Know that I come from a background of work in the study and modeling of Earth systems and natural disasters. We are in a period of shift. We and our children are entering a world known for its climate refugees. Shifts are dramatic, and there is a chance that everyone will have had the opportunity at least once to be a climate or natural disaster refugee.
What happens when the power goes out? What happens when geomagnetic storms intensify – those beautiful auroras that are the Earth healing its own electromagnetic defense system. But they have affected our communications, and that can happen again. As temperatures rise and tax our infrastructure. As we sit in homes hunkered down for more massive coastal storms and tornadoes. As we shovel snow. As we sweat. Our energy infrastructure, like all infrastructure in our country, is aging and failing. What is history if not etched somewhere more permanent than our digital world?
Did newspapers really begin in 59 BCE with the Romans? The first stone etching? Or the first painting on a cave wall? Why are newspapers important to me?
When the power goes out, the truth isn’t found in the darkened messages of social media or YouTube or any website. It is gone. But a physical newspaper can be found even decades after its printing – for instance, in the insulation of a recently demolished historic building.
I am a digital person, a software programmer, but I want my print. I’ve lost lifetimes of digital works in a simple motion, or by getting a virus. I do not want the safety and history of my community dependent on the whims of an iCloud. I want my stack of papers. I want the clippings of events — the Flood of 2013, the Cold Springs fire — to be in my CVEN 3000 Scrapbook of curriculum for modern-day civil engineering students and geologists so that when the power goes out for fear of a wind event, I can still share something of value with my students and community.
When I was poor and homeless, the digital world was a luxury I could not afford. The world I helped to build in computing was not accessible to me on a flip phone; not much was. (Though modern flip phones do try.) If I had another zero-earning COVID month — and I did — like that, my digital self was gone.
So this is a ramble of a woman from geospatial information technology development, in my prime and its bleeding edge. As a geoscientist with the perspective of a 4.6-billion-year timescale, digital has yet to prove it is sustainable and will help our rural mountain communities through natural disasters, while preserving accurate and vital history. I WANT MY PRINT NEWS more than “My MTV.”
