Thursday, December 6, 2007

I coined a new word today during an afernoon nap, woke up and there it was.

DRIPNAMI.......is means a slow moving drip drip glacially-slow tsunami of environmental damage that ever so slowy damages the Earth and thebiosphere .... comes from the "slow drip" terminolgoy of andrew revkin's blog.......

TSUNAMI means literally HARBOR WAVE in Japanese. these were waves that entered harbors before the big wave hit and told villagers to move up to higher ground, so we call them Tsunami today.....but it really means small harbor wave warning of the big one to come

DRIPNAMI is a DRIP wave.......drip drip drip, but finally it will take its toll...

4 comments:

DANIELBLOOM said...

in Japanese it would be

"drippu-nami"

DANIELBLOOM said...

GWEN IFILL: Well, let's do our part, Andy. If you had to look back on this year and the discoveries that were paid less attention to, would you say that we've raised more questions than we've answered?

ANDY REVKIN: My sense is we tend to pay attention to things that seem dramatic and powerful, and some of the big developments this year have been related to the slow drips, the issues that don't get a lot of media attention.

Climate change is kind of the ultimate slow drip in some ways, but there was another very powerful thing that happened that really slipped past everyone, which is the extinction of the first whale species.

You know, this creature living for 20 million years in the Yangtze River, this Baiji dolphin vanished. They couldn't find it in weeks and weeks of searching.

And that's the kind of thing -- extinction of species, for hundreds of years, has mostly been kind of out of sight and kind of invisible. And now it's happening to very large creatures that are a very big part of our world. And that's something that I think is -- the message is the slow drips matter, at least to me.

DANIELBLOOM said...

1.October 24th,
2007
4:17 pm Beautiful slideshow - those are some intense images, and I’m excited to read more of this blog.

I’m also curious to know where you got the phrase “slow drips.” I recently learned of the phrase “slow changing stocks” - things like infrastructure and population growth which start out small, maybe a new power plant here or an oversized family there - but determine how we use resources far into the future. When I heard you use the phrase “slow drips” I made the connection in my mind - these large, growing issues are springing from large, growing sources, and both have accelerated together, kind of overwhelming us all. It’s hard to know where to start, treating the source or plugging the drip.

-Lindsay

— Posted by Lindsay

DANIELBLOOM said...

I’ve decided to focus Dot Earth on the broad-brush theme of sustainability for a few reasons. One is that “slow drip” issues are hard to capture and convey through traditional media tools, which are mostly (and appropriately) focused on dramatic events happening now, not eventually momentous trends that hide in plain sight.

ACR