I love how you wove in your grandmother's story with Jared Diamond's Collapse. It is how life happens-- bacteria struggling on a petri dish, or one family's way of life beaten by dust, to the life of a state, country, planet. The ability to ignore a problem until it is too late seems like it's built into the organism. There are probably always a few bacteria who do see the disaster looming, but just have no where to jump off the petri dish.
Several thoughts came to me as I read. One was that it has occured to me that if, sometime in the faraway future, archaeologists were to dig up parts of our own civilization perhaps the most impressive (in terms of vast scale) thing about us would be the extensive network or roads we've created.
Your comments about the world in the petrie dish reminded me of petrie dishes my microbiologist father would bring home when I was a child. Once, my older sister did some sort of science experiment for school with a set of those dishes. She had taken swabs from her own mouth, maybe from ours too, and smeared them on the agar, then put them in the darkness under her bed. Interesting and foul-smelling colonies grew. I seem to remember my father telling us not to open them and that I had some belief that perhaps the colonies had mutated into potentially deadly organisms and the only way to keep the threat at bay was not to open them. Your comparing those colonies to our own planet as a kind of closed system, that's an idea that resonates. It's always depressing to me, seeing the apparent denial in the majority. It seems so obvious, to me, that we are, all of us, so entirely dependent on this planet and that if we don't care for it well, then we are apt to do ourselves and lots of other species in. But unfortunately I think (or fear) people mostly don't respond on a large enough scale to make any difference until there may be so much damage done that there's no way to repair the damage.
I am now imagining bacteria activists carrying around tiny picket signs demanding sustainable metabolism.
Sorry.
I guess am the one who started this.
Thanks for your comments, RD and Nina.
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