About
The Purpose of A Drop of Rain
Rather than just read the news stories every day, it seems like it might be useful to expand on the context that surrounds the stories that are starting to flood the internet and print media. There’s a lot of background information behind pretty much every major story that’s unfolding day by day, and it’s not always easy to keep up.
Not everyone has time to dig their way out of the morass created by a virtually non-stop stream of corporate produced spin and misinformation, and far too many people are falling for blatant internet myths and cynically generated ‘research’ whose primary aim is to derail attempts by humanity to stop the process facing us before it’s too late.
This corporate backed misinformation material is produced for one and only one reason: the companies that promote it realize that it will cost them profits to adapt to new situations like climate change etc, so they cynically decide that if they can keep you confused and unsure, they can get away with their lunacy for a few more years.
This blog will try, as much as possible, to avoid corporate generated doubt and misinformation. Will it succeed? We’ll do our best, and will look for what seem to be the best sources available as often as practical.
Where does the name A Drop of Rain come from? It did not come from this Saudi Aramco source. But the idea might not be that different:
For, as the Arab proverb says,
“The beginning of rain is but a single drop.”
Finding Our Way Out of the Pit
You may note that the image of the peak in the site banner is a double peak, and thus forms an almost exact profile of real-world commodity extraction levels (aka: peak production). Please note that we do not produce raw materials, we extract them. The initial maximum extraction rates are achieved, followed by decline due to economic chaos etc caused by lack of cheap resources to exploit in production of commodities, then a new maximum is reached as all efforts are put towards extracting more of the commodity, then the final, and irreversible decline in raw material extraction rates occurs as the actual geological limits of the earth are reached. This last step is non-negotiable, but causes the greatest attempts to negotiate, oddly enough.
Despite the unfortunate use of the term peak I somewhat uncritically fell into while reading various web sites and authors whose primary premise is that of peak x or y (ie, peak oil production, peak population, etc), I finally have come to view this perspective as a trap which almost guarantees the person who falls victim to it will be unable to see outside this box, and, even more critical, will be unable to find a way out of the hole we are digging ourselves into daily. For you must be clear, what we require is first to stop digging ourselves in deeper, then to begin to exit the pit.
It’s about time for people to start understanding that we are not separate from nature or each other, no matter how much we want to delude ourselves into believing such nonsense. If you’re not willing to do what it takes to change things, in your daily life, don’t bother asking anyone else to do it either.
About the Site
The header image is a nice shot from deep inside the California Big Sur Ventana wilderness, from Ventana Double Cone, about 5000 ft.
A Drop of Rain is built with, and runs on, Free Software. The site is developed in Debian / Linux, and is served by Apache / FreeBSD.
Free software is software that gives you the user the freedom to share, study and modify it. We call this free software because the user is free.
To use free software is to make a political and ethical choice asserting the right to learn, and share what we learn with others. Free software has become the foundation of a learning society where we share our knowledge in a way that others can build upon and enjoy.
In other words, in a small way, Free Software is about sharing and helping others. And as such, it forms a model, no matter how weak or flawed (which is certainly the case), of a more positive way of human interaction.