News from WaPo:
Finally a Front Page headline that gets one of the Core Confusing Words right!
“In the World’s Rural Outposts, A Shortwave Channel to God.”
This is a story about listening to sermons broadcast over shortwave radio filed from Homoine in southern Mozambique. There are some “rural” outposts in some parts of Africa such as Mozambique and in South America, Central Asia, New Guinea and other isolated places.
When we first traveled in the remote corners of the Caribbean there were rural places there too, but not any more. There are a lot of low density urban places and some nonurban places where human live and work but there are no “rural” places in the US of A and few (yes, Larry some close to the Arctic Circle but nowhere near where tourists go) in North America. For a full discussion of “rural” and other Core Confusing Words see GLOSSARY.
For those who have not read Bjorn Lomborg’s perceptions of Climate Change the front page of Outlook has a nice photo of two Polar Bears and a short item by Lomborg. Interesting perspectives but he, and most others, miss the settlement pattern issue. The only way for humans to protect themselves from future Climate Change – up or down – and other impacts of natural reality is to shrink the ecological footprint of human activity.
That means, over time, fewer people each consuming less. Even more important is that humans need to consume less in all their joint economic, social and physical activities that are carried out at the Household thru the Inter Continental scales – that includes all six of scales in between the Household and the Inter Continental scales. Transport, heating and cooling – and most other forms of resource consumption vary by settlement patterns. More on this in our next column.
By the way, it seems pretty warm today.
Finally for those who think the US of A is doing just fine compared to our primary economic competition, Steven Hill has a nice item “5 Myths About Sick Old Europe” on page 5 of Outlook.
Happy reading and thinking.
EMR