CHANGE IS INEVITABLE

Have you seen photos of the beautiful cave paintings in Lascaux, France? (Click “discover,” then “virtual visit”).

There is so little we can know about these prehistoric cave paintings.  What do they mean?  Who painted them?  Were they painted by men or women?  No one knows.  I doubt anyone will ever know. 

The cave paintings depict different kinds of animals.  Were the paintings created to petition gods, goddesses, or animal spirits to provide hunters with good hunting?  Perhaps the images had no more to do with hunting than the wintry scenes of deer and chickadees on Christmas cards.  We have no clues that will tell us about these people with any certainty.  We have only mystery.

The Lascaux cave paintings are many times older than the pyramids of Egypt.  The paintings were made about 17,000 years ago.  It’s hard to grasp how long that time is.  It’s easier for me if I think in terms of generations.  Figure this:  There is approximately one generation each 33 years (or so says The How Book for Genealogists, Sixth Edition).  At three generations per century and 30 generations per millennium, that comes to 510 generations. 

Maybe you have started working on your family tree.  Maybe you know the names of all eight of your great-grandparents.  Maybe you’ve traced some ancestral lines back a dozen generations, Why can’t you trace back 510 generations?  Maybe one of your ancestors was the artist who painted those cave paintings.  Why can’t you know her name?

Well obviously, the reason you can’t go back 510 generations is because there is invariably some catastrophic event like a fire burning down a church with all the church records inside, a war where everyone in the town is killed or becomes a refugee, a flood, a famine, a plague, etc., and records are lost.  Languages evolve and records become undecipherable, paper records molder and crumble and are not replaced; and if you go back far enough, there is no system of recordkeeping, or no writing.  People forget.  People emigrate.  Communities forget or disintegrate.  Institutions don’t last.  Libraries, governments, organizations – all fail eventually or so it would seem.

We like to think we have continuity in our institutions.  Many who call themselves Christian like to think they are followers of a man named Jesus who lived about 2,000 years ago in Palestine, but how many of these so-called Christians actually understand and strive to follow his instruction to “love your enemy”?  Just how much continuity is there?

We like to think that the concept of democracy and “liberty for all” instituted a short 200 years ago here in the US will last forever, but now people seem willing to give away chunks of that liberty – the freedom from government spying guaranteed by the fourth amendment to the US Constitution.  They are giving away our liberty in order to obtain some more “protection” and “security,” not realizing that the very foundation of our strength and our identity as a nation lies in the liberty they are giving away.  Will there be continuity or not?

We like to think that the institutions on which our society depends are rock solid, and then we look around and see that half of all marriages end in divorce.  We see that the news media are being taken over by commercial interests that give us entertainment news, not real news, and we have very few independent news outlets left.   We see that all the decisions that really matter in this country are increasingly being made by the corporate puppeteers who hold the strings in government.  Hard to find continuity amid the changes!

When does a civilization start to collapse?  When a devastating hurricane comes along?  When the climate changes and the people have no more rain for food crops?  When someone decides to drain the Treasury for one more war to grab resources?  When the country goes into massive debt to pay war profiteers and much of that debt is held by foreigners, and the taxpayers’ debt and interest payments go abroad?  When the jobs go abroad?  When the people self-destruct on drugs and poison themselves with pollution?  When the people lose control of their government, yet couldn’t care less?

When we look at the kaleidoscope of history there is very little that is lasting.  Nothing is constant except change.

Where am I going with this?  Lately we’ve heard that we need to increase the number of nuclear power plants in order to decrease our carbon footprint on this Planet – meaning we need more nuclear power plants so we can continue our unrestrained consumerism, without worsening global warming.  Of course building more nuclear power plants means more highly radioactive nuclear waste – waste that is incredibly toxic and needs to be kept out of the environment; waste that stays dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years (far longer than the amount of time that has passed since the caves were painted at Lascaux).  Well, good luck with that.   

What about current plans to bury the radioactive nuclear waste deep in Yucca Mountain, Nevada?  Some would like us to accept the risk that it might leak into groundwater, get into drinking water, into the biosphere, and into the food chain.  Accept the risk of earthquakes.  Accept the risk that people might someday unwittingly disturb the waste burial ground, or maybe release the waste intentionally as an act of terrorism or insanity.  There would have to be institutional controls to keep people away.  But how? – fences and armed guards funded by bureaucracies spanning millennia?  How long would those institutional controls last?  200 years?  2,000 years?  Not long enough?  How could anyone reasonably expect we could manage these wastes and keep the burial site intact over thousands of years?

It remains to be seen if we will opt for energy sources and life styles that are compatible with our desire to respect and live in harmony with Mother Earth.  Or will we create more radioactive nuclear waste that will burden and endanger hundreds of generations yet unborn? 

The cave painters of Lascaux were able to sustain themselves without leaving any footprint except one – their paintings – a lingering bit of beauty to remind us and warn us of the fragility of our vaunted institutions. 

What will future generations remember about us?  How long will we (and our wastes) be remembered?

Slide show and music on my main page.

-2007-