Greetings, old friends and new
Twitter, to and from
As a lifelong essayist, many long years ago I joined Twitter in the hope that I could connect with readers and send them to my blog.
I had, in those long ago days, a self funded website/blog called No Package Deals, because I have long found “thought packages” to be unsatisfactory. Right wing or left, center, “environmentalist” or “liberal,” it seemed to me that to say one believed this thing was always taken to imply that one must also believe that other thing. I was never comfortable with the packaging.
Over some years of writing I slowly accumulated nearly 100 essays on a variety of topics. By the time I was up to maybe 25 essays, I was also “up to” four regular readers. So I took to Twitter, as I said, hoping to find new readers.
The best laid plans, the poet said, gang aft agley. Soon I was writing fewer and fewer conventional essays, and had developed a personal style of Twitter essay, my Twitter threads. It has taken many years, but Twitter claims that I have 18.1 K “followers.” Based on interactions I am confident that I have at least a few hundred regular readers, readers who find my thread essays enjoyable. A writer needs, above all, readers and allow me to, again, thank all of you.
I had long been concerned about the continuing degradation of what we used to call “the environment,” a term often used to refer to the world around us, the real world of which we are but evolved components. Those who felt as I did called ourselves environmentalists. As time passed I found myself more focused on the endless process of accelerating ecosystem degradation / atmospheric alteration / biosphere diminishment now mostly referred to as “climate change.” Today I find neither term, environment nor climate change, satisfactory, although for convenience I still use either of them from time to time.
How we (developed societies) got here
Beginning in the late 1700s, and continuing through the present at ever faster rates, men (mostly) discovered means to apply heat and get motion, faster motion with more power than we had ever known before. The first heat engines used fire and water, steam to carry the heat, with the resultant rotary motion first used to lift water out of the perpetually flooding coal mines of Britain. Even the first, crudest, open fire powered, steam driven, water pumping systems were said to do the work of five hundred horses, to replace two hundred and fifty teamsters.
I don’t know who counted.
Fire based machines and systems released, then (partly) captured and used, solar energy stored in fossil hydrocarbons, oxidizing and liberating the carbon from untold billions of long dead life forms. Atmospheric CO2 levels and the levels of other greenhouse gases rose, first slowly, then precipitously as the technology found ever wider acceptance and application. Humans discovered ever more ways to apply ever more fossil energy to materials, to produce ever more things from ever more materials, ever faster, to ship them ever farther, also faster. We created an entire new industry just to whip up desire for the products we made ever more of.
Within two hundred years of the first ever practical working steam engine, and barely over a century past its escape from mines and pumps to serve as motive power for manufacturing and transportion, NOAA’s Jim Hansen and then others caught the public’s attention speaking of a process they called “global warming,” a process of energy capture which showed itself as increasing temperatures in Earth’s atmosphere and waters. I and many other long time environmentalists turned our attention to this (seemingly) new threat, to the processes which were adding carbon, and therefore thermal energy, to (at first) the atmosphere, then soon to oceans and land, to inanimate objects and living creatures. Energy is slippery stuff and gets into everything.
As it turned out, none of the processes warming the globe were newly discovered. We had known nearly since the start. We feigned surprise, but it had required an effort to remain ignorant. Eunice Newton Foote demonstrated, as published in 1856, that CO2 captured heat energy from sunlight, with the corollary that increasing the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere would increase global temperatures. Newton Foote’s work was based on direct observations and measurements. Some 40 years later Svante Arrhenius would prove the same results, approaching his work from the principles of physical chemistry. Arrhenius would later win a Nobel Prize in chemistry, although not for this particular work.
To make a long story short, for the past 170 years, in spite of knowing what the outcome would be and why, we - Homo Industrialensis, Modern Man (to give women a break for the moment) - happily went right on burning and building, bulldozing and paving, rushing and flying, massively altering the atmosphere, cutting down the biosphere, hauling it away, and paving its corpse.
And lying about it.
We still are.
Both.
Moving right along…
This year, when I finally closed my long moribund website, I had eighty-some essays still stored. They are gone, gone to where the picture goes when you turn the TV off. Some techspert might be able to find them in the Wayback Machine or something, but I don’t know. In the time it took me to produce those eighty-some blog essays, I had also accumulated over 175,000 tweets and about 18,000 Twitter readers, called “followers” by Twitter.
Life was good.
Everyone knows what happened to Twitter. The world’s richest spoiled brat bought it and broke it, filling it with poison, scattering established communities to the four winds, seeding them with liars, haters, dispute and distaste. That said, after my last four years of saying, over and over, the same things, always presented in streams of unedited tweets-as-paragraphs, complete with typos, brain farts, and technologically introduced errors known as autocorrections, I was slowly realizing that I had driven that Twitter cow as far as I could anyway.
So now what?
My plan is to begin again, here on Substack. As I have done on Twitter, I will produce essays as I am able, not to bemoan the situation we have created of the rich Earth we inherited, but to discuss realistic, albeit unlikely, solutions we could take to slow, halt, and reverse our current ceaseless ecosystem degradation.
What has been for the past decade my Twitter threads, my frequent essays regarding our place in the ecosystem and what we might do to improve our odds of continuing on without falling off any sudden cliffs, will now e written as Substack essays. My old short tweets, offhand wisecracks and some short tales of days with donkeys, will be Substack Notes. I tested this evening and Substack Notes does support threading as I have historically done.
Tales of days with donkeys might turn up either place, as a Note or as the day’s essay.
It is my understanding that Substack supports replies, with blocking features. I hope my many Twitter friends who have conversed with me there will get into the habit of conversing with me here.
It is my hope and intention to fully evolve away from Twitter. I do not want to support Elon Musk with my work. I disapprove of Elon Musk specifically, and more generally of the value system and economy which gives him power.
Structure and cost
Substack is designed to allow the writer to price subscriptions to her or his own best advantage.
Subscriptions are free. Subscription is free. My best advantage is intelligent readers, as many as possible. As a 100% disabled combat veteran I receive enough money to live my life comfortably, and I get free government medical care which I find entirely satisfactory. Subscriptions are not only free, I personally appreciate each and every one.
Subscriptions to my page are free. I do ask that you Subscribe and I ask that you
and tell your friends. I ask that, if you agree with and support my ideas, you tell others. I ask that you Restack my Notes. I ask that you tell my Twitter readers where I went. I need that for this to work, and it’s important to me.
Where to from here?
Forward. This is tonight’s “thread.” Please tell your friends.
Yeah, I found you!! Much better for you.
This format suits you Jeff. It seems....slower.