The World Wildlife Fund (with its partners the Zoological Society of London, the Global Footprint Network, and the European Space Agency) released its Living Planet Report yesterday, a reminder of the state of our home.

“We are living as if we have an extra planet at our disposal. We are using 50 per cent more resources than the Earth can provide, and unless we change course that number will grow very fast – by 2030, even two planets will not be enough.” [four planets if we all lived like residents of the USA]

“…the Living Planet Index continues to show around a 30 per cent global decline in biodiversity health since 1970”

“These analyses indicate that continuing with “business as usual” will have serious, and potentially catastrophic, consequences. In particular, continued increases in greenhouse gas emissions will irreversibly commit the world to a global average temperature rise of well over 2oC, which will severely disrupt the functioning of almost all global ecosystems and dramatically affect human development and well-being.”

Surely one response to these somber words must be sorrow at the wreckage we’ve left behind in our seemingly heedless passage through life.

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought/I summon up remembrance of things past,/…Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,/For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night…/…And moan the expense of many a vanish’d sight…

Such a response is not an exercise in pointless self-flagellation. By taking in this knowledge – by not banishing it with distractions, medicating it with irony, or washing it away with psychological salves — we open ourselves to feel the consequence of our actions, to step up and offer a genuine mea maxima culpa, and to spur ourselves to reform (all the while knowing that the “offender’s sorrow lends but weak relief”).

One of the biggest challenges in moving toward a “sustainable” economy is the utter disconnection between our actions and knowledge of their consequences. Our materials and waste generally come from and go elsewhere, making us almost totally unable to comprehend what we’re doing. But the disconnect is also one of the emotions – we’re taught that sadness is a pathology that needs to be quickly erased (conveniently, the economy is happy to sell us aides in this quest), ignoring the possibility that melancholy might be a good and necessary thing sometimes. The WWF report, then, might be a way in which the world’s frayed connections can be brought to consciousness and as a consequence, felt.

Fair enough. But tears are not the only thing that the world calls from our eyes. How about a smiling twinkle? The world outside is not unremittingly dire (and the Sonnet walks us, maybe a little too smartly but hey he only had fourteen lines, from one part of memory to another, a sweeter place). Life’s great and fundamental characteristic is is irrepressibility, a quality that is probably the only reason we’re here after the “long strange trip” of the last four billion years. A very small offering of this Seussian gleam-in-the-eye:

This young downy woodpecker (lower bird on the pole) has been pursuing its parents around the neighborhood for the last day or so, as if attached by a springy leash. The youngster can fly, but only in a comedic blur of wings. The bird squalls continually for food which the tireless parents pick up from the bird feeder, then transfer a few feet to the young woodpecker’s mouth. These birds pursue their roles with vigor and seriousness of purpose, focused, as they should be, on the matter at hand: the goodness of a fat sunflower seed.

A virus has delivered a special end-of-semester gift in the form of a cold and mild fever. I know this is a common experience among teachers: our immune systems carry us through to the moment that grades are due, then dump us over the cliff, their patience finally worn to nothing.

But the point here is not to whine about minor ailments or the rhythm of the semester, but to ask why fevers mess with our minds. High fevers bring on full blown hallucinations; milder versions create a restless cacophony of strange images and thoughts, seeming to rise up through the acidic vapors of the sinuses.

The neurobiological literature is, as far as I can tell, not clear about the causes of all this confusion. For major hallucinations, it seems that an imbalance between inhibition and excitation in the brain creates sensory illusions. In other words, some parts of the brain are shooting out way too many signals which, when combined with dulling of the parts of the brain that say “stop,” creates the neural mirages we call hallucinations.

For the milder confusion of a low fever, I suspect that mistiming plays a part. All our thoughts exist as relationships among nerves. These relationships depend critically on the timing of which nerves fire when. Even a simple thought, like an imagined object, is held in a network of neural firing patterns that shifts five times per second. So, thought is like music — it depends on relationships among dozens of players and the timing of those relationships determines the nature of the melody. When we heat up the brain with a fever, chemical reactions quicken slightly, throwing off the tempo.

Taking an aspirin is therefore like switching on the metronome. Click, click, click. Back to coherence.

I’m in Denver for a conference, which means lots of time in chilled conference rooms, viewing the world through powerpoint slides. Great stuff, up to a point. Butt and brain give out after a while, so off comes the neck tag (a little frisson of excitement at liberation from group identity) and out the door I go…

I quickly found the Denver Bikes, a bike-sharing program that has bikes for check-out in racks across the central part of the city. Check-out privileges come in daily ($8), weekly ($20), monthly ($30), and yearly ($59) increments. Once you’ve registered at a kiosk (takes about a minute), you can check a bike out from any stand, then return it to any stand. The system is designed for short trips, so check-outs over 30 mins incur extra costs ($1 for an extra half hour, then $4 after that). The bikes themselves are tanks, seemingly indestructible, but surprisingly easy to ride.

Many streets in the city center have bike lanes and they seemed, in my few miles of pedaling, pretty well respected by cars and trucks.

Even better, the city has several bike paths along waterways, so it is possible to go through the center of town and into outlying areas along bike-only paths that wind along running water. Hard to beat. (But stay out of the water — looks great, but bacterial counts are high.)

The best part: avoiding the Denver Boot, an enforcement device invented here in the 1940s by, of all people, a violinist. The boot shown below was put on a car right outside the window of the conference lunchroom. It was very kind of the local police to enliven our dining experience with a historical reenactment of traditional western vehicle wrangling:

[and this news added after I made the original post: bike-share is coming to Chattanooga…]

I’ll be on the NPR show To The Best of Our Knowledge this weekend (April 28/29). The program is “Into the Woods,” and I’ll be talking about The Forest Unseen. Also scheduled for the show are Terry Tempest Williams, Stephen Sondheim, Marina Warner, and Stephen Long. I’m very grateful to be included in this line-up, to say the least.

Stations that carry the program and broadcast times are here. WPLN (Nashville) runs the show at 3pm on Sunday on its 1430 AM channel. WUTC (Chattanooga) runs at 12:00 (eastern time, 11am central) on Sunday on 88.1 FM. The show will also be available through podcasts, XM satellite, etc as detailed here.

Unlike previous interviews which have been live and over the phone, this interview was recorded last week in the WPLN studios in Nashville. The experience of sitting in a quiet studio, talking to people several states away, using a great mic and headphones was an unexpected treat for my senses. The studio was so quiet and the equipment so good that the world was stripped down to a nearly pure experience of sound. Just voices, hanging in a silvery space. It was almost enough to calm my nerves.

At the CCJP Earth Week fair this weekend, Chris Lancaster had a great display of solar panels from the last decade. These panels are the best kind of nuclear power — harvesting energy from the nuclear fusion plant located at the center of the solar system. The risks associated with this nuclear power plant are outlined with admirable brevity here.

Chris’ display was a practical reminder that solar cell costs continue to decline, a trend that was discussed in this interesting blog post at Scientific American.

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I threw in a slide of the oldest and the best panels of all.

Photo from a trip to DC last autumn.