Disasters, Dogs, and Defiance

Three D’s on my mind

Disasters

When you think of a disaster, it’s usually something immediate, happening quickly and leaving us to deal with the fallout. Wildfires, flash floods, and storms are often perceived as events that just happen, without much regard to the many factors that go into turning what used to be a normal event into a horrible disaster. Sinkholes often happen due to natural voids in the ground, but can also be caused by excessive use of groundwater – the sinking groundwater pulls the earth with it, creating voids that erode away underground until the ground gives way. Fukushima occurred due to a mix of a massive tsunami and the failure of the backup power systems. Wildfires can only happen if fuel loads are allowed to build up, rather than occasionally culled, either through controlled burns or through targeted logging to clear away dead wood and smaller trees. These things are easy to identify as disasters because they don’t normally occur.

Some regularly-occurring phenomenon also result in disasters – but only sometimes. Record rainstorms and wind speeds can cause floods and property damage sometimes. It’s difficult to predict the intensity of floods – a loss of the ground’s ability to absorb water into the ground or into aquifers, an increase in concrete and other impermeable materials on the ground that prevents absorption, or simply too much water in too little time can all cause disaster. The same goes for wind speed and building damage – nobody can predict exactly which trees will be uprooted and hurled through which building, breaking windows, smashing walls, and letting the rain and wind in where it shouldn’t be. This frustrating variability leaves us picking up the pieces, wondering what we could have done better and trying it, knowing full well it might mean nothing at all.

And then there are the disasters that may or may not be happening – massive, incomprehensible, worldwide phenomenon happening in slow motion, apocalypses on a generational timetable. Climate change, formerly (currently?) known as global warming and global cooling, is presented as the slow-motion disaster to end all disasters[1] – one caused by the very life we live. Endless emissions of carbon dioxide created by our ravenous demand for energy and concrete to continue our hydrocarbon-burning, concrete-pouring, international shipping, mass-farming way of life are coating the planet in a greenhouse jacket and retaining heat – heat that slowly raises the temperature and puts our planet’s natural cycle out of whack and is slowly changing our climate for the worse and more variable. In the same vein, there is the idea of peak oil - a theoretical point in the future where we will be unable to find more oil and production will decrease. This would increase the price of the remaining oil and force us to use something else to power our vehicles or stop using them entirely – the light weight and high energy of oil are unmatched by current batteries, making the black gold the best fuel for transportation. The results of this would be catastrophic, essentially forcing us to halt or cut back on automobile transport to the extent that electricity isn’t available. Heavy vehicles – construction equipment, mining vehicles and seagoing ships, for example – would be forced to electrify or disappear, despite their relative weight and the weight of the batteries needed to power them making this a difficult endeavor. Airplanes, which require immense amounts of energy, would be grounded forever, the weight of current batteries far beyond the forward movement they could generate with their power, not lasting long enough for the transcontinental, trans-Atlantic, and trans-Pacific flights that thousands of people take every day. These crises are still hotly debated – whether they exist at all, what to do about them, and when are ever in flux, shifting and changing with the times.

Of all the slow-motion disasters, the one most recently in my attention and the one I’d like to talk about is the worldwide demographic crisis, diagnosed by a collapse in the total fertility rate (TFR) – an average of the number of children per woman in a given population, reported as X children per woman of childbearing age. To give a brief overview, as a nation’s population becomes more educated and prosperous (per capita), the TFR declines to the point that it passes below the replacement point of 2 children per woman. Best seen in Japan and South Korea[2], what happens next is an aging population taking pensions paid into by a much smaller younger generation, an economy whose wages don’t grow fast enough to support the existing structure of government services and elderly pensions due to the lack of younger people working and consuming to run the economy. Assets, predominantly held by the large cohort of elderly, become unaffordable due to the slow growth in salaries, making it much harder to hit milestones once considered as normal. Almost as if the prosperity machine of past decades has been flipped into reverse, the ideal of a family with their own home and apartment is suddenly getting farther rather than nearer for most. Longer educations and economic realities push people into getting married later, if at all, further narrowing the demographic chokepoint.

This demographic crisis is a common theme these days, with lakes of ink, seas of saliva, and terabytes of pixels have probably already been spilled in the quest to understand why, and how to fix it. I would like to refer you to a professional demographer on YouTube, KaiserBauch, whose videos do a far better job explaining demography than I can here. I recommend you start with his Demographics 101, then browse his videos from there for countries you want to learn about. The problem of falling TFR’s is essentially worldwide, though – the countries of East Asia, Western Europe and Eastern Europe are simply the leading edge, with everyone else having higher but still declining TFR’s. As the latest and most terrifying of the slow-motion disasters, difficult to even get a grasp of, the demographic crisis adds itself to the endless litany of troubles that we are told we have to face.

Alright, enough of that, time for dogs!

Dogs

One of the dogs in the neighborhood gave birth recently, and I have pictures.

Pictured: The dog when she first came in

When she first arrived at the neighborhood, this dog was absolutely tiny, even for a Jack Russell Terrier. We almost thought she was a rat.

Pictured: Dog having a lounge on someone’s lap

She grew into a surprisingly long dog, legs not growing longer, but being really long snout-to-tail.

Pictured: Future mother hiding in a cupboard

She’s very territorial, quickly colonizing small places and little hideaways like this and barking at every dog that comes by. Doesn’t have a problem with us humans, though.

Pictured: Mother with kids.

Here she is with her six puppies – not sure if you can see them all. Surprisingly, despite being her first birth, all six survived. In our experience, the first births usually don’t go so well.

Funnily enough, it was this that convinced me to write about the demographic crisis above. Much larger batches of children were common in my parents’ generation – homes with five kids, seven kids, even ten kids were not uncommon back then. Three is the new five, it seems, as my generation seems to settle on three or four being the limit (though I have a friend with six siblings). Seeing all six of those puppies survive gave me the idle thought that if this dog were a human, she would solve the whole crisis on her own. I idly wondered what it would be like to have five siblings and quickly decided that it would be a kind of happy anarchy of activity, only to end when you start growing up and getting married off. What is it like to grow up in a large family? One with cousins and in-laws coming to and fro, with someone from abroad or from another town coming every week, everyone coming back for the holidays, and so on.

Contrast with the cold realities of today – kids come solo or in twos and threes, cousins are farther away, busier, and harder to hang out with, and uncles and aunts are distant compared to how things once were. With people coming to take care of, see, and fuss over this dog and her six puppies, it’s clear that this little family produced a warmth that everyone wanted to bask in – a comforting, nostalgic warmth for the old who remember their own large broods, and a surprising new heat for the young, who are used to smaller and still shrinking litters in their own lives. With more choosing (or perhaps defaulting) into going unmarried and childless, especially as economic prospects fade for many, dealing with childbirth becomes rarer and rarer.

Defiance

With that, my thoughts turn to marriage, and weddings, with all the parties and social engagements that implies. I’m coming up on that age, and as older acquaintances start on that part of their lives, I had an idea – weddings are the only celebration where the party comes before the achievement. Think about it:

• Graduations happen after you put in all the work in all your courses.

• Birthday parties happen after you make it through another year.

• Weddings happen before you start your life together.

Simple as. But as I thought about it more and more, I realized that a wedding – a marriage – is not a celebration of the future, but rather, of the choice – the choice to take up the baton in the relay race of life and carry it forward to the future. Having and raising children is a handoff – as our parents age and we grow up, it falls onto us to pick up the baton of being the custodians of the future, in the form of our children. As they did, we hope to one day hand off the baton to our own children, despite the uncertain, disaster-filled world facing us. To, despite everything, head towards the future.

The way things are now, I see getting married and raising kids as almost an act of defiance – a rising against the constant doom and gloom of slow-motion disasters. A sign and a celebration that despite everything, we will carry on.

I’ve never been so happy to be wrong.

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[1] If this collection of failed predictions is to be believed, global warming has apparently slept in quite a bit.

[2] China and Taiwan are not far behind. Maybe it’s an East Asian thing?