Bacteria in a Petri dish will grow exponentially until they run out of resources, at which point their population will crash. Only one generation prior to the crash, the bacteria will have used up half the resources available to them. To the bacteria, there will be no hint of a problem until they starve to death. Before that happens, the bacteria will begin cannibalizing each other in last-ditch efforts to survive.



But humans are smarter than bacteria, right? You would think so, but the facts seem to indicate otherwise. The first commercial oil well was drilled in 1859. At that time, the world's population was about 1 billion. Less than 150 years later, our population has exploded to 6.4 billion. In that time, we have used up half the world's recoverable oil. Of the half that's left, most will be very expensive to extract. If the experts are correct, we are less than one generation away from a crash. Yet to most of us, there appears to be no hint of a problem. One generation away from our demise, we are as clueless as bacteria in a Petri dish.


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Captain caveman - Wednesday, 14th April 2004 #
Up here I lead an incredibly simple existence, something I reflected upon this evening as I put my tent up and found a particularly nice patch of snow to dig up and melt for drinking water.

As I filled up my bag with blocks of snow, I felt a tinge of sadness that it won't be long before I'm home, where water comes instantly out of a tap and it takes more than just nice snow, the direction of the wind or the colour of the sky to make me happy. You see, here I'm away from the clutches of the marketing people. I don't worry about what clothes to wear, because I only have one set. I don't cleanse, tone or moisturise, yet my skin has never been better. I don't feel left out because I don't have a widescreen tv or a DVD player.

One of the things I love about the Arctic is the way it strips away all the superficiality we surround ourselves with, all the layers of aftershave and pretence, and what you're left with is life stripped to the bare essentials. Even up here, it's amazing how little you need to live in relative comfort. What's that great line in the film Fight Club? Something about people wasting their lives working in jobs they hate just to buy things they don't even need...

What I'm realising is that it's the people that are close to me that I miss, not the things that I own. Here endeth today's rambling.

I nearly forgot - I had some decent ice for a change this morning (see pic). Happy days!

Today is dedicated to a few people I haven't heard from in years - Russell Witcher, Aaron Haynes, Oliver Restorick and my dad. It'd make my day to hear from any of you.

www.bensaunders/dispatches

So I knew this guy named André. Not the man in the photo, not a man from peru, and no, no monkey either.

Ignore the photo.

I was working at a lumberyard in the town of Oshawa, Ontario, earning money in the summer of 99. It would be a summer of stacking wood in the sun, and listening to the words of a veteran lumber lifter, the best, some would say.

André was about 50 years old, a slim and tall man, the kind that could squat into a ball on the ground and have his legs look like 2 long sticks of french bread. Incidentally, he was French, or at least he had been at one time, now only his accent remained. He had a thin face that had long ago forged itself into a permanent wince, yet his stock of ill-favoured teeth could sometimes recruit his lips to produce a smile that, in my opinion, was beautifully childlike. He was a child after all.

Everyday he would eat lunch, alone, in the back of his Volkswagen Jetta. It was a great looking car, silver, new. It was probably the best thing in his life. “It’s nice to have a car,” he would say, “If you want to go somewhere”. He ate alone in his car because he had trouble relating to the other men in the lunchroom, or he had never bothered to try. It seemed to me that his life had taught him that there is safety in being alone.

He had loved a woman once, and she left him for his brother.

What I learned of André came to me in random bits and pieces, stories of his life and the lessons that he noticed he had learned. “Be gentle with women,” he once said. Wise advice of course, but I will never really know where it came from or what it cost him. His lessons were like that, learned the hard way, learned and left like safety pins that would never let him move to triumph the second time around.



Apparently when André was young man he was able to jump and fall from heights of over 50 feet and land safely using a “crouch into a ball and roll” technique. This was his skill, a gift that he would use it to impress his friends, and I could tell he was still quite proud of it. He demonstrated the procedure to me, perfectly executed at a falling distance of zero. André doesn’t jump anymore.


Maybe in Peru André might have had a monkey.