Where We’re Heading (If We Don’t Take Heed)

 

fish-eating-fish

Written to a friend:

Look — no sweat about the particulars of here and now with Trump (vs.Clinton) being the winner in the US Presidential election contest. Either way, there’s no big difference when one looks at the bigger, long-term picture.

You personally know about where the world is going with increasing human overpopulation, climate change (which according to some climate change experts, could leave half of the world uninhabitable and largely devoid of life), sixth great extinction underway, resource (renewable and non-renewable types) deficits, the economy ramp-up dialectically opposed to the natural world surviving in a healthy state, forests torn down for toilet paper and catalogues, oceans depleting of fish, the governments always supporting the corpocracy, etc., etc.

Trump vs. Clinton? It’s a chump change level of thinking from the broader perspective.

Larger scenerio? How about this:

Humanity’s Population Trainwreck – 10 to 15.8 billion by 2100? – Scribdhttps://www.scribd.com/…/   Humanity-s-Population-Trainwreck-10-to-15-8-billion-by-…World population has grown from two billion in 1930 to seven billion in 2011 (FIVE ADDITIONAL BILLIONS in a single human lifetime) – and the newest U.N. …

Trump or Clinton are just the same: a tiny hic-cup in the larger time (with both supporting the same basic principles) as we face ruin of the natural world on which we depend. Indeed, let’s see about how well we do when fossil fuels (the backbone of our agriculture and transportation of food to stores, and all of the rest of our complexity based on fossil fuels) collapse. With an excessive human population, we are thrown back into the stone age, it would seem.

Please don’t tell me about renewable energy since we haven’t the metals and rare minerals to support this alternative on the scale needed. … Besides, it’s not energy-rich like fossil fuels, which are largely responsible for climate change.

Forget Trump’s relatively minuscule influence, in my opinion. Instead, educate your children so that when push comes to shove, they can have have the understandings to educate their own children to survive.

Please understand this information, too. Who’s culpable for this mess? (Let’s please not point a finger at someone else.)

Well, I drove from MA to CT in the USA for a Thanksgiving feast. I’ve flown in the air for vacation time in other countries. I use heat in my home three seasons of the year and air conditioning on the forth. All use fossil fuels, which contributes to methane leaks:

Scholarly articles for methane climate change

Mitigation of climate change‎Change – Cited by 398

Methane Hydrates in Quaternary Climate Change: The …‎Kennett – Cited by 466

Changes in atmospheric constituents and in radiative …‎Forster – Cited by 5124

Why not go further, though, with the blame-game? Please look at the materials from which your house is made, your clothes and your food. Lots are made of wood — trees,  such as soft bamboo and other fibrous clothes.
51 Facts About Deforestation – Conserve Energy Future www.conserve-energy-future.com/various-deforestation-facts.php Facts 7: The rate of deforestation equals to loss of 20 football fields every minute. … Facts 11: 20% of the world’s oxygen is produced in the Amazon forest.

Let’s also look at the details of the happening that was described in a documentary that I saw about the looming extinction of monkeys and gorillas:

In the Congo, there are people, who destroy forests. They have four teams.

The first are sharp-shooters. They kill all life that moves.

They particularly prize baby monkeys. The flesh is tender and the brains are considered delicious.

Next come the cooks. They bleed out the animals and cook the remaining flesh three times a day: breakfast, lunch and dinner.

They serve the sharpshooters, themselves, the loggers and the tree transporters while the last group gets the clear-cut forestry products to wherever they need to go to become lumber for worldwide markets. (We may wish to think of this sort of practise whenever we see the exotic wood types in stores.)

If we feel sanctimonious about such a situation, let’s recall some of the USA practises. Here’s one example:

Apparently the old cow was depleted of calcium from the recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH), a genetically engineered hormone manufactured by Monsanto. So she could not stand on her legs since they could not support her weight due to her own body’s calcium having gone into her increased milk production.

The result was that she was being dragged forward by a chain or rope around her neck. Simultaneously she was tasered in the eye in an effort to force her onto her feet to move forward to the butchery site. After all of her years to provide a profit for a farmer, this is the gratitude that she gets — abuse followed by torture.

It’s all in the name of profit and the increasing commodification of the natural world. The result of the videotape of the cow being tormented was that a California school recalled the beef and a new law was put in place that it is illegal to make a movie of an animal being treated cruelly in a meat making plant. Problem now solved, right?
Meat Recalls + Slaughter Plant Shutdowns = Supplier for the National …

www.foodsafetynews.com/…/meat-recalls-slaughter-plant-shutdowns-supplier-for-the-...

Mar 11, 2014 – The video shows cows, many of whom were sick or injured, being mistreated. … Meat Packing Co., another dairy cow slaughter plant in California. … The questionable safety of the meat entering the National School Lunch …
Beef Recall – Huffington Post

www.huffingtonpost.com/news/beef-recall/

Plant Behind Massive Recall Bought Diseased Cows For Processing … a dusty little slaughterhouse in Northern California was ground zero for one of the biggest meat recalls in years. … GROSS: Plastic Found In Recalled School Lunch Meat.

 

I don’t even want to share about the outrageous ways that chickens, roosters, veal calves, pigs and other animals are treated in factory farms and at slaughter in the USA. Of course, most people and the media industry don’t want this sort of information shared, anyway, since it would cut into profits were an outcry to take place to develop new standards in humane treatment of animals.

Instead many people just like to go to the market or a restaurant and find delicious food. Besides, there’s a long history of hubris behind the outlook that we can and should get such goods. After all:

New International Version
Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
Genesis 1:26

Let’s compare this to evolutionist Richard Dawkins’ view in Unweaving the Rainbow – Wikipedia. Stretch out your two arms as far as they will reach left and right (–l–). Now go across the span to your last fingernail on the right — the one attached to your largest finger.

The total extent from the left to right arm roughly represents the time that life was on Earth from the beginning. The last, farthermost away, right fingernail loosely represents the time that mammals were on earth while its white part is the time that humans were here. Take one scrape – just one — with a nail file across the top and that, time-wise, represents human recorded history. Amazing and humbling!

As far as I can see, the problem isn’t just the stories that we make up about ourselves to justify our supremacy, nor is it the way that we treat the natural world as a way to make money, as much as possible, for ourselves.

In my view, there is something deeper than the economy destroying the world as the culprit in our plight. Maybe, just maybe, it involves evolution itself.

After all, in a closed energy system, such as we have on Earth, how can there not be brutality in one form or another?
http://fizzyjinks.deviantart.com/art/Big-fish-eat-Little-Fish-178970237

I’ve been watching some of the episodes of Westworld (TV series) – Wikipedia and I can’t help but see parallels between the robots and our own condition. In fact, we are deeply programmed through the large expanse during which evolution has transpired on this planet so as to take and take and take so as to rip down much else and wildly expand the number of our species’ members in the process.

So there should be no surprise that we now have these conditions:

The Extinction Crisis – Center for Biological Diversity

It’s frightening but true: Our planet is now in the midst of its sixth mass extinction of plants and animals — the sixth wave of extinctions in the past half-billion years. We’re currently experiencing the worst spate of species die-offs since the loss of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

Boom! Earth’s Population Could Hit 12 Billion by 2100 | WIRED

https://www.wired.com/2014/09/human-population-2100/

Sep 18, 2014 – The projections also contained a great deal of uncertainty, with possible population scenarios of as many as 15.8 billion people, or as few as …

All considered, we’ll be fortunate if our kind doesn’t end up like this:

What Happened On Easter Island — A New (Even Scarier) Scenario …

www.npr.org/sections/…/what-happened-on-easter-island-a-new-even-scarier-scenario

OK, maybe there was no “ecocide.” But is this good news? Should we celebrate? I wonder. What we have here are two scenarios ostensibly about Easter Island’s past, but really about what might be our planet’s future. The first scenario — an ecological collapse — nobody wants that. But let’s think about this new alternative — where humans degrade their environment but somehow “muddle through.” Is that better? In some ways, I think this “success” story is just as scary.

Now we can ask ourselves about what’s coming and what we intend collectively to do about it. What’s on the way? Let’s look at the combination of factors and then it’s pretty easy to surmise potemntial outcomes.

Climate Change Will Worsen Hunger, Study Says | Worldwatch Institute

www.worldwatch.org/node/6271

India, wheat, climate change Climate change is expected to lower grain yields and raise crop prices across the developing world, leading to a 20-percent rise in …

Climate change: It’s even worse than we thought | New Scientist

https://www.newscientist.com/round-up/worse-climate/

Five years ago, the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change painted a gloomy picture of our planet’s future. As climate scientists gather …
Climate change could make half the world uninhabitable – Telegraph

www.telegraph.co.uk › News › Earth › Environment › Climate Change

May 12, 2010 – Climate change could make half of the world uninhabitable for humans as a rise in temperature makes it too hot to survive, scientists have warned. … “Under realistic scenarios out to 2300, we may be faced with temperature increases of 12 degrees or even more,” he said.

Researchers find future temperatures could exceed livable limits

www.purdue.edu/newsroom/research/2010/100504HuberLimits.html

May 4, 2010 – Reasonable worst-case scenarios for global warming could lead to … warming would put half of the world’s population in an uninhabitable …
The Extinction Crisis – Center for Biological Diversity

www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/biodiversity/elements_of…/extinction_crisis/

Although extinction is a natural phenomenon, it occurs at a natural “background” rate of about one to five species per year. Scientists estimate we’re now losing species at 1,000 to 10,000 times the background rate, with literally dozens going extinct every day [1].

One common definition of an extinction event is 70% or more of all life forms disappearing within a few hundred years. Just imagine the way that the world would be with such a massive devastating loss.

The six natural resources most drained by our 7 billion people ...

https://www.theguardian.com › Environment › Energy

Oct 31, 2011 – The six natural resources most drained by our 7 billion people … Here are six already under severe pressure from current rates of consumption: …
The World at 7 Billion: Can We Stop Growing Now? by Robert ...

e360.yale.edu/feature/the_world_at_7_billion_can_we_stop_growing…/2426/

Jul 18, 2011 – With global population expected to surpass 7 billion people this year, … more affluent ones climbing up the ladder of middle-class consumption.

7 billion in 2011 has already risen: World Population Clock: 7.5 Billion People (2016) – Worldometers

It doesn’t take a genius to see about where we’re collectively heading. How tragic for our own children … and especially for theirs.

So let’s put in a concerted effort to stop our utterly tragic trajectory. Let’s each do our own part as much as we can individually and in unison. This madness has to stop!

Sally Dugman  is a freelance writer

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