Sunday, July 31, 2011

quatorze: The Twenty-Ninth Day

Holga
Fuji Provia
Great Salt Lake, Utah
Summer 2010

"We are handicapped by the difficulty of grasping the dynamics of exponential growth in a finite environment - namely, the earth. For me, thinking about this is aided by a riddle the French use to teach schoolchildren exponential growth. A lily pond has one leaf in it the first day, two leaves the second, four the third, and the number of leaves continues to double each day. If the pond fills on the thirtieth day, when is it half full? The twenty-ninth day." 

-Lester Brown, World on the Edge

Brown suggests wartime speed. But all I can see sometimes is wartime fear.

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