Letters: Readers respond to an article about quitting the rat race, with some saying their generation was handed an untenable position and others saying the struggle is nothing new
We don’t, scientifically, know which one of us is right.
We can only go based on gut feeling and anecdotes.
My job is in bioinformatics, from the computational side. The measurements we took were assumed to be wrong due to how far they were out of the expected. Sadly, the equipment did not malfunction, the temperature of the environments we measured shifted drastically causing a reduction in community complexity.
My fun-time is partially in small scale farming, while some of my family members work full time in the agriculture.
I’ve seen both small scale collapse, meaning a tree or a bush die from extreme weather. Members of my family now drink more, as they witnessed fields ruined in a few hours. Hail out of session, a once in a hundred years wind that blew day after day for a week, extreme cold (for the region), extended dry spells in winters with floods between.
Each one of those events reduced the agricultural output of a given area to zero for that season.
I live in a western country, we have no technology to stop that and it will become more frequent and global. We have no technology to save our own food supply.
We know how to grow food in building. If we have energy to replace the sun. We don’t. So we are going the route of food collapse, leading to population collapse, extinction will follow a few years later.
We don’t, scientifically, know which one of us is right. We can only go based on gut feeling and anecdotes.
My job is in bioinformatics, from the computational side. The measurements we took were assumed to be wrong due to how far they were out of the expected. Sadly, the equipment did not malfunction, the temperature of the environments we measured shifted drastically causing a reduction in community complexity.
My fun-time is partially in small scale farming, while some of my family members work full time in the agriculture. I’ve seen both small scale collapse, meaning a tree or a bush die from extreme weather. Members of my family now drink more, as they witnessed fields ruined in a few hours. Hail out of session, a once in a hundred years wind that blew day after day for a week, extreme cold (for the region), extended dry spells in winters with floods between. Each one of those events reduced the agricultural output of a given area to zero for that season.
I live in a western country, we have no technology to stop that and it will become more frequent and global. We have no technology to save our own food supply.
We know how to grow food in building. If we have energy to replace the sun. We don’t. So we are going the route of food collapse, leading to population collapse, extinction will follow a few years later.