A friend once said "White man make big fire, sit far away, Indian make small fire, sit close."
This phrase offers a wise observation from a culture that lived at least 10,000 years here in North America without devastating the ecology. A people who didn't talk about sustainability, but who were all about it.

Some supposedly "advanced" folks liked to talk down about "savages", but it now appears that they were advanced in some important ways. Some would argue that they didn't have the capacity to alter the planet, others observe that they thrived and lived in a sort of harmony with nature.

Our civilization may alter the climate in such a way that we loose a third or half of the species on the planet. If so it would be one of the worst mass extinction event in the future history of the planet. I've wondered what it would look like if we were 10,000 years in the future? With an asteroid, we can find an impact crater perhaps if it caused a geophysical event, but with CO2 driven climate change, it's a more subtle signal if viewed from a distant planet. A sad change, and one that we can yet mitigate.

Hopefully we will learn from the ways of the native Americans, from our farmers, foresters and ecologists, scientists and our best minds. Can we learn to live with our nature as the treasure that it is? Can our society learn to respect, protect, and conserve the wild spaces,? It is the diversity of life and the large habitat areas that are the most precious legacy we could give to future generations.

Sometimes it is so easy to help a species through the narrow point as they face extinction, and yet so difficult to get folks to support these efforts. Extinction is different from individual death of course, and it's so unnecessary to allow entire lines of evolution to stop just because some greedy fool wants a blip of profit, just because the values don't yet account for the environment, and our economic system hasn't figured out how to work effectively in the new ways that are necessary to adapt our society to the realities becoming apparent in global climate change.

With Perigrine Falcons, a small amount of money, some dedicated scientists and caring people, good luck, and they are now populating California again in sustainable numbers. This small triumph shows how we can make a difference, yet it is a fragile triumph as the species will need continued stewardship as the climate shifts and habitat is threatened.

I suspect that as the climate heating raises the ocean levels and unloads the glacier weight, the crust of the earth and the tectonic plates may flex a tiny bit, but make big news in the process. It seems to me that the distribution of weight on the plate boundaries (margins in some cases) may allow some things like large earthquakes and increased volcanic activity.

On the good side, volcanic activity can cool things, unfortunately we may be fooling with a system prone to catastrophic transitions to other parts of the dynamic map. Some "tipping points" appear within the horizon, a wake up call, an opportunity to conserve the heritage that we enjoy for future generations.