Thinking About Polar Cities — Or Trying To

An interesting journalist named Dan Bloom, now based in Taiwan, has been agitating for consideration of one of James Lovelock’s more alarming ideas — polar cities. (Here’s his site on the subject.)

I don’t have answers for Mr. Bloom’s difficult questions, but while I’m thinking on the subject, I want to quote on this Sunday from his citation of the late great Kurt Vonnegut, and his poem Requiem:

..When the last living thing has died on account of us,

how poetical it would be

if Earth could say,

in a voice floating upwards

from the floor of the Grand Canyon,

"It is done."

People did not like it here.

But some of us do like it here, readers will protest. And no doubt Kurt would say; yes, but — not enough to save the place. And he has a point. What  we say is of little interest to the natural world…