Considering paradoxes

There is a new debate about having children, questioning the motives of those who choose not to have children and judging them as selfish. However, when we consider the scale of the human population explosion against the dwindling lives of other species and the impacts on weather and climate for all living beings, I have to question the logic of those judgements.

It is a paradox, however, that humans experience their own personal drive to have a child as somehow exempt from the planetary consequences of billions of humans with similar drives.

Recently, my attention has been focused on another paradox, that many who staunchly oppose fracking, are cheerleaders for natural gas. It is a similar disconnect between wishful thinking and logical consequences.

In the sketch below from my journals, I have contemplated the paradox of how North America plans to deliver energy to a burgeoning and demanding population, while, incidentally crisscrossing the continent with fracking wells, pipelines that could explode, right thru the third largest watershed in the world. Earth Day, Tuesday afternoon, April 22nd, in discussion with Jim White and Gene Turner, we will discuss those disconnects in a Gulf to Gulf webcast.

The yellow horizontal she across the United States indicates the swath of fracking and natural gas destroying watersheds and habitats in its wake.