Basic conditions facing homo sapiens

Written from a general scientific perspective.

Welcome to Grundvilk. Reportedly, this is both Swedish and Danish for “basic conditions”. This word — spelling and all — unexpectedly popped into my head one day while I was at home alone in my dingy Seattle basement apartment during my college sophomore year. It, the apparent word, stuck in my mind without any translation whatsoever for more than 40 years. Then, late last year, it occurred to me to let Google Translate search to see if the thing actually meant anything at all —anywhere at all.

The writing here uses the general scientific perspective I’ve accumulated from my education and working life in geology-geochemistry-geophysics, from taking an extra graduate degree in economics, and from my chronic ‘recreational reading’, to describe or review the basic conditions (grundvilk) of human life, and then, from time to time, comment on current political, economic, cultural, and social topics and problems from this perspective.  In contrast to probably most of the writing found on these sort of things hosted here on Substack and elsewhere, the emphasis in Grundvilk is on the matters of understanding and maintaining the communal forest, and not on just giving voice to the various creaks and moans of wind-blown individual trees within that forest.

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