#11 Suspender Cables Will Distribute Our Bridge's Load, Real Communication, Across the Broad Span

A bridge's components work together to carry the loads. One of the most important components in the interconnected system's ability to distribute the loads are the suspender cables that tie the 3 spanning elements [main cable, girder matrix and deck] together into a flexible, interactive whole. The first suspension bridges were built in Tibet and Bhutan in the 15th century by the Tibetan saint and bridge-builder Thangtong Gyalpo. Gyalpo used of iron chains in his version of early suspension bridges. In 1433, Gyalpo built eight bridges in eastern Bhutan. The longest surviving was the Thangtong Gyalpo Bridge in Duksum en route to Trashi Yangtse, which was finally washed away in 2004.

The job of our communication bridge's many suspender cables will likewise be to distribute the loads created by our consumer culture and its impossible demands for endless growth on an Earth with limited resources.

Global warming and climate change are just a symptom of the much broader disease that our environment, our limited biosphere, faces. The environmental movement, IMO, lost its way when it allowed CO2 pollution driven global warming to become public enemy #1. Well meaning as most enviros are they nonetheless fell into the trap of mistaking a symptom for the disease. Confusing the issues of symptoms and disease has allowed the entire environmental about into a dead end that confuses symptoms with causes.This confusion has allowed the entire environmental debate, which should be about the broader causes of the disease, to be hijacked by one narrow controversial issue - the role of human CO2 production in today's observed climate change.

Many issues, like the crisis over our food supply created by annihilation of world's pollinators, which is now proven to be caused by the use of pesticides and insecticides in industrial agriculture is certainly more immediate and just as potentially catastrophic in the long term as global warming. Searching an of the issues on list below from 'Green Living' or others, shows that though fossil fuels and global warming are part of the disease created by the demands of the consumer culture but that they aren't alone or even the most immediately catastrophic

1. Contamination of Drinking Water
2. Water Pollution
3. Soil Contamination
4. Wildlife Conservation
5. Air pollution
6. Biological pollutants
7. Carbon footprint
8. Climate change and global warming
9. Consumerism
10. Dams.
11. Ecosystem destruction
12. Energy conservation
13. Fishing and over-fishing.
14. Food safety
15. Genetic engineering including GMO foods.
16. Industrial farming
17. Land degradation, desertification and soil and land pollution.
18. Urban sprawl and habitat destruction
19. Logging and deforestation
20. Mining pollution including toxic emissions and heavy metals.
21. Nanotechnology
22. human induced 'natural' disasters
23. Nuclear issues
24. Other pollution issues like light light pollution and noise pollution
25. Overpopulation
26. Ozone depletion
27. Resource depletion
28. Non-Sustainable communities
29. Human introduced toxins - a long list
30. Waste such as litter, landfills, incineration, marine debris...

Suspender cables distribute a bridge's load. Real communication, our bridge's load, between the encampments must distribute the debate about the broad disease, about its causes, about the role we all play in it as consumers who's demands the capitalist matrix supplies. As Jorge Majfud says, "Trying to reduce environmental pollution without reducing consumerism is like combating drug trafficking without reducing the drug addiction." It's important to notice that Majfud, a genius IMO, refers to the broad issue of "environmental pollution" not just to global warming.

Tomorrow the bridge deck will be assembled and our bridge over the river of distrust between the two solitudes will be complete.