Global Turning

Gentle visitors,

The denizens of the upper half of this dappled orb, which we fondly Gaia, must have noticed that summer has run its course, and our worries have naturally turned from the scourge of global warming (or at least the breathless warnings of the same) to the inconvenience of hemispheric cooling and light deprivation.  The irony is that the latter worry is insoluble, even with a semi-global awakening, while the former worry --colossal and catastrophic as it is -- might be addressed by concerted, global action.

Your humble Contributor, ever mindful of his greenness and sustainability, etc., once offered a global solution in this vein.  What, he asked, with a scholarly air that once involved the prop of a pipe and a wisp of smoke -- what if we carbon-based freeloaders agreed that we would not exhale for one day out of each week for a whole year?  

Our rough calculations, based on the median volume of CO₂ in a human exhalation (excluding heavy sighs, yawns, and other non-verbal cues) times the mean exhalations per subject per day (21,600, excluding experienced oyster divers and hyperventilating young raconteurs) times 6,789,071,460 (the current estimate of Gaia's children, excluding racketeers, scofflaws, hooligans, and other public officials)indicate that such a project could reduce carbon-emissions by as much as 1%, thereby acting as a virtual hand fan on Gaia's rotund and somewhat overheated corpus.

More importantly, however, the project would have the added benefit of culling the human race from the worldwide diversity of fauna -- the very species whose relentless insistence on living and thriving have placed Gaia in her current peril!  This inspiration for a global non-expiration expiration event seemed the thing until peer reviewers noted that the very success of the project would be its undoing:  that is, after the non-expiration expiration event, no-one would remain to record the splendid results save a handful of tenured chimps with the time and grant money to publish them.

No matter that we reminded our critics of Borel's mathematical theorem, which, in its simplest form, might be expressed as follows:

 

No matter, since, as they noted, typewriters have become exceedingly rare and qwerty these days.  Moreover, the quantity of paper required for such a theoretical simian project -- conservatively estimated at 10¹⁰ reams -- would exhaust the world's forests, thus, again, defeating the very purpose.  Likewise, my alternate suggestion of enlisting the earth's leafy flora -- a generally sedentary lot -- to recycle carbon dioxide into oxygen was rejected as scientifically unsound and politically unthinkable.

On reflection, the problem is less with the world burning up or even seasonally turning away from her shining suitor, than with Gaia herself.  Consider that she fell for her own son, Uranus -- not a bright prospect -- then, unsurprisingly, bore him Cyclops and other monstrous offspring, then sent off her horrific brood to emasculate the poor, dear son/husband.  Goodness! May we not rightly question her judgment?

Perhaps the answer would be to cease worshiping her, and go about our business of living, treading across her ample person with some regard for her tremors and her spells, and for our own muddy footprints.