I wonder how people think the world works. Do they know that gases in the air turn into our bodies? I mean, yeah, some iron and calcium and potassium, but mostly oxygen, and hydrogen, lots of nitrogen, and a whole bunch of carbon, which is a solid element but also air. Do they?

How do they think all that stuff travels through human bodies, into the soil - do people realize we're part of Earth? We're made of Earth? Their holiest of books says we're made out of Earth.

3. Given that I, for instance, wasn't always here, where did all this solid - appearing stuff called "Jeff" come from?
Well, it went in circles. But arbitrarily let's start with air, sunlight, and photosynthesis.

4. By the magic of photosynthesis, the miracle called Life extracts carbon,.in the form of CO2, and hydrogen, from the air, and nitrogen, from the ground except it came from the air and was "fixed" by... Some other life...

5. Anyway, turns those gases into sugar. You can take carbon and hydrogen, add energy to hook the molecules together, the combination molecules are sugars and the energy is bound up in the linkage.
Somebody eats that plant, maybe me. And then that atmospheric gas becomes...
Me.

6. So as a matter of objective fact I'm full of hot air.

7. There is no way you can make that cycle happen without the plants.
In the process of doing all that, the plants also produce a certain relatively stable ratio of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen in the atmosphere.
And that results in a stable global climate.

8. I'm not talking about yer redneck moron that everyone is having fun pounding on right now. He looks so much like me that sometimes ... never mind. But I'm talking about, say, Elizabeth Warren. Say, your chosen Democratic Secretary of the Interior. How do they think it works?

9. What do you suppose the purpose of, say, a flea is?
What is the purpose of a wasp?
What is the purpose of poison ivy? Or Virginia creeper?
What is the purpose of any of the thousands of species we run into extinction annually?
What is the purpose of anything? Money?

10. I honestly don't understand the mind that says, yes, I know, but I really need to go a mile a minute, so fuck it.
Which is exactly, to the point, where we are.
And Elizabeth Warren believes that. She won't say so, but she says we've gotta have high energy grid, fast jobs,

11. There is no possible dispute that the entire botanical underpinnings of life as we know it are badly broken. We know it.
The Amazon is *not* the lungs of the Earth.
Every square millimeter of Earth is its lungs.
The Amazon is the cigarette addicts last half a lung.

12. And people pretend that halting carbon emissions will stop the degradation, stop the collapse. All the rest of the destruction is not just OK, it's the objective. Why we need the renewable energy. To keep doing it.
How do people think the world works?
It's beyond me.

13. While the plant was making that sugar, it didn't need the oxygen that was left over from the process, so it excreted it out into the air.
Photosynthesizing life excreted so much oxygen that the air killed almost everything on Earth, but that was a long time ago. Later, us.

14. So now, we're sucking oxygen back out of the air, tying it up with carbon, spewing it back out as CO2 to catch solar energy in the atmosphere, but hey, there's lots of free oxygen and who's counting?
You know what used to catch and store solar energy?
Plants.
What they do.

15. Plants capture solar energy and use it to extract CO2 from the atmosphere, bind it in sugars and other complex molecules, and power everything on Earth.
That's how the world works. How the thing we're made out of, works.
How do all those plants get planted?
All the animals.

16. Ever seen coon shit?
This time of year it's heavy in persimmon seeds.

17. The whole thing that was here 6,000 years ago when we thought up carrying annual grass agriculture out of the flood plains and up the hillsides, tillage agriculture - before that, that thing we lived in for 150,000 years before that - it works.
It makes food, even. Enough.

18. The whole deal is about catching solar energy with plants and turning it into everything we need. And miraculously, there is already a design for how to do it. It's called "remaining ecosystems."
Do that.
Climate change will go away.
Might take 100 years. Took 100 to get here

19. But this money deal is a problem.
We measure everything by how much money it causes to flow uphill toward the ownership class. This measure is called "GDP," but it's measured money.
Money doesn't exist.
It's make-believe.
Don't trade the world for it.
It's a shitty deal.

20. We need some measure of basic need satisfaction. The ratio of persons alive to basic needs met. Ideally you want 1:1.
But we've got to get real. Real needs. No human anywhere on Earth has any absolute need to go faster than evolution equipped her to go.

21. We need to be warm, well fed, reasonably comfortable, clothed, safe. We need the company of other humans in community. We need productive work to do with our minds and bodies. We need to walk. We need to express our humanity in art, music, storytelling.

22. It is simply false that, once a person has the things I list above, perhaps others like them I missed, any other specific list of possessions or technologies will increase our happiness or our sense of well-being.
Warm, well-fed, safe, loved, happy. Enough.
Not a sacrifice.

23. The rat race is over.
The rats won.
Let's do something else.
--jeff