BOUVARD ET PECUCHET

1. During the height of the Great American Buffalo Slaughter, 1872 to 1874, the whites killed 3.2 million bison and the Indians killed 1.2 million.

2. Flaubert never finished writing BOUVARD ET PECUCHET, a novel about the gap between how people think and reality, because he found no end to human stupidity.

3. Today we are changing the climate of the world, which already has begun to bring on catastrophes that will attack western civilization in unpredictable and radical ways. Note that western civilization has unfortunately disintegrated twice in the past (a change in climate helped induce the fall of Egypt, Babylon, the Minoan and the early Greek network more than a thousand years before Christ and, much later, we dimly recall the fall of the Roman empire). 

4. Do we care? We are Bouvard and we are Pecuchet.