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Many thanks to Peter Goodchild for sending an abridged copy of his new book, The Coming Chaos. You can download a copy here: https://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B5F-idWfw7TeY2U4ZjE3ZmUtYjU5Ny00ZGQ5LTg4YTQtMGVmZjg5ZjQxZGI4&hl=en&authkey=CMDYyYcF
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December 2nd, 2010 at 9:23 pm
Inasmuch as the chaos appears to be coming, there is something I fear and I fear it terribly. If the human community loses its primary faith in science as the best available guide for making determinations regarding what is adequate enough knowledge of the “rules of the house” in the planetary home God has blessed us to inhabit as well as regarding the most accurate placement of humankind within the natural order of life on Earth, then a keen sense of foreboding overtakes me because it appears that we could end up destroying, however inadvertently, that life which we claim to be protecting. In the course of a single lifetime, human beings will have done so much irreparable damage to something millions of years in the making, something we believe we are preserving.
That is to say, if the family of humanity does not accept out of necessity that even a uniquely and superbly gifted species so splendid as Homo sapiens lives according to the “rules of the house” in which we live so well, but instead chooses to deny the directions and guideposts provided to us by God’s gift of science and refuses to live within the biophysical limitations of our evidently finite and noticeably frangible home on Earth, then woe will be onto the children who follow my generation of elders, I suppose.
Have the self-proclaimed masters of the universe among us determined that their arrogant, avaricious and soon to become unsustainable way of life is the one and only way to the ‘good life’? Can mortgaging the children’s future and threatening their very existence somehow be cleverly construed as the best way to live? It appears that the very children for whom the world is supposedly being made into a better place are the same people from whom their elders are willfully stealing life as we know it, relentlessly dissipating Earth’s resources and recklessly degrading its environs.
Please note the silence of so many on this topic, both inside and outside the PMC community and well as within the communities of top-rank experts. That silence is also something to be feared and fearly terribly. There is no global threat so great as our so-called leaders’ elective mutism with regard to notifying the public about humanity’s central role in recklessly depleting Earth’s finite resources and degrading Earth’s ecology as well as to helping the children sensibly prepare for what could likely occur in the offing. Such unconscionable behavior by my generation could have the effect of ruining the planetary home we inhabit as a place for humane habitation by the children.
Good people, the willful silence of knowledgeable leaders and followers is a colossal mistake with profound implications for the future of life on Earth. Please, speak out loudly, clearly and often. Say whatsoever you believe to be true and real regarding the human predicament in which humankind finds itself in these earliest years of Century XXI.
More voices….. we need many more voices. Time is being wasted because those with wealth and power and their super enriched minions adamantly defend and righteously pursue overconsumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities. Because these activities could soon become patently unsustainable, necessary behavior change has to occur fast. If more members of the human family do not speak out to resist what the richest and most powerful in the human community are seducing all of us to do now as we strive to ravenously consume Earth’s resources, to relentlessly hoard wealth, and to overproduce unnecessary stuff, then the planetary home we are inhabiting and overpopulating could be made uninhabitable for our children and life as we know it in the fairly near future.
One day our children may look back in anger and utter disbelief at many too many leaders and followers in my not-so-great generation of greedmongers, who had the chance at least to try and mitigate the fully expected damages of pollution, climate destabilization, environmental degradation, resource dissipation, biodiversity extinction and unbridled overpopulation but abjectly failed because we chose to play around the edges of the global challenges before us and refused to take demonstrably responsible action in the face of clear and present dangers.
Being honest and personally accountable; earning wealth the old fashioned way by actually providing something of value; exercising moral courage; and making necessary changes toward sustainable lifestyles, was too damn hard for so soft, satisfied, sanctimonious and selfish a generation of elders, I suppose.
For me, it is impossible to believe that a species so wondrous as Homo sapiens will not find a way to continue rather than to induce its own extinction as we appear to be doing now. Somehow the miracle of life as we know it, with all its beauty and biodiversity, has to be preserved. At least we have to try, whatever the odds.