“Now we are all sons of bitches.”

Dinah and I went to Los Alamos, and it really gives you pause so I’m afraid it has made me serious for a moment.

“Now we are all sons of bitches” is what test director Kenneth Bainbridge said, on July 16, 1945, when Trinity exploded with the force of 25 kilotons in the New Mexico desert. He meant that everyone involved in creating the Bomb, had to take accountability for whatever might happen now that the genie was let loose.

Pueblo people’s ‘Alcove’ room 140 feet up the cliffs of Frijole Canyon

After Los Alamos, Dinah and I headed to Bandelier National Monument where the ruins of ancestral Pueblo people are all that remains of a community that lived there for 500 years. They didn’t need a Bomb to disappear. Overuse of land and climate changes drove them away.

Civilizations come and go. The modern world has, so far, survived the nuclear era with Hiroshima and Nagasaki being the only horrific examples of atomic weapon usage. But globally, climate change and overuse of land are upon us and the difference from the Pueblo people is that like the atomic weapon, what is happening is manmade and with enough self awareness that we should know better.

The Blue Marble. Taken Dec 7, 1972 by astronaut Harrison Schmitt.

We, every one of us (not just the scientists), have a role in climate change and overuse of the planet. I can only hope that “Now we are all sons of bitches” does not apply to all eight billion of us and we get our act together. After all, the Pueblo people from Frijoles canyon simply moved 30 miles to a different location. There is no option to planet Earth.