Consider the world as it is. As I write this, New York City is draining a flood. The basements are still full and the subways are too. Every week some major city is flooded; every week some major river is dry. 36,000 fish just died in a dried-up river in Brazil, and half a million people drink that water. I could go on, but I’m not going to.
None of these events just happened. About two hundred and fifty years ago, white people decided that they had to have more of everything than all the people in the world, working together, could make. In order to do that, they invented ways to apply imported energy to work.
For a quarter of a million years, Homo Sap lived happy, comfortable, often long, lives on all we could produce for ourselves. Aside from the occasional plague or genocide, global human populations tended to increase over time, even as they still do today.
You could go back before Homo Sap, to Homo Tools, the beginning of the first stone age, three million years ago, and throughout all those millions of years, we grew from a few saps in some savanna to the dominant species worldwide. We did it through some ice ages, a couple hot spells, and - nobody has ever worked as many hours a year as Homo Industrialesis, which we do while patting ourselves on the back because we’ve got Bitcoin and Teslas.
In between the times when we bemoan that New York just washed away a few million dollars worth of infrastructure.
It’s all one thing.
We have known, since the very beginning of Homo Industrialensis and the Industriocene (often called the Anthropocene but I don’t think it’s our human-ness, we just did this in 250 years) that what we were doing was going to get us where we are today. Literally since the beginning.
We made a decision: we’re going to have fun, we’re going to go faster and have more stuff than anyone in human history, it’s going to heat up the planet, we’re going to do it by stripping the entire living layer off this spinning rock, and to us that’s the best and highest that humans can be.
I disagree with this decision. I don’t think humans would have to sacrifice anything. The only way this lie can be sold is by taking all the surface of Earth away from the many and cramming them into cities where they never breathe a breath of clean air from year to year, fill their lives with packaged entertainment made for them by the people who own all the living land and have no interest in sharing it.
Human life now is a sacrifice. For humans to live bereft of birdsong and lightning bugs, flowers and bees and hummingbirds, a donkey to carry our stuff for us, time to look around - we’ve been had.
And to preserve that, we are killing the world faster each day than we did the day before, always boasting that the next invention will cure the output of all that we do.
It won’t.
We have only one problem, our value system. It will surely be fatal.