Big History & Moving to the Water

I came across something called Big History.

It's a field of study, as founding Prof David Christian explains in this TED Talk, that aims to understand history in its totality. Not just starting with civilization, or the evolution of Homo sapiens, or even the beginning of life. It includes everything in the story of the universe, from the Big Bang to today, the Big History.

To better explain our world and how complexity has arisen from an entropic, empty blackness, these historians study subjects normally separated in academia; physics, chemistry, biology, anthropology, philosophy, archaeology, paleontology, all of it. They’re trying to re-conceptualize history as not just a slightly-aloof pursuit of primary documents and chains of events, but as a grand, macro-level telling of everything that has ever happened.

It’s ambitious, clearly. And it goes against what we think of with academics; that research needs to specialize to truly grasp a piece of the complex universe, that dedicated submersion within a well-defined topic is how individuals can add to the shared body of human knowledge.

I don’t know if Big History will ever become mainstream, or if it should. From what I’ve seen, it seems to gloss over details (as something this grand in scale must inevitably do) and also approaches human history deterministically, which brings up its own ethical/philosophical dilemma. 

 

But with the help of Bill Gates, the Big History Project was made as a high-school level course free online. I like the potential Big History has to stimulate general intellectual activity in teenagers--it seems like it could show students how fascinatingly connected everything is, sparking exponential growth and linkage of their interests.

 

I came across this concept through one of the Great Courses called The Big History of Civilizations (free through your public library!). A disciple of Prof Christian, Prof Craig Benjamin, uses the interdisciplinary framework of Big History to examine human civilization.

Something he touched on is how water availability drove the establishment of ancient settlements in the Middle East. Jericho, which is the longest continually-inhabited city in the world, has had groundwater gushing from the Ein as-Sultan/Elisha spring for the more than 10,000 years that humans have lived there. That's amazing and totally logical. 

Life and water are intertwined by fate, so it isn't surprising that most human development sprung up right around ample freshwater. 

But compare that ancient, basic, most-obvious line of thinking with a modern dilemma. 

 

The Colorado River, flowing across the arid Southwestern U.S., is the water source for around 40 million people and millions of acres of agriculture in 7 states and 2 countries. The green lawns of Beverley Hills, the spewing fixtures of the Vegas Bellagio, Lake Mead and Lake Powell and 15% of all the crops grown in the United States (as of 2012) all come from the Colorado.

But there isn't enough water in the river for all this. And everyone knows it. 

Demand has outpaced replenishment rates for 20 years now, during which most of the basin was in a historic drought, yet the thirst gulps insatiably. Nevada, Colorado, Utah, and Arizona have been among the fastest growing states population-wise for the last 3 decades. Miles of aqueducts and dams divert the flow to such an extent that the river rarely even reaches the ocean anymore, only through concerted effort. 

On top of all that demand, supply is waning as the Rocky Mountain snowpack that feeds the river is shrinking under a warmer climate. Flow in the river has already declined notably and is predicted to drop off even more dramatically. The reservoirs are shriveling up before our very eyes.

When I told my friend about the impending water shortage out West, how insane it is that more and more people continue to move to a region with a contracting water source, he simply replied 

"Yeah, no one thinks about water when they move."

 

What a wild time we live in.

Side Note on Myself

I've been stagnant for the last week or two. The culprit for my idle frustration, I believe, is a multifaceted one. Getting into my personal details isn't the point, though. It's the upwelling of the frustration I want to focus on.

 

I'm finding compartmentalization difficult nowadays. It's like everything in my life swirls into one irreversible concoction. I can't pinpoint specific origins anymore, or limit aspects of my life to their own little boxes. 

 

Part of this has got to be work from home. I have no physical separation between personal and professional, so even if I work 8 hours, I tend to feel in the same mode as I did before and do after. 

The spillover is also exacerbated by the loosening of my schedule. I don't have a stated block of time for a specific class or a specific class for a semester block. Things in general are much more fluid and self-motivated, like I mentioned in my previous post. 

I do like the freedom I get in this more integrated lifestyle. I can better transfer positive energy from one thing to another, compounding the impact and efficiency. When it's negative energy, though, the same properties of transfer and compounding apply. A canyon can form.

That's what I think happened with me over the last few weeks. I got bored and lethargic in one manner, then the feeling escaped confines and infected everything. 

Oh well. I guess it's through these instances that you learn to pull yourself up off the ground and back on the horse. The flip side of the downward slide is that finding an inspiring motivation in one part of life can be the stimulus that rights the course for the rest of it too. 

There's a double-edged blade out here. Got to use it the right way or that cut will sting.