NATURAL PERSPECTIVES:

Vic and I were blessed with a new baby granddaughter the morning of Dec. 31. Megan Nicole Murray, daughter of our son Scott and his wife, Nicole, weighed in at 8 pounds, 2 ounces. She has coal-black hair and a set of lungs that could earn her a job as an emergency alert siren some day. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a louder baby. And cute? Wow, is she ever. Not that we’re prejudiced or anything.

While Nicole is recuperating in the hospital and Scott is taking care of Megan, I’ve been taking care of our twin granddaughters, Allison and Lauren. They turned 2 Dec. 28. I’m sure you’re picturing me with my feet up on the coffee table, eating Bon Bons and catching up on the daytime soap operas. Yeah, sure.

A better image would be of me teaching the girls science and giving them beauty tips. You’re never too young to learn. Right now, they’re examining the relative virtues of ketchup versus ranch dressing as hair conditioners.

Scott took the twins to the hospital to visit their mom last week. “They have food in their hair!” Nicole exclaimed. Oh, I’m supposed to wash that stuff out? Who knew?

One of the new-to-me issues in modern baby upbringing is teaching sign language to babies before they can talk. Pediatricians say that as soon as a baby is old enough to wave bye-bye, he or she is old enough to learn to sign. It helps them communicate and learn spoken language faster, and prevents frustration.

At 2, the twins are just starting to talk. They can say 10 words. But they know signs for 30 additional words. They can sign for animals as diverse as spider, dolphin and elephant. Being Vic’s granddaughters, they also know many birds. They recognize owls, penguins, flamingos, ducks and a number of other bird families. We’ll work on individual species later.

Grandpa Vic joined me in taking care of the twins last week. Allison had to go to the doctor for a checkup, so Vic took Lauren for a ride through their neighborhood in the new red wagon the twins got for Christmas. Along the way, he explained the relative merits of various types of trash collection systems and the role of sunshine and vitamin D in making strong bones.

Lauren found a stick and beat the wagon with it. She was not as entranced with those educational subjects as Vic had hoped. However, she did repeatedly make the sign for flower on their walk.

Megan’s birth came only a few weeks before I turn 65. That got me to thinking about how much the world has changed since I was born, and how much more it’s likely to change by the time she’s 65.

I remember there was still an occasional horse and wagon on the street when I was young. When my dad went to the gas station (we called them filling stations back then), several men in uniforms and hats dashed to check the oil and the air in the tires, and washed the windshields. They pumped the gas while we sat in the car in regal splendor.

Cars had running boards in those days. I would ride on the running board like a G-man while my dad drove down the block. When it snowed, my dad would tow all the neighborhood kids on their sleds behind his truck. We’d loop the rope around the bumper and just let go of the rope if he drove faster than we wanted. If he had to stop suddenly, he told us to be sure to roll off the sleds, because they’d go under the truck and we’d get crushed. He also said not to tell Mom. I was 6 at the time. Can you imagine any parent doing that now? They’d be jailed for child endangerment.

When my grandparents were young, there were no automobiles, only horses. My mom remembered cars with windshields that flipped up. She said roads back then were just rocky, rutted, dirt tracks. Their family would go for a drive on Sundays and the car would almost always get a flat tire.

I can remember the first interstate coming to Indianapolis. I was 16 when the I-40 was built through town. A cloverleaf interchange was a brand new experience. My friends and I would drive in loops around and around the cloverleaf, never going anywhere. There wasn’t much to do in Indianapolis.

My dad was appalled when he bought gasoline in Yellowstone National Park at 44 cents a gallon back in 1958. It was normally around 25 cents a gallon. I’m pretty sure I’m going to be appalled at gasoline prices of more than $4 this summer.

The era of cheap gasoline is really over. The world is nearing the pinnacle of what is called Hubbert’s Peak. That’s the point of maximum oil production. After that, the amount of oil produced each year will go down. For the United States, Hubbert’s Peak was reached back in the 1970s and U.S. oil production has declined ever since. As oil becomes more and more scarce, prices can be expected to skyrocket.

We can only hope that practical alternative fuel sources are developed in time to avoid collapse of the world’s economy, which is based on relatively cheap and rapid transportation. It’s hard to predict when we’ll have pumped out the last of the Earth’s oil, but it could come within Megan’s lifetime.

When I was born, the number of human beings on planet Earth was approximately 2.3 billion people. A generation later, it was 3.3 billion. Now at the birth of my new granddaughter, it has grown to 6.7 billion. How high will it be when she has her first child? How high when she is the age I am now? The Earth is nearing its carrying capacity for humans, so world population can’t go up indefinitely.

What with a rapidly expanding world population and global climate change, Megan and the twins will see a lot of changes during their lives. Scientists predict that with these coming changes, a quarter of all species will face extinction by 2050. That’s 250 million species. We hope that there will still be dolphins, elephants and penguins when our grandchildren turn 65.

VIC LEIPZIG and LOU MURRAY are Huntington Beach residents and environmentalists. They can be reached at [email protected].