This is a journal entry I hoped I would never have to write. For most of my career, I have been fighting to prevent this, to slow it down or at least to plan for it.
What is happening is that methane hydrates are melting in the Arctic Ocean and along the US Atlantic seaboard. The methane they are releasing is adding to that already pouring out of tundra in Siberia, Alaska and Canada.
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As Anne has written in her diary, our friend of 30 years, Margot Adler, has died. She was one of the most alive, delightful and delighted human beings I have ever met. Margot could be serious and go deep, but she could also explode with joy and dancing and wonderful wildness. She was the author of a major work on paganism, Drawing Down the Moon, and also a reporter for NPR for many years. For a time before National Public Radio existed, she was on WBAI radio with a late-late show called Hour of the Wolf. I was on it with her a number of times. I suppose because I’m too much of a pariah for NPR, her occasional efforts to use me on air for the most part failed.
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If Vladimir Putin had personally ordered the shoot-down of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 last week, events could not have played into his hands more perfectly. In fact, the result has been so valuable to Putin, that it seems possible that he did take a calculated risk here and order the missile to be fired at the plane.
It wasn’t just any plane that was shot down. It was the only plane to cross the combat zone that day that was packed with Dutch nationals. On the surface, it would seem that the last thing Putin would want to do would be to create such friction between him and his biggest western trading partner.
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In 1975, a paper by physicist Michael Hart inspired Enrico Fermi to ask the question: where is everybody? He asked it because of the silence of the universe around us–no radio signals, nobody coming in for a landing, indeed, nobody approaching us in anything like a conventionally understandable manner.
Now, whether you believe that extraterrestrials are here or not, a good argument can be made that, even if many of them present such an unconventional picture that we literally cannot recognize them as what they are, some, at least, should be in some sort of more conventional contact with us.
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