've seen suggested would be a program of "meeting folks where they're at" --by pointing out the birth through high school graduation cost of bringing up a child. In the United States, it amounts to an average of about $250,000.00^ --an amount some might otherwise choose to spend on (say) dozens of overseas vacations, early retirement, a private plane, an exotic automobile, or a high maintenance mistress.

^ $330,000, assuming today's rate of inflation, and add on about 25% if it's an only child.

* Only a few people will get into my presentation here --those who already basically agree with it {hug}. I expect that most folks won't become mindful of the inevitable tragedy until a massive "die-off" is well under way.

* However: when that turmoil is upon us and for whatever triage and salvage might then be possible, it will be invaluable that a few people had at least laid down some anticipation and understanding of why it all came about.

While many population experts have predicted stability at a world population of about 11 billion (meaning a grinding state of existence and attrition, in which deaths = births), nature (left unchecked) is cyclic: sinusoidal at best, catastrophic at worst. Instead of slowly stalling out at 11 billion (that black curve in the next graph), a significant downturn is more likely, followed by oscillations (the blue curve) around some "limit" (based on the carrying capacity of the planet --times a factor for the over-all industrial efficiency applied to exploiting its remaining resources).

* Most likely: civilization will crash. I side with those who think that the first die-off will be deep and bleak, since a limit of 11 billion (or whatever) assumes way too much: that mechanized and chemicalized agriculture will endure, that mass transportation and the (profits motivated) orderly distribution of food stuffs (and other resources) will continue, that the petroleum which powers all this activity, will keep flowing to where it's socially needed.

I think you know better.

I suspect we'll go back to "subsistence agriculture" (locally grown and consumed food) at best. While some have estimated that long-term industrial agriculture is (just) sustainable at 2 billion people, modern, regional, organized, peace time subsistence agriculture might only support 10% of that, with lower, medieval type population levels more likely (the red curve).

Assuming there's first a long period of anarchy and bedlam, then war lords and feudalism, we can anticipate a "hunter-gatherer-plunderer stage of social development that would sustain only several tens of millions worldwide, mitigated only by isolated pockets of whatever passes for civilization, culture, and agriculture.

A Risk of Total Collapse:

"We would be foolish to take for granted the permanence of our fragile global civilization"
--by Dylan Evans

"Is it possible that global civilization might collapse within our lifetime or that of our children? Until recently, such an idea was the preserve of lunatics and cults. In the past few years, however, an increasing number of intelligent and credible people have been warning that global collapse is a genuine possibility. And many of these are sober scientists, including Lord May, David King and Jared Diamond - people not usually given to exaggeration or drama."

"The new doomsayers all point to the same collection of threats - climate change, resource depletion and population imbalances being the most important. What makes them especially afraid is that many of these dangers are interrelated, with one tending to exacerbate the others. It is necessary to tackle them all at once if we are to have any chance of avoiding global collapse, they warn." {end quote}

Think about how long "growth is good" has been an integral part of our language and culture.

* Traditional religionists have been counseling us to be fruitful for thousands of years --and that "God will provide".

* Free marketeers and capitalists assure us there's no population problem, and no other problem --that
unbridled opportunism, greed, individualism and the invisible hand of Adam Smith --can't put to rights.

* It's been the wisdom of the political left for over 100 years that we need only tend to the redistribution of our collective wealth. Their take on birth control and "population policy" has long been that it's gotta be some kind of a right wing genocidal plot.

* Trade, guild, and booster business groups naturally combine to foster the growth (control and acquisition) of "markets", becoming inimical to any kind of population control.

* New agers, ecologists and "sustained development"-alists prescribe doing more with less and less --until we're taking turns breathing and growing vegetables in our hair.

Coping:

One of the liberal assumptions we (most of us) have labored under is democracy --at least the representative facsimile we celebrate as a republic. But to survive and blossom as a culture, and considering how unmindful of our Constitutional heritage, and how easily bamboozled the voting public has shown itself to be, our conceptions about democracy will have to change, and change forever. In all humanity, honesty, and social good will, I think we'll be compelled to reexamine how community and society should be constituted and franchised: who "rules" and how it's to be gone about.

* Don't you have to admit that how we've so far gone about the business of governance is ending up a pathetic failure?

Surely, you also agree that to make this re-examination come out right, a good start would be to redefine the "self" as more of a social creature and less of an autonomous individual.

No: I'm not promoting subordination of the individual. My quest runs more along the lines of "Quaker meeting", appropriate humility, interpersonal spirituality, a positive (and erotic) connection with life.

During the darkness which is likely to come, we'll need each other and we'll also need leadership --with dogged integrity, patience, prudence, the ability to creatively solve problems, and avoid trouble. Through both formal studies and local initiatives, it's time to start designing and cultivating the kinds of portable community which can adapt to the exigencies of the near future, yet still conserve and realize the promise of the human spirit --when we finally emerge into the climax civilization of a distant future.

No: I'm not suggesting that today's people should "live for the future", but that we should live as if there's a future --and assume that we can be a part of it --in the now.

I'm imagining "intentional community" groups who would prepare themselves (as families, associations, and communities/tribes), preserve what's socially relevant from our vast culture/history, and learn how to strengthen the human bonds --which make community, civilization, and social continuity possible. Perhaps something along these lines can be initiated through the resources of the Fellowship for Intentional Community (at:

> http://www.ic.org/ ).

Just being a part of the discussion stage --would be to know a measure of such meaning, continuity and social salvation.

* A ray of hope: "sex dolls" --which use to be pathetic looking inflatables, but they've since evolved into a diversity of often appealing silicone creations, as well as rudimentary "sexbots": robotic devices which even pretend to "artificial intelligence" --per:

https://www.cnet.com/news/realdoll-harmony-ai-app-realbotix-sexbot/

https://fabiusmaximus.com/2017/03/30/a-look-at-sexbots/

Search "sex dolls", "sexbot" or "sex robot" at Amazon.com and up comes a selection of products --!

While you're at Amazon, peruse the free pages of David Levy's: Love and Sex with Robots.

It's easy to imagine both genders "grooving" on comely and compliant artifices, sometimes out of reach of, or to the abandonment of human-to-human sexual relationships, and to the point of reducing or even reversing population growth.

I suppose (but I didn't always) --that enlightened, intimate, caring, bonded "group marriages" are beyond our cultural reach. Social design, negative eugenics and population policy would then be second nature. Maybe "next time around" we'll get there. I hope you can at least feel a pull in that direction.

"There is an almost sensual longing for communion with others who have a larger vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendships between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality almost impossible to describe." -Teilhard de Chardin

Professor Lovelock: "The Point of No Return is Behind Us"

Thirty years ago, the scientist James Lovelock worked out that the Earth possessed a planetary scale control system which kept the environment fit for life. He called it Gaia, and the theory has become widely accepted. Now, he believes mankind's abuse of the environment is making that mechanism work against us. His sobering conclusion: climate change is already insoluble. Life on Earth will never be the same again.
 

From: The Independent (U.K.) Jan. 16, 2006:

The world has already passed the point of no return for climate change, and civilization as we know it is now unlikely to survive, according to James Lovelock, the scientist and green guru who conceived the idea of Gaia - the Earth which keeps itself fit for life.

In a profoundly pessimistic new assessment, published in today's Independent, Professor Lovelock suggests that efforts to counter global warming cannot succeed, and that, in effect, it is already too late.

The world and human society face disaster to a worse extent, and on a faster time scale, than almost anybody realizes, he believes. He writes: " Before this century is over, billions of us will die, and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable."

In making such a statement, far gloomier than any yet made by a scientist of comparable international standing, Professor Lovelock accepts he is going out on a limb. But as the man who conceived the first wholly new way of looking at life on Earth since Charles Darwin, he feels his own analysis of what is happening leaves him no choice. He believes that it is the self-regulating mechanism of Gaia itself - increasingly accepted by other scientists worldwide, although they prefer to term it the Earth System - which, perversely, will ensure that the warming cannot be mastered.

This is because the system contains myriad feedback mechanisms which in the past have acted in concert to keep the Earth much cooler than it otherwise would be. Now, however, they will come together to amplify the warming being caused by human activities such as transport and industry through huge emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2 ).

It means that the harmful consequences of human beings damaging the living planet's ancient regulatory system will be non-linear - in other words, likely to accelerate uncontrollably.

He terms this phenomenon "The Revenge of Gaia" and examines it in detail in a new book with that title, to be published next month.

The uniqueness of the Lovelock viewpoint is that it is holistic, rather than reductionist. Although he is a committed supporter of current research into climate change, especially at Britain's Hadley Centre, he is not looking at individual facets of how the climate behaves, as other scientists inevitably are. Rather, he is looking at how the whole control system of the Earth behaves when put under stress.

Professor Lovelock, who conceived the idea of Gaia in the 1970s while examining the possibility of life on Mars for Nasa in the US, has been warning of the dangers of climate change since major concerns about it first began nearly 20 years ago.

He was one of a select group of scientists who gave an initial briefing on global warming to Margaret Thatcher's Cabinet at 10 Downing Street in April 1989.

His concerns have increased steadily since then, as evidence of a warming climate has mounted. For example, he shared the alarm of many scientists at the news last September that the ice covering the Arctic Ocean is now melting so fast that in 2005 it reached a historic low point.

Two years ago he sparked a major controversy with an article in The Independent calling on environmentalists to drop their long-standing opposition to nuclear power, which does not produce the greenhouses gases of conventional power stations.

Global warming was proceeding so fast that only a major expansion of nuclear power could bring it under control, he said. Most of the Green movement roundly rejected his call, and does so still.

Now his concerns have reached a peak - and have a new emphasis. Rather than calling for further ways of countering climate change, he is calling on governments in Britain and elsewhere to begin large scale preparations for surviving what he now sees as inevitable - in his own phrase today, "a hell of a climate", likely to be in Europe up to 8C hotter than it is today.

In his book's concluding chapter, he writes: "What should a sensible European government be doing now? I think we have little option but to prepare for the worst, and assume that we have passed the threshold."

And in today's Independent he writes: "We will do our best to survive, but sadly I cannot see the United States or the emerging economies of China and India cutting back in time, and they are the main source of [CO2] emissions. The worst will happen ..."

He goes on: "We have to keep in mind the awesome pace of change and realize how little time is left to act, and then each community and nation must find the best use of the resources they have to sustain civilization for as long as they can." He believes that the world's governments should plan to secure energy and food supplies in the global hothouse, and defenses against the expected rise in sea levels. The scientist's vision of what human society may ultimately be reduced to through climate change is " a broken rabble led by brutal warlords."

Professor Lovelock draws attention to one aspect of the warming threat in particular, which is that the expected temperature rise is currently being held back artificially by a global aerosol - a layer of dust in the atmosphere right around the planet's northern hemisphere - which is the product of the world's industry.

This shields us from some of the sun's radiation in a phenomenon which is known as "global dimming" and is thought to be holding the global temperature down by several degrees. But with a severe industrial downturn, the aerosol could fall out of the atmosphere in a very short time, and the global temperature could take a sudden enormous leap upwards.

One of the most striking ideas in his book is that of "a guidebook for global warming survivors" aimed at the humans who would still be struggling to exist after a total societal collapse.

Written, not in electronic form, but "on durable paper with long-lasting print", it would contain the basic accumulated scientific knowledge of humanity, much of it utterly taken for granted by us now, but originally won only after a hard struggle - such as our place in the solar system, or the fact that bacteria and viruses cause infectious diseases.

A rough guide to a planet in jeopardy

Global warming, caused principally by the large scale emissions of industrial gases such as carbon dioxide (CO²), is almost certainly the greatest threat that mankind has ever faced, because it puts a question mark over the very habitability of the Earth.

Over the coming decades soaring temperatures will mean agriculture may become non-viable over huge areas of the world where people are already poor and hungry; water supplies for millions or even billions may fail. Rising sea levels will destroy substantial coastal areas in low-lying countries such as Bangladesh, at the very moment when their populations are mushrooming. Numberless environmental refugees will overwhelm the capacity of any agency, or indeed any country, to cope, while modern urban infrastructure will face devastation from powerful extreme weather events, such as Hurricane Katrina which hit New Orleans last summer.

The international community accepts the reality of global warming, supported by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In its last report, in 2001, the IPCC said global average temperatures were likely to rise by up to 5.8C by 2100. In high latitudes, such as Britain, the rise is likely to be much higher, perhaps 8C. The warming seems to be proceeding faster than anticipated and in the IPCC's next report, 2007, the time scale may be shortened. Yet there still remains an assumption that climate change is controllable, if CO2 emissions can be curbed. Lovelock is warning: think again.

Bloomberg.com, Jan. 16, 2006

Jan. 16 (Bloomberg) -- Climate change will kill billions of people this century as the Earth warms, passing into a "fever" phase from which it may take 100,000 years to recover, James Lovelock, the scientist who propounded the "Gaia" theory, said.

Temperatures in temperate regions such as Europe and the U.S., will soar by 8 degrees Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit) this century, and those in the tropics will rise by 5 degrees as a result of man-made emissions, Lovelock wrote in today's Independent newspaper.

"We have given Gaia a fever and soon her condition will worsen to a state like a coma," Lovelock wrote. "She has been there before and recovered, but it took more than 100,000 years. We are responsible and will suffer the consequences."

Lovelock's Gaia theory, advanced in the 1970s, sees the Earth behaving like a self-sustaining organism, with a control system that keeps the environment fit for life. By trying to take over regulation of the planet's climate, humans have condemned themselves to "the worst kind of slavery," and will soon find it impossible to keep the Earth fit for life, Lovelock said.

"Much of the tropical land mass will become scrub and desert, and will no longer serve for regulation; this adds to the 40 percent of the Earth's surface we have depleted to feed ourselves," he said. "Before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable."

Not all scientists and politicians support the theory that the planet's climate patterns are changing as a result of human activity. The administration of U.S. President George W. Bush has said there's no proof that global warming is causing a change in the weather.

Lovelock said that with the U.S. and emerging economies such as China and India unlikely to cut back emissions of so-called greenhouse gases that trap the sun's heat, "the worst will happen and survivors will have to adapt to a hell of a climate."

THE problem:

We've been hearing regular harangues about overpopulation for two centuries, beginning with Malthus' "An Essay on the Principle of Population" in 1798. The usual implication of such admonishments is that we should stop just short of our Earthly and regional carrying capacities. But there's a much better concept to advocate: that of an optimum population, and I doubt that anyone has articulated such a goal better than John Stuart Mill:

There is room in the world, no doubt, and even in old countries, for a great increase in population, supposing the arts of life to go on improving, and capital to increase. But even if innocuous, I confess I see very little reason for desiring it. The density of population necessary to enable mankind to obtain, in the greatest degree, all the advantages both of cooperation and of social intercourse, has, in all the most populous countries, been attained.

A population may be too crowded, though all be amply provided with food and raiment. It is not good for man to be kept perforce at all times in the presence of his species. A world from which solitude is extirpated, is a very poor ideal. Solitude, in the sense of being often alone, is essential to any depth of meditation or of character; and solitude in the presence of natural beauty and grandeur, is the cradle of thoughts and aspirations which are not only good for the individual, but which society could do ill without. Nor is there much satisfaction in contemplating the world with nothing left to the spontaneous activity of nature; with every rood* of land brought into cultivation, which is capable of growing food for human beings; every flowery waste or natural pasture plowed up, all quadrupeds or birds which are not domesticated for man's use exterminated as his rivals for food, every hedgerow or superfluous tree rooted out, and scarcely a place left where a wild shrub or flower could grow without being eradicated as a weed in the name of improved agriculture.

If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere purpose of enabling it to support a larger, but not a better or happier population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compels them to it.

It is scarcely necessary to remark that a stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement. There would be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress; as much room for improving the Art of Living, and much more likelihood of its being improved, when minds ceased to be engrossed by the art of getting on. Even the industrial arts might be as earnestly and as successfully cultivated, with the sole difference, that instead of serving no purpose but the increase of wealth, industrial improvements would produce their legitimate effect, that of abridging labor.

Hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being. They have enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an increased number of manufacturers and other to make fortunes. They have increased the comforts of the middle classes. But they have not yet begun to effect those great changes in human destiny, which it is in their nature and in their futurity to accomplish. Only when, in addition to just institutions, the increase of mankind shall be under the deliberate guidance of judicious foresight, can the conquests made from the powers of nature by the intellect and energy of scientific discoverers, become the common property of the species, and the means of improving and elevating the universal lot.

--From J. S. Mill's Principles of Political Economy, Book IV, Chapter VI ("Of the Stationary State"), Section II (as it first appeared) --published in 1848.   (* A rood = 1/4 acre)

Gosh: what stand-out thoughtfulness!

--Here we are, 171 years later, and the painfully obvious issues of overpopulation have yet to mature, even to the point of denial and ridicule^ (from which stage climate change is beginning to emerge). On every politician's lips we hear: "growth", more jobs, prosperity, buying power to drive it, more exports and general consumption.

^ (Re: Schopenhauer's 3 stages of truth: ridicule, violent opposition, wide acceptance as being self-evident.)

We should advocate things like a "population policy", tax incentives/disincentives, and similar "social legislation" --unless you can think up some better ideas. Author and past AGO keynote speaker Bill McKibben advises that getting such concepts enacted into law would be a long time a coming --finally to arrive only after most of the populace had been persuaded of family limitations anyway.

Some radicals ("deep ecologists") have proposed (and I mention it to emphasize the gravity of our situation) --that a viral, sterilizing contagion be released --!

* We might also get personally and officially behind the distribution of contraceptives, Planned Parenthood, the protection of clinics and programs that make abortions available, lobby against clinical rules that disallow sterilization until after the 3rd child, and assist/support the development of new contraceptive methods and devices (such as the "Janesway" female condom garment).

Another approach might be similar to India's official advocacy of smaller families --perhaps along the lines of our nation's anti-smoking campaign.

Crass appeals to pocketbook and quality of life issues could be very effective (with children costing out at something like $250,000 each these days). I'd prefer to think that people are best motivated by the general welfare of society, but this issue is important enough to "meet people where they're at".

Growth Links:

Joe gets up at 6:00am to prepare his morning coffee. He fills his pot full of good clean drinking water because some liberal fought for minimum water quality standards. He takes his daily medication with his first swallow of coffee. His medications are safe to take because some liberal fought to insure their safety and work as advertised.

All but $10.00 of his medications are paid for by his employers medical plan because some liberal union workers fought their employers for paid medical insurance, now Joe gets it too. He prepares his morning breakfast, bacon and eggs this day. Joe's bacon is safe to eat because some liberal fought for laws to regulate the meat packing industry.

Joe takes his morning shower reaching for his shampoo. His bottle is properly labeled with every ingredient and the amount of its contents because some liberal fought for his right to know what he was putting on his body and how much it contained. Joe dresses, walks outside and takes a deep breath. The air he breathes is clean because some tree hugging liberal fought for laws to stop industries from polluting our air. He walks to the subway station for his government subsidized ride to work; it saves him considerable money in parking and transportation fees. You see,
some liberal fought for affordable public transportation, which gives everyone the opportunity to be a contributor.

Joe begins his work day; he has a good job with excellent pay, medical benefits, retirement, paid holidays and vacation because  some liberal union members fought and died for these working standards. Joe's employer pays these standards because Joe's employer doesn't want his employees to call the union. If Joe is hurt on the job or becomes unemployed hell get a worker compensation or unemployment check because some Liberal didn't think he should lose his home because of his temporary misfortune.

Its noon time, Joe needs to make a Bank Deposit so he can pay some bills. Joe's deposit is federally insured by the FDIC because some liberal wanted to protect Joe's money from unscrupulous bankers who ruined the
banking system before the depression.

Joe has to pay his Fannie Mae underwritten Mortgage and his below market federal student loan because some stupid liberal decided that Joe and the government would be better off if he was educated and earned more money over his life-time.

Joe is home from work, he plans to visit his father this evening at his farm home in the country. He gets in his car for the drive to dads; his car is among the safest in the world because some liberal fought for car safety standards. He arrives at his boyhood home. He was the third generation to live in the house financed by Farmers Home Administration because bankers didn't want to make rural loans. The house didn't have electricity until some big government liberal stuck his nose where it didn't belong and demanded rural electrification. (Those rural Republicans would still be sitting in the dark!)

He is happy to see his dad who is now retired. His dad lives on Social Security and his union pension because some liberal made sure he could take care of himself so Joe wouldn't have to. After his visit with dad he gets back in his car for the ride home.

He turns on a radio talk show, the hosts keeps saying that liberals are bad and conservatives are good. (He doesn't tell Joe that his beloved Republicans have fought against every protection and benefit Joe enjoys
throughout his day) Joe agrees, We don't need those big government liberals ruining our lives; after all, I'm a self made man who believes everyone should take care of themselves, just like I have.

Tim Murray, a Canadian writer makes a great fit on this page.  Thanks Tim!
(And see more from him below.)

The Inconvenient Truth About the Inconvenient Truth
-- by Tim Murray

Posted (elsewhere) by Tim Murray on June 29, 2007 (minor editing: 6/24/2008)
~~~~~~~~~~~

Al Gore makes an impressive, but flawed presentation.

   1. For one thing, he does not make the point that reaching Kyoto targets would be impossible without a reduction in the population. You cannot feed such an unsustainably high population without chemical fertilizers and large-scale, energy-hungry agriculture.

   2. Secondly, he completely neglects the fact that in all likelihood peak oil has already occurred globally and natural gas supplies will be exhausted sooner than gasoline becomes practically unavailable. I think he should give more thought to the implications of this for climate change considering what types of energy are most likely to be exploited next (nuclear, burning wood for electricity, corn/sugar cane for ethanol, coal) and what is the capacity of these energies to meet present usage levels. Imagine the deforestation and acid rain caused by using wood and coal for electricity after oil and natural gas are extremely scarce. Or all the nuclear waste from trying to power electric cars. Obviously there are no technological fixes that can allow economic growth to go on for much longer. I think Gore needed to make the point that the population is growing faster than conservation technology could ever grow and since all people must consume in order to survive --I haven't met an economist who would dispute that-- no technology will allow for perpetual human population growth on earth.

   3. Thirdly, what about habitat loss? Is climate change all we care about? Most biodiversity is near the equator, not the poles. How many species' extinctions have so far been due to climate change compared to how many have been due to wild habitat loss caused by the growing human population? Biodiversity performs about 33 trillion dollars in free and vital services to the human race annually, from cleaning our air and water, replenishing our aquifers, creating our topsoil, cycling nutrients, pollinating flora, isolating atmospheric carbon, preventing erosion, and providing genetic diversity. Without these services our "economy" would die. Biodiversity gives ecosystems the resilience they need to cope with changes and fluctuations. Biodiversity is humanity's most important insurance policy. The blatantly evident manifestations of global warming are surely startling, dramatic and frightening, but biodiversity loss caused by human impact will be, as biologist Neil Dawe of the Qualicum Institute puts it: "the final nail in our coffin."

   4. Lastly, Gore loses credibility in his contention that we can reduce our impact to zero if we individually opt for greener alternatives. His exact words: "We have the ability to do this. Each one of us is a cause of global warming, but each of us can make choices to change that with the things we buy, with the electricity we use, the cars we drive. We can make choices to bring our individual carbon emissions to zero. The solutions are in our hands. We just have to have the determination to make them happen." This is absurd, since it implies that a human doesn't need to consume in order to survive. No matter how "green" a human is, he will still convert potable water to waste water, consume biomass (harvest plants and/or animals), produce waste, etc. You can be a vegetarian with "a diet for a small planet", but if you checked out the January 07 issue of National Geographic you would realize that vegetarian consumers are causing vast areas of precious Amazonian rain forests to be mowed down for soybean farming. Enjoy your tofu. Or you can buy into Jack Layton's plan and drive a "green" car, retro-fit your house, recycle your garbage or erect solar panels (made of plastic) and windmills (lots of material involved there too). But you are still going to be a consumer. And while you are doing your part as a "green" citizen and cutting back your consumption in accord with their prescriptions, Jack and his Green Party rival Elizabeth May want to add 300-400,000 new consumers --immigrants --annually, to build up Canada's population to 40 million. Reduce our ecological footprint as individuals, but increase our numbers so that aggregate consumption remains high. Make sense?

The real "inconvenient truth" is that our religion of Economic Growth, which is predicated on population growth and high consumption, will negate any efforts to stop climate change or solve any other environmental problem. Economic growth and Kyoto don't mix. Economic growth and biodiversity don't mix. And to graft a "Green" agenda onto a political party that is committed to Economic Growth is an exercise in self-delusion, contradiction and futility. Neither Gore, nor Layton, nor May, nor Dion, nor anyone leading any major environmental organization will speak about this truth.

So what is the solution? The solution is the establishment of a "steady-state" economy that would maintain constant stocks of wealth and people at levels that are sufficient for a long and good life. The conversion of natural wealth through the economic process should be low rather than high, and always within the regenerative and absorptive capabilities of the ecosystem. The alternative is a growing economy, and unlimited growth on a finite planet is an impossibility.

Tim Murray,

Quadra Island, B.C.

2 Comments:

* Comment by Rick Shea on July 6, 2007

    Excellent analysis, and thanks, Tim. I posted the following at our CRCP discussion forum on April 8th, in response to a column in a local newspaper.

    Jackie Deshannon didn't quite get it, and neither does John McDonald. "What the world needs now" is neither love nor a benevolent dictator.

    McDonald's proposals to increase gasoline prices, limit urban sprawl, divert taxes to transit, implement block pricing on gasoline, and generally change our lifestyles are all worthy proposals, but they don't address the underlying problem --a problem which will only make any and all of these measures completely and utterly futile.

    That problem of course is sheer human numbers and population growth. Cut our green house gas emissions by 40 percent? A decade or two of growth will negate any benefits. Build denser development closer to the workplace? A few decades of growth will bring back the sprawl. Block pricing on gasoline? The wealthy don't care, and growth will make up for any short term reduction in use for the rest. Sheer human numbers makes the likelihood of a serious contagious disease more and more likely, depletes other planetary resources, and increases the number of violent conflicts between nations and even between inner city neighbors.

    Mr. McDonald is in good company, though. Al Gore, David Suzuki, Elizabeth May, and virtually everyone with a conscience seems to be unable to take that last step, to acknowledge that unless we deal with the underlying problem of population growth and sheer human numbers, Mother Nature will soon take care of our short stay at the Hotel Planet Earth in any number of ways.

    It is sadly true that any prominent public figure or politician who proposes population caps, or even (horrors) population reduction through natural means, would be committing political suicide. Yet this is precisely what our beleaguered planet needs.

    Perhaps it is due to misunderstanding, long-held economic myths, or even simple propaganda that citizens are unwilling to listen to this message. Population caps at a local level do not necessarily limit mobility, yet opponents resort to ignorant and histrionic statements such as "throw up a wall," "close the drawbridge," and so on. Given our national birth rate, population caps at that level do not even prevent immigration. On a global level, population growth is slowing even now. We could speed that process along through education and better birth control.

    Canada could become a world leader by establishing a national population cap at our current level, and by entering into immigration/emigration agreements only with other countries who have done the same. Canada could implement the theories of steady state economics, where growth in the quality of life is not linked to growth in consumption and population.

    Despite the histrionics and propaganda; continued population growth and increased consumption are not inevitable or even necessary. Indeed, if we cannot break out of that mindset now, our growth will most surely kill us. The only item in question is how.

* Comment by John Zeger on December 16, 2007

    I just want to add this little bit of info from Terrierman's Daily Dose (blog), Oct. 12, 2007 that provides data that shows that greenhouse gas emissions in the past 100 years haven't risen because of a per capita increase but rather because of population growth:

    "The inconvenient truth is that the world is NOT producing more greenhouse gases per person than it did in 1830 when the world had 1 billion people. Nor is it producing more greenhouses gases per capita than it did in 1930 when the world had 2 billion people.

    The inconvenient truth is that the world is producing about the same or less greenhouses gases per person today that it did 50 or 100 years ago. People forget that horses produced serious amounts of greenhouse gases (methane) and so too did homes heated with wood and coal.

{Link}    Table 1, page 19 from "Per Capita Carbon Dioxide Emissions Convergence or Divergence?" by Joseph E. Aldy, 2005 published by Resources for the Future (a PDF)

    The simple fact is that while the atmospheric level of CO² has increased 30 percent since 1860, world population has more than quadrupled since then. Per capita CO² emissions in the industrialized world are actually in decline, and have been for quite some time. When we look at all CO² production, we find that global population growth and CO² emissions track almost perfectly.

    The problem is not that we are driving cars or cooling our beer in refrigerators -- it's that there are too many people. Too many people necessarily results in too many cars, too many refrigerators, and too many coal-fired electrical plants.

    There are too damn many of us!

    Population growth, energy use and CO2 emissions track perfectly. The causal agent here is human population growth -- an "inconvenient truth" largely glossed over in Al Gore's otherwise excellent movie. Figure 2 is from "Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide as a proxy for growth of the human population? ," 1995, University of Washington

    Al Gore is willing to talk about rebuilding power plants, building nuclear reactors, knocking down or retro-fitting every building on the planet. He is willing to discuss what's wrong with Ford and Chevy, but he is not willing to talk too long or too loudly about population growth for fear his audience might look over his shoulder to see how many people are sitting in his own family room."

Taken from: http://webdiary.com.au/
(Posted in December of 2007 --minor editing: 6/23/2008)
[Note: AGO has folded, but their 2004 final posts remain up as of this writing]

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~begin:

"Web diarist James Sinnamon sent us this piece from Canadian writer Tim Murray. The article raises some interesting questions that are equally relevant to Australia."

Andy Kerr, former president of Alternatives to Growth Oregon, posed these questions, "To those who support generous immigration, I ask you this: Why are you are on the same side as Microsoft and the other huge computer corporations and of Archer Daniel Midland and the rest of the agribusiness lobby? How can you support a policy that helps ensure that our existing poor will never be adequately valued for their labor?"

Kerr's questions could well be asked of so many left-wing critics whose first reflexive response to closed border arguments are that they are "right-wing", "reactionary", "racist" or "xenophobic", despite the fact that historically the first beneficiaries of mass immigration to North America, and several other localities, have been cheap labor employers. Naomi Klein, in "The Shock Doctrine" blemishes her excellent analysis with this commonplace attitude.

If Klein wanted to probe the shock therapy applied by big capital by using immigration as a battering ram to break down the working class, she need only have looked to the history of British Columbia, where her brother Seth labors for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

In the nineteenth century Chinese labor contractors imported labor to the point that perhaps one-third of the entire workforce had become Chinese. Working for half the wages, paying no taxes, they were prepared to ignore safety regulations, so the Dunsmuir Coal Company used them to break a pivotal miners' strike in 1883. The Miners Union then presented a resolution to government to restrict Chinese laborers from working underground, and another one stating that these laborers were a menace to underground safety, had lowered wages, deterred other Canadians from seeking employment in B.C., offered unfair competition and were provocative to public peace.

In 1907 five Tokyo immigration companies filled an order to bring 6,000 Japanese laborers to work for the Canadian Pacific Railway (C.P.R.) when the province was experiencing a recession. B.C. workers were against the ropes, so the Vancouver Trades and Labour Council met to form an "Asiatic Exclusion League". Two days later a Japanese ship arrived with 1177 laborers. The chemistry was right for the infamous Vancouver anti-Asian riot of September 7, 1907, an incident which has been retroactively depicted as a simple and despicable act of racism. In fact it was a reaction to B.C. businesses which were then using Japanese cheap surplus laborers instead of their Chinese counterparts. It should be known that Native Indians also seethed with resentment at the Japanese presence.

Chinese immigrant labor had finally been slapped by a "head tax" by the federal government in response to decades of lobbying by the B.C. to level the playing field with Canadian laborers. But they wouldn't follow suit with a similar tax on Japanese labor for fear of jeopardizing trade arrangements with Japan. Hence the end run by employers and the pogrom by B. C. workers. To demonstrate labor's outrage at the collusion between now Lieutenant-Governor Dunsmuir and the C.P.R. to orchestrate the Japanese influx, a Socialist legislator moved a motion in the B.C. House that Dunsmuir be impeached.

It should also be noted ---and this is always omitted by revisionists--- the Oriental Exclusion Act was actually a misnomer. It was in reality, the Oriental Laborers Exclusion Act. Chinese merchants and their families continued to enjoy access to Canada. The purpose of the omission is obvious, to foster guilt and shame so that an agenda of "justice" an restitution can be pursued by Canada's immigration industry so that corporate Canada can have its labor requirements satisfied in the same way that robber baron Robert Dunsmuir's was. Just 30 miles from where he used Chinese labor to break the miners strike of 1883, the corporation I was working for used Chinese labor to try and break my strike a century later. As waves of Chinese, fresh from Hong Kong, passed through my picket line, escorted by police, it occurred to me that I was having a "multicultural" experience. I was so enriched. Like the miners were in 1883.

The same misrepresentation and spin was made of the "Komagata Maru" incident where East Indians were denied entry at the Port of Vancouver. Does this mean that racist antagonisms did not alloy with legitimate economic grievances? It would stretch credulity to argue that case, particularly in light of the outrageous internment of Japanese-Canadians in 1942, the fact that Chinese-Canadians were denied the vote until 1948, or the right to own property in the exclusive British Properties among other indignities. But should illegitimate motives discredit and invalidate the very cogent arguments of working people to defend their livelihood?

These arguments have been made by socialists and trade unionists not only in Canada but in America a century ago by Jack London, Socialist Party leader Victor Gerber, and the legendary Samuel Gompers. They were also made by the heroic Cesar Chavez who was committed to restricting immigration. Chavez even picketed the border and reported illegal aliens who served as strike-breakers against United Farm Workers.

Today leading labor economists have carried on the fight. Dr. George Borgias of Harvard University is most notably among them. It is his contention that native-born American workers lose $152 billion annually because of job displacement and wage depression caused by immigration. And yet, how does the labor movement respond? This is what the Carrying Capacity Network asks:

"The AFL-CIO, the biggest labor union in the country, is AGAIN urging Congress to give amnesty to as many as 13 million illegal immigrants. Result: depressed wages and lost jobs for Americans while rewarding lawbreakers with the right to work and potential citizenship. Isn't the AFL-CIO sanctioning lawbreaking by pushing for an amnesty?"

Where does the Canadian labor movement stand? You can guess. In a letter dated May 4/06 to Minister of Public Safety Stockwell Day and Minister of Immigration and Citizenship Monte Solberg, Secretary Treasurer of the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) Hassan Yussuf complained about the "zealotry" of the Canadian Border Services Agency. "(They) aggressively deported a number of undocumented residents, particularly those from the Portuguese community as well as targeting members of the Asian, Chinese, Caribbean and Latin/Central-American communities. The manner in which those deportations were handled exposed a government acting with excessive zeal, hardness, and in some cases, an inexcusable lack of humanity.

I suppose the more "humane" course of action for the CLC would be just to let everybody who wants to come to Canada stay. Open borders. One world. John Lennon's dream. Just imagine. But that's globalism isn't it? Who will speak for the Canadian workers whose wages and working conditions are being hammered by this vision of brotherhood?  Why, the CLC of course. Like its political arm, the NDP, it claims to represent them. Yussuf's letter concludes: "The CLC representing more than 3 million workers, joins with those calling for a moratorium on all CBSA deportation/detention activities."

How about a moratorium on immigration instead? That would do more for those 3 million workers. And more than a swift process, in the CLC's words,  to "regularize undocumented workers whose skills are in need and who have been contributing to the economy." You have to love the CLC's politically-correct language. Calling an illegal immigrant an "undocumented resident" is like calling a drug-pusher an "unlicensed pharmacist". How does the labor movement like it when people call scabs "replacement workers"? And why doesn't the CLC just call "regularize" what it is ---amnesty for law-breakers, or, as Geoffrey Blainey once put it, "an incentive for others to arrive, hoping to benefit from further amnesty."

Contemporary socialist and trade union affinity toward  international solidarity even at the expense of national well-being can be traced to a Marxist legacy that sees class, not nationality, as the primary divide. Even social democracy taps into this tradition which combines as one strand in a muddled xenophilia with Christian and environmental thought. The latter mutation is expressed quintessentially in the Canadian Green Party line that since global warming is a global problem requiring global cooperation, to obtain this we must not send out an unfriendly message of "fear" by closing our borders, but on the contrary drop them instead. Presumably a radically downward adjustment in consumption habits and greener technology will compensate for all the extra millions who would swarm in. Instead of "workers of the world unite", the Greens offer us a new rallying cry: "more and more people, consuming less and less".

What is interesting is that American icon, Ralph Nader, Green Party candidate for President, does not share this Canadian love affair with the world. He had this to say in 2000:  "We cannot have open borders. That's a totally absurd proposition. It would depress wages here enormously, and tens of millions of people from all levels, including scientists and workers, would be pouring into this country."

Australian political scientist Frank Salter had this to say about the socialist attitude to nationalism. "The Left, as it has evolved over the course of the previous century, looks down on the ordinary people with their inarticulate parochialisms as if they were members of another species. since they care nothing for the preservation of national communities. Ethnies are considered irrelevant to the welfare of people in general. It would be understandable to Martians to be so detached from particular loyalties. But it is disturbing to humans doing so, especially humans who identify with the Left."

Such is the European Left's identification with the Other at the cost of the resident national that, in the name of anti-racism, it was possible for left-wing novelist Umberto Eco to declare his hope that Europe would be swamped by Africans and third world emigrants just so to "demoralize" racists. And such is the identification of the AFL-CIO with 13 million illegal immigrants as potential recruits that it supports amnesty and essentially a corporate welfare program that reduces wages for the lowest of American workers. A scheme which advocates call "liberalism" but American workers call an invasion. The CLC (Edgar Bergen) and its social-democratic parliamentary arm, the NDP (Charlie McCarthy), sing the same tune. Crocodile tears are shed for "undocumented" workers who allegedly make great contributions to the economy, according to their hire-a-left-wing-think-tank. But Statistics Canada's conclusions about the effect of immigration on the Canadian work force echo those of Dr. Borgias for American workers. Except the May 2007 Statscan report showed that in Canada, it was the educated workers who were really taking a hit. Between 1980-2000 their wages dropped 7%. And in Britain, careful analysis revealed that the Trade Union Congress was wrong in its contention that amnesty would net the Treasury one billion pounds annually. Rather it would cost taxpayers 1.8 billion pounds a year.

But alas, socialist thought is not monolithic. The Leninists were wrong. For the working class, national identity was as important as class identity, or as Orwell put it, "in all countries, the poor are more national than the rich." If they can't find a voice on the Left, in desperation they will look to the Populist right, as they did recently in Switzerland. But just when it looked like the field was left entirely to globalists, maverick social-democratic and socialist leaders in the tradition of Berger, London, or Canada's J. S. Woodsworth are staking a claim for national, as opposed to international, solidarity. They are doing so after their constituents have been battered by one of the greatest migratory waves in history, that saw the United States for example import the equivalent of three New Jerseys in the 1990s alone, or 25 million people. One would think that Naomi Klein, a Canadian, would have known that the Father of Canadian democratic socialism, the Saint of Canadian politics, the Rev. J. S. Woodsworth steadfastly opposed immigration throughout his leadership in the 1920s and 30s. Woodsworth understood that his constituency was in Canada, not overseas. His motto was no doubt that of Vancouver Rev. Edwin Scott: "We are not universal nations yet. Universal nationality and universal brotherhood are two different things."

The Democratic Socialist Senator of Vermont, Bernie Sanders, has begun to make some noise about the disaster that is the illegal immigration invasion in the United States. His voting record in reducing chain migration, fighting amnesty and unnecessary visas rates B-, B-, and A+ respectively from Americans for Better Immigration. "If poverty is increasing and if wages are going down, I don't know why we need millions of people to be coming into this country as guest workers who will work for lower wages than American workers and drive wages down even lower than they are now." To Sanders the American working, middle class is caught in a squeeze. "On the one hand, you have large multi-nationals trying to shut down plants in America, move to China and on the other hand you have the service industry bringing in lower wage workers from abroad. The result is the same: the middle class gets shrunk and wages go down." Five million people have left the middle class during Bush administration, Sanders observes.

Other social-democratic leaders have spoken out against open borders. Former Social Democratic Chancellor Helmut Schmidt now admits that immigration under his government was excessive and damaging to Germany. In a book published in 1982 he confessed that "with idealistic intentions, born out of our experiences with the Third Reich, we brought in far too many foreigners." Dutch Socialist leader Jan Marijnissen is strongly opposed to the practice of importing East European workers to undermine the position of Dutch workers. East Europeans are hired as "independent contractors" to circumvent labor law. Marijnissen wrote "It is unacceptable that employers pay foreign workers 3 euros per hour and have them live in chicken coops as they were in competition in the nineteenth century of Dickens. The unfair competition and displacement of Dutch workers and small business is intolerable. Therefore we shouldn't open the borders further, but set limits instead."

Setting limits. Acknowledging limits. That is the great divide. In the past those limits have been perceived to be economic by those with the sense to perceive them. Now, some on the left are beginning to realize that the more unforgiving and immutable limits are set by nature. Former Labor Premier of  NSW , Bob Carr, and his fellow Laborite retired veteran MP Barry Cohen joined environmental leaders Tim Flannery and Ian Lowe in exposing the myth of Australia as a big empty land begging to be filled up with people. Said Carr, "our rivers, our soils, our vegetation, won't allow that to happen except at enormous cost to us and those who follow us." Carr and Cohen call for severe immigration cut-backs and a population policy put in place.

In Klein's Canada, meanwhile, the phrase "carrying capacity" is as unknown in the socialist lexicon as it is the corporate. Biologists and ecologists might as well be speaking ancient Aramaic to leftists to make them understand that their human rights agenda cannot be built on an environment that will not sustain it. Canada cannot become the soup kitchen to tens of millions of refugees, nor can vital biodiversity services coexist with a population of 50 million Canadians. In economic jargon, its called "diseconomies of scale". In the language of real science, its called a "limiting factor".

This essay began with two questions from Andy Kerr. It will end with six or seven of mine.

Why? Why has opposition to a policy of mass immigration, a policy that drives down the wages of marginal workers, middle-income workers and professional workers been characterized and vilified as "right-wing" and "reactionary". Why has earlier socialist and trade union understanding of the negative consequences of this policy been overtaken by a "love thy neighbor" zeitgeist of the post-war era? Why is the "Left" on the same side as the "Right": the same side as Microsoft, ADM, real estate developers and cheap labor employers?

It is time to challenge this labeling and to challenge those who use it to prevent thoughtful discussion. The question that needs to be posed today is not the conventional one of "is it Left or is it Right?", but rather: do we accept that there are Limits, or do we continue to persist in the fantasy that this country, and others, are a massive treasure trove of boundless resources --waiting to be unlocked by an endless number of people who can exploit them without ecological consequences?

History shows, sadly, that the latter delusion is shared equally among the devotees of Adam Smith, the Communist Manifesto and its derivatives.   ------end

Selected commentaries (actually: the first four --in order) which followed the above essay:

* What utter balderdash
Submitted by Marilyn Shepherd on December 19, 2007

I am hard pressed to work out just what it is people like this are ranting about when they issue one of these anti-immigration diatribes.

Canada is an enormously vast country with a population of just 37 million, America is the richest country on earth with a population of 300 million and not enough people to do the work.

Australia is a vast nation of 21 million and despite what many might think Howard upped the migration program to the highest level since the second world war.

We all need to get over this bullshit of borders and nation states. No-one ever said that person A had to stay in country A forever just because he was born there did they?

Before last century people moved without permission, without documents and without carrying on like pork chops against the next lot of people who did the same thing.

How the hell do the colonial British outposts like Canada, the US and us got settled? Did the British ask permission to settle, kill the natives, steal the land and the children?

No. Now it is time to grow up. If people are starving to death in Africa they have a right to move to a place where they can work and live in dignity.

If that means open borders all over the world then so be it because we have open borders for tourists and not one person whines about them.

Here the only immigration issue ever discussed is the few refugees who arrive and they have been conflated into a flood of terrorist queue jumping illegals instead of a mere 15,000 people in nearly 20 years for which we had to waste $3 billion locking up.

* bourgeoisphobe
Submitted by Eliot Ramsey on December 19, 2007

Perhaps the psychological roots to the 'progressive' infatuation with immigration, invariably in their rhetoric equated with 'multiculturalism', are anchored in the Romantic idealization of the exotic 'Other' as being representative of non-Western, pre-industrial Arcadia?

Immigration is 'good' because 'non western' people are morally pristine, having not yet been contaminated by bourgeois western ideas. They're 'better' than the humdrum, day-to-day garden variety of human we're all used to.

It's not so much Marx behind it all as Rousseau.

Peter Gay's books 'Culture Wars' shows quite nicely how Bohemia rejoiced in the role of 'bourgeois-phobe' and how important this was to its self esteem.

Exulting in the exotic was part of the pose. That's not going to change.

* Canada's Pauline Hanson?
Submitted by Gareth Eastwood on December 19, 2007

If you like this kind of isolationist, anti-immigrant garbage, try out Tim's blog. I've taken the liberty of identifying some of the numerous holes in Tim's piece.

Re "To those who support generous immigration, I ask you this: Why are you are on the same side as ---."

I support open borders, this doesn't put me on the same "side" as anyone. This isn't a team game with two opposing sides.

Re "historically the first beneficiaries of mass immigration to North America, and several other localities, have been cheap labor employers."

Rubbish, the nation as a whole and the migrants themselves are also obvious beneficiaries. How can nations of migrants like Australia, Canada and the US be so well off if migration only benefits employers?

Re "Result: depressed wages and lost jobs for Americans."

This is one of the biggest falsehoods perpetrated by the anti-immigration clan. Said Americans (or Canadians) will lose their jobs and depress their wages no matter where the workers are located. If the workers can't move, the jobs do, it's called off-shoring. If you can't get a job or earn a sufficient wage, stop blaming others and skill up. The said Americans (or Canadians) even at minimum wage earn an hourly rate far superior to the average daily rate in the developing world, your American (or Canadian) job is not sustainable in that situation, you're going to lose it either way. It's called competition, Americans are all for it when it suits them.

Re "Presumably a radically downward adjustment in consumption habits and greener technology will compensate for all the extra millions who would swarm in."

Maybe the developed world should stay poor so that Canada and the US don't have to bother themselves with adjusting their consumption habits and developing greener technology? I think the Indian and Chinese natives are going to wealth up no matter what country they're residing in. Closing borders to migrants is going have bugger all impact on slowing climate change.

Re "tens of millions of people from all levels, including scientists and workers, would be pouring into this country."

Just like the US in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Just like all the people (natives excepted) that currently populate Ralph's country.

Re "On the one hand, you have large multi-nationals trying to shut down plants in America, move to China and on the other hand you have the service industry bringing in lower wage workers from abroad. The result is the same: the middle class gets shrunk and wages go down."

So do you think blocking migrants is going to make said multi-nationals more likely or less likely to 'move to China'? Pretty obvious answer I think. It's a see-saw; you push down one side, the other goes up. How about working on something that will actually create sustainable wealth in the middle class? Working on increasing productivity would be an example.

I guess it's pretty safe to assume that Tim Murray is unconcerned about the well being of the third world's poor. He seems very much the Canadian nationalist; his views have a lot in common with Pauline's One Nation. Have a read of his "Threat of climate change refugees" post if you don't believe me.

The fantasy that Mr. Murray is perpetrating is that his Canadian homeland can remain wealthy while isolating itself from the rest of the world.

* It certainly gets them upset, doesn't it?
Submitted by Eliot Ramsey on December 19, 2007

Marilyn Shepherd says: "Australia is a vast nation of 21 million and despite what many might think Howard upped the migration program to the highest level since the second world war."

Gareth Eastwood says: "Rubbish, the nation as a whole and the migrants themselves are also obvious beneficiaries. How can nations of migrants like Australia, Canada and the US be so well off if migration only benefits employers?"

These are the top ten countries for per capita income in the world in order:

    * Luxembourg
    * Norway
    * Iceland
    * Switzerland
    * Ireland
    * Denmark
    * Qatar
    * United States
    * Sweden
    * Netherlands

Apart from the USA, all of these countries have tiny populations.

One other contender for a nation with a singularly successful economy would be Japan, a country with no immigration whatsoever. None.

Now have a look at this item about Harry Triguboff, the boss of the Meriton construction corporation, as reported in the Sydney Morning Herald:

    The views of the Meriton boss, Australia's biggest property developer, are likely to outrage conservationists - particularly his declaration that Sydney has "too many forests and parks".

    "You go north and we have all these reserves and you go south and you have all the reserves, and they are the best part of the coast. That is crazy. We should be building on this area," he said.

    "If they want to see trees, they can go to Katoomba, there are plenty of trees there."

    In an interview with the Herald, Mr. Triguboff said there was too much focus by the Prime Minister, John Howard, and others on land releases on Sydney's outskirts, and that too much land was locked up in national parks and reserves.

    He also called for a big increase in immigration, saying the population of Sydney should be 20 million by 2050, with the population of Australia 150 million.

That would get our 'vast nation' to just under half the population of the USA.

And you can just tell that Harry wants this because he loves cultural diversity and environmental balance, can't you?

So why do people who oppose over-development, and fret about resource depletion, and who hate urban sprawl and pollution, and who rail against globalization and the exploitation of cheap labor absolutely obsess over the 'virtues' of big populations? Because 'migration' equals 'multiculturalism' equals 'non western' equals 'good'.

If you think big populations are the formula for social cohesion and prosperity, you might want to start thinking about places like India, Brazil, Indonesia, Bangladesh and China. Because they've got population in spades.

More about, and my comments on: the Georgia Guidestones --

* I should trouble to do a separate web page about the Guidestones, but I'd first need to closely read R. C. Christian's book. I've no connection with the Guidestones project or its sponsors --except what we can all find on the Internet, and I like to begin by taking what's presented at face value. The Stones' 10 messages do recommend themselves and speak well of their author's/authors' motivation.

* It was a fellow member of a nation-wide group (the Stereoscopic Society of America --we make old fashioned stereographs) --who introduced me to the Guidestones by passing around a stereo view of them. This monument inspired my wife and I to also do something which might last --and at least be our due diligence in making a personal, wanna-be, humbly helpful contribution to --whatever the future might hold.

* Their mystery has attracted much attention and speculation. I don't think the Guidestones were just a local chamber of commerce gimmick to boost tourism and Elberton's granite industry --although that surely plays/played a big part. (Note the evident pride in the legends' citation of construction details --which is just fine by me.) However, whether "R. C. Christian" and company or Elberton Granite initiated the project, the authorship of the Guidestones' messages and their troubling with those seven translations must come from a deeper source --than just a circle of rural town merchants. My best guess: the local Masonic lodge reached out through its grapevine of brothers to bring in some serious, nobly motivated, Masonically and academically degreed talent --in the person of "R. C. Christian". (I speculate that earnest local talent and sparse oversight by the project's author/s let that spelling error get through --which is also just fine by me. Clearly, they all did their personal best.)

* I'm really impressed. The Guidestones' author/s got it right --ten times in a row. I take it as a privilege, and in our recognition of the Guidestones project, that my wife and I made its messages the core of our Time Capsule Tiles.

* I also take R. C. Christian (and company) at face value in his/their Christian witness --despite his refrains about "The Age of Reason" --re: Thomas Paine's Deistic, 3 part, strident attack on the books of the Bible and all Abrahamic religions. I'm guessing that was out-weighed by (what I gather to be) RC's and Paine's deep Masonic and monotheistic roots. (Being a spiritual humanist who's humbly agape at creation, I resonate to RC's calls for concord.)

Again: that quiet voice from the past:

Only when, in addition to just institutions, the increase of mankind shall be under the deliberate guidance of judicious foresight, can the conquests made from the powers of nature by the intellect and energy of scientific discoverers, become the common property of the species, and the means of improving and elevating the universal lot.   ---From J. S. Mill's Principles of Political Economy, Book IV, Chapter VI ("Of the Stationary State"), Section II - 1848. (Mill was an amazing dude. His father taught him the Greek alphabet at age 3. By age 8 he'd read read a "7 foot shelf" worth in Greek, then started in at reading Euclid and the rest in Latin.)

END