Gulf of Messico

The green ends where the concrete barrier begins.

Where the concrete barrier ends is where "we" begin.

"We", as in what we humans with our intelligence have been able to cook up out of the ingredients we scour from what God made: the universe and all that is in it.

Specifically, our lonely blue planet so wonderfully colored and filled with life.

At least, it was. Once. This is not "once upon a time". This is not fairytale fiction. Much of it still existed in the first decades of my life.

When I was in grade school, there were about 3.5 billion people on earth. Now there are nearly twice that many. Earth's population can literally double in under three decades.

That's not doubling from one million to two million either. We're talking doubling way more people alive at once than have ever lived before in all the history we have the ability to know about--all combind.

Where will the lines intersect on the graph? What lines? The lines of the number being born and the number dying.

'Til now, the number being born has always stayed far ahead of the number dying. But an intersection may not be far off. It could come, not as a gentle change but as a steep collapse. I don't know, but I'm studying the things we are doing and where they might go.

Somebody couldn't afford to put their discards in their "proper" place: a landfill. (Tell me again how that is proper????) So they put them in an improper place for all to see. So somebody else could clean it up.

This stuff has since been moved. But it hasn't gone away, all this stuff you see in the picture. Maybe a few bits of metal have been recycled. But most of the rest of it will lurk somewhere else on earth.

Waiting for doomsday or....

What's going on in the Gulf of Mexico isn't unique or off the charts. It's a little capsule of what we humans in general have done with the gift we have been given.

And we still have the boldness to talk about stewardship of creation.

OK, when exactly? When?

That's not a question waiting a president, a Geneva convention or a Congress to rise from the dead. It's a question for each of us to raise and answer every day.

Roger