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The old button from the Environmental Club days which I just happened to find on Earth Day! It is a little beat up (particularly the ends of the ribbon), but no worse for the wear, I think. And it is one of the few items that I have left from those days, so it carries a lot of great memories for me! Nothing Changes Until You Do!
Here is a picture of a very similar logo, with the same message, that was on the t-shirt that I purchased from the BCC Environmental Club and, if memory serves me correctly, may even have helped to make. There were a few projects like that which club members, myself included, were regularly involved with. It has been so long, however, that I no longer recall specifically if I actually helped to make these or not, although I do believe so, since I remember seeing the process of the t-shirts being dyed. In any case, I loved this t-shirt, and have kept it ever since, even if I do not regularly wear it. Since it was part of my experience with the BCC Environmental Club days, as well as more generally having an environmental theme, it seemed appropriate to share it here.
"Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's needs, but not every man's greed."
~Mahatma Gandhi
"Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future."
~John F. Kennedy
“Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.”
~ Chief Si’ahl (Seattle)
“Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.”
~ Chief Si’ahl (Seattle)
For a very long time, I have had a premonition that our modern day society was heading towards disaster. All of the signs were there, even decades ago, during my childhood and transformation into early adulthood. The threats were everywhere. There were stockpiles of nuclear weapons that threatened to wipe out life as we knew it, and it seemed that more and more people, from rogue nations to even terrorists, were closer to having them. There was always the threat of some plague wiping us out, and the Bible had always predicted end times. And, of course, the climate was growing warmer, and there were warnings that the sea would rise.
It even seemed to me that people were outwardly showing that they were abandoning their faith in the old ways, the old styles of living and thinking that had allowed these near catastrophes to continue growing, and to threaten the very lifestyles that we had created for ourselves. This seemed to be confirmed by the fact that we were losing our collective civility, as well as allowing the national debt to keep ballooning, growing bigger and bigger, until any semblance of balance or moderation was wiped out. And look where we are in both of those areas now!
If anything, the threats seem to be growing worse now. Perhaps the world seemed safer, briefly, when the Cold War ended, and mostly peacefully, at that. Yet, that was just illusory, because in fact, the world did grow to become a more dangerous and unstable place, and in almost every way. It just did not seem that way at that time. In fact, looking back, I would have to say that that era - the 1980's and well into the 1990's, from the end of the Cold War to the immediate aftermath, when the United States seemed to stand supreme as the world's only remaining superpower - was the last time that there seemed to be any real sense of optimism in this country. There was this sense that things were indeed getting better. Indeed, that was the last time that I remember that feeling being widespread, and to some degree, I actually kind of felt a little bit of that myself, albeit in a measured way, because I was only too aware that such beliefs were nothing new for humanity, and that similar sentiments had been eradicated by brutality on an unprecedented scale, such as when those who had believed that humanity was too advanced to continue warfare and believed that the coming "Great War" would be the war to end all wars had to deal with the staggering inhumanity and senseless bloodshed from that war, and how it quickly became clear that it was not, in fact, anywhere near being the final war of human history. Far from it.
Still, the optimism of the nineties was real, although it was hardly sweeping, and not nearly as naive as it had been in the early 20th century, before World War I. Nor was this optimism merely something that foolish and unlearned people had faith in. in the late nineties and into 2000 and the first semester of 2001, I attended Rutgers University, and remember reading some books that illustrated this kind of optimism. One of them was The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 by Eric Hobsbawm. I remember wondering what made him assume that this age of extremes was already over. And then there was Francis Fukuyama, who in 1989 wrote "The End of History?" and then had a follow-up book in 1992. Much like with Hobsbawm, it seemed to me awfully presumptuous to assume that we had reached a point where we had apparently figured something out, or solved something, and that history, at least as we know it, was over.
Of course, all of that was before September 11th, which I think it is fair to say changed everything. People woke up to the reality that the world was not really safer. In fact, they began to recognize just how vulnerable we are, even if we had been sold on the illusion that we Americans are virtually untouchable and largely safe. Then, there were the Anthrax attacks, and the assault on the Constitution. Americans troops were torturing people at Abu Graib, and there were concentration camps being built by the United States, all during our hugely unpopular war with Iraq, which most of the world was opposed to. Americans were growing used to being regarded, increasingly frequently and, if we are honest, increasingly with legitimacy, as not being the undisputed "good guys with the white hats" as one former history teacher of mine put it. Then, there was the hugely controversial and unpopular surveillance and drones during the Obama years. And then, of course, came Donald Trump. Increasingly, now, the United States itself is being seen as some kind of rogue nation, and again, not without some measure of legitimacy, either.
Indeed, if Americans had managed to escape the self-examination and self-doubts which followed that false certainty in the belief that things were just getting better and better, and that our modern society had reached such a high and advanced state that we were beyond some of the horrors of the past, then Americans now find themselves in that questionable state, and are well behind Europeans, who have now coped with grappling these questions for many decades, and at least have reached a political consensus that governments indeed should actually try and protect and worked to benefit their citizens, rather than leave them open to the excesses and greed of major institutions, in this case huge corporations and banks and the for profit healthcare and prison industry.
Yet, as dire as all of this seems, and as horrible as the news headlines dominated by an undeserving idiot who now occupies the Oval Office may be, they are nothing compared to what the biggest, most inevitable, and most tragic major developing news story will likely grow into. And the worst thing is, we can hardly claim to be victims of this collectively, since this is a problem of our own making. We could have done something either to prevent it, or at least, to limit the severity of it. Instead, we did nothing, and we are likely going to see the tragedy of that indecision and criminal inaction. Horribly, the people who are likely going to suffer the most are likely not the people who actually could have done something about it. The people who are expected to suffer the most are, predictably, the poor, and future generations.
By now, it should be obvious that I am talking about climate change. It is the elephant in the room, which is dominating any serious discussions of what our future will look like, because humanity will be forced to adapt to it, because the mindset today, when it still seems a bit in the distant future, is too frequently one of blatant dismissal and a stubborn refusal to either believe, or even worse, a claim to not believe in order not to have to take responsibility or do anything. God forbid we sacrifice even the tiniest profits for wealthy CEO's and members of board of big polluters who could actually make some difference, if they wanted to! God forbid we actually elect anyone into the highest office in this country who actually not only believes that climate change is real, but has the backbone to seriously fight to force some change! We would rather elect someone who at least many claim to be entertaining, although I personally have yet to find any entertainment value in the man and the administration who currently occupies the White House.
The United States still is far and away historically the leading contributor to climate change in the entire world. Nowhere else have they historically put profits over environmental concerns so automatically and unquestioningly - to say nothing about being arrogantly sure of their righttness on it, almost to the point of being boastful and waving away any and all concerns about possible dire consequences for such short-term thinking down the line - as much as we do here in the United States. After all, we keep electing climate change deniers into the highest offices, and with disastrous results. Donald Trump expressed outright denial with a tweet in the past suggesting that climate change is a huge hoax invented by the Chinese to hurt the American economy. It takes some gall, frankly, to suggest that an entire world, and pretty much all of it's scientific community, are in on some gigantic conspiracy to hurt the United States, and that big polluting corporations, particularly the oil industry, have miraculously come up with the pseudo-science to try and counter this evil, dastardly plot. Yet, that is apparently what millions of Americans seem to believe. Roughly 30 percent of Americans do not believe that climate change is real, yet somehow, these people keep managing to get other skeptics to be elected as our national leaders, and with disastrous results. To say nothing of what else has been done, the United States now stands alone in the world as the only nation that is not a part of the Paris Climate Accord on the grounds that it does not believe in climate change. Strangely enough, while Americans are on a completely different page from the rest of the world in terms of climate change - much like we are also on a different page from the rest of the world in terms of healthcare and gun control - those who are skeptical of climate change remain as cocksure of themselves as if they had all of the science and scientific data on their side, even though they have almost none of it.
Yes, the scientific data backs up the notion that climate change is real. After all, the planet is getting undeniably warmer, and weather patterns have grown more extreme. Mere decades ago, climate change deniers would boldly laugh at the arguments of those who warned of climate change, and dismissed it as absurd. Only recently, since the days of Hurricane Katrina and the aftermath that saw George W. Bush and his administration reluctantly admitting that climate change is real, did many who oppose action on climate change alter their arguments. Now, they often preface their arguments by stating that they themselves are not scientists, but the climate is and always has been changing, and they do not believe that human activity is responsible for climate change, even if they grudgingly agree that said climate change is indeed real. Even Donald Trump had to quickly lie and claim that he never sent out that tweet about climate change being one gigantic Chinese hoax when directly confronted about it during a presidential debate in 2016. Regardless of the shifting arguments of climate change deniers, the facts are that it is indeed changing. In this regard, all of the scientific evidence is suggesting that global temperatures are indeed getting hotter, that weather patterns are growing more extreme, and that polar ice caps are melting, leading to rising waters. It does not take a genius to see that the climate has changed. My father remembered snow and very cold temperatures being a regular feature of winters in the Paris area of France, and it has since become rare to see snow or serious cold there. In my own lifetime, I remember much colder and harsher winters being quite routine during my own childhood, even though we seem to have gravitated towards much milder winters, to say nothing of much wetter springs, generally speaking. We can see climate change in our everyday lives. All that is required is to open one's eyes, and to not allow our stubbornness or egotism or desire for profits to get in the way of accepting this as truth.
Let's face it: we here in the United States should have managed to get over ourselves on this topic. Claiming that we are not scientists is not a legitimate argument to counter scientific research and consensus. Conspiracy thinking, trying to hang onto that small toehold of any doubt that we have left does not qualify as reasonable doubt that we can build a case, and truly believing that climate change is some kind of conspiracy meant to hurt the American economy is ridiculous and laughable. At least it would be, anyway, if the consequences were not so dire. This kind of thinking is knee-jerk reactionary thinking and counterproductive. It betrays our egotism, our arrogance, our ignorance, and our selfishness. I mean, you just know that no matter what is proposed, whether it is more development of alternative energy using unlimited resources like power from the wind or the sun, or trying to at least limit, and even better eliminating, single-use plastics or plastic bottles or Styrofoam or demanding more fuel efficient vehicles, or any other measures that we can think of to cut emissions and our contributions to pollution on a massive scale, there will be plenty of nitwits who argue that these measures will be costly (as if losing the livability factor for the entire planet is not) and that trying to eliminate these things is taking away from our beloved American freedoms for majorly polluting corporations to blindly and recklessly pursue short-term profits, no matter what the cost for the rest of us.
We Americans should be ashamed.
And again, it is not like we are bending the rest of the world to some kind of realization that maybe climate change is some big scam. Far from it, more and more Americans - roughly 70 percent now - are conceding that climate change is real, and that we need to take serious action to try and curb the excesses. Yet somehow, we keep electing leaders who literally laugh at any notion of climate change, and who not only drag their feet, but do everything possible to throw obstacles towards any action to even begin to seriously address climate change.
As Kathleen Parker wrote in a recent article for the Washington Post about just how serious and dire the consequences of climate change really are:
Finding out that 1 million species face extinction without radical corrective changes in human behavior is akin to finding out you have a fatal disease. One day you have a thousand problems; the next, you have just one. Nothing in today’s headlines compares to the catastrophic potential posed by climate change and the decimating effects of careless consumerism around the globe.
The four horsemen of the apocalypse — generally considered to be conquest, war, famine and death — weren’t far off the mark. Today, we might revise the New Testament version to include plastics, emissions, deforestation and Homo sapiens.
Yes, we have met the enemy. And it is us. A recent report by the United Nations suggests that one-eighth of all this planet's species - nearly one million different types of species - are facing extinction, and clearly, this will have ramifications for us. That is not one million creatures, which would be horrible enough, but one million different kinds of species. It is no exaggeration to suggest that our mindless, for profit consumer culture that shirks at any notion of self-restrain is beginning to resemble a genocide for all of what many in the human population would consider the world's inferior species. They keep having to die off, so that we can have more space for human beings and the requirements that larger human populations translates to. So, more forests will be clearer, more land converted to polluting farmland, and more energy and pollution produced in order to sustain (temporarily, anyway) the creature comforts that we apparently so blindly enjoy and bask in, even congratulating ourselves for.
Plus, this trend is getting worse, because the human population keeps on growing. It had taken thousands of years for us to reach the one billion mark, but there were about one billion people on the planet around the time of the French Revolution. Shortly after that, relatively speaking (a little over 100 years later), we reached two billion right in between the end of World War I and the beginning of World War II. By the year of my birth in 1974, the population globally of human beings had reached 4 billion. By the turn of the new millennium, we had reached 6 billion people, and we presently have 7 billion people on the planet. We are expected to reach 10 billion by mid-century, and clearly, all of these people are going to need food and place other demands in order to sustain themselves, let alone live in the kind of comfort that we westerners have grown so addicted to.
Collectively, we barely even register that we are playing with fire in having created, and now acting to sustain, such a deadly way of life. It is killing the very life that we have grown to rely on, and which we indeed need, in order to continue surviving on this planet. And that stubborn refusal is nowhere stronger or more entrenched than right here in the good ol' United States of 'Murica.
Again, let us read what Parker says about it in her article (see link below) and the warnings of this most recent UN report:
The report makes the essential connection to human wellness, as opposed to merely caring about the horrors endured by sea creatures dying with their stomachs packed with plastic or Arctic animals starving to death as the ground melts beneath their feet. If something hurts economies and schoolchildren, we eventually get around to paying attention. As Watson noted, “We need to link it to human well-being; that’s the crucial thing. Otherwise we’re going to look like a bunch of tree-huggers.”
Yes, apparently, outright warnings that life on this planet as we know it are not enough to wake consumeristic people up. We now have to convince them that we who are concerned about climate change are not merely crazy tree-huggers, but people with humanity's best interests in mind.
Meanwhile, the main problem that contributes to the rise in severity of climate change and greenhouse gases just keeps on growing, unaltered:
Meanwhile, the world’s population is expected to reach nearly 10 billion by mid-century, according to the United Nations. Already, it has tripled since 1950. Collectively, we humans have altered 75 percent of Earth’s land and more than half of the marine environment. More people require more crops, more land and fewer trees, which ultimately results in warmer temperatures — and you know the rest.
Who knows? The end of everything may be the great unifier we’ve been looking for.
Maybe, but even then, given the levels of stupidity and hubris that we are now witnessing, I am not entirely sure that even this would unify us, or finally force some kind of consensus that the threat is real, and action should be taken.
I have long suspected that the increase of apocalypse survival themed books and television shows and movies seem to be preparing us for that post-apocalyptic world that we seem to all be in agreement that humanity will face, sooner or later. It might be a Biblical prediction come true, or it might be a nuclear war. Or it might be some plague, or something else.
But my own money would be on what the world's scientists have outright warning us about for decades now: climate change.
Indeed, maybe facing our own extinction could be what we have been longing for, in terms of unifying the country, or even the world. If so, too bad that it takes that for us to finally come together. And too bad that it seems to be leading to that scenario becoming increasingly inevitable, because of our own inability to get past ourselves and our selfish desires, and to recognize that there is indeed a crisis, and we might do well to finally begin to address it, once and for all.
Here is the link to Kathleen Parker's Washington Post article that I reference several times in writing this blog entry. Underneath it is a link to another article showing that the first species (the first of many more to come) to go extinct because of climate change has happened already. Please take a look at both articles:
Yet, as dire as all of this seems, and as horrible as the news headlines dominated by an undeserving idiot who now occupies the Oval Office may be, they are nothing compared to what the biggest, most inevitable, and most tragic major developing news story will likely grow into. And the worst thing is, we can hardly claim to be victims of this collectively, since this is a problem of our own making. We could have done something either to prevent it, or at least, to limit the severity of it. Instead, we did nothing, and we are likely going to see the tragedy of that indecision and criminal inaction. Horribly, the people who are likely going to suffer the most are likely not the people who actually could have done something about it. The people who are expected to suffer the most are, predictably, the poor, and future generations.
By now, it should be obvious that I am talking about climate change. It is the elephant in the room, which is dominating any serious discussions of what our future will look like, because humanity will be forced to adapt to it, because the mindset today, when it still seems a bit in the distant future, is too frequently one of blatant dismissal and a stubborn refusal to either believe, or even worse, a claim to not believe in order not to have to take responsibility or do anything. God forbid we sacrifice even the tiniest profits for wealthy CEO's and members of board of big polluters who could actually make some difference, if they wanted to! God forbid we actually elect anyone into the highest office in this country who actually not only believes that climate change is real, but has the backbone to seriously fight to force some change! We would rather elect someone who at least many claim to be entertaining, although I personally have yet to find any entertainment value in the man and the administration who currently occupies the White House.
The United States still is far and away historically the leading contributor to climate change in the entire world. Nowhere else have they historically put profits over environmental concerns so automatically and unquestioningly - to say nothing about being arrogantly sure of their righttness on it, almost to the point of being boastful and waving away any and all concerns about possible dire consequences for such short-term thinking down the line - as much as we do here in the United States. After all, we keep electing climate change deniers into the highest offices, and with disastrous results. Donald Trump expressed outright denial with a tweet in the past suggesting that climate change is a huge hoax invented by the Chinese to hurt the American economy. It takes some gall, frankly, to suggest that an entire world, and pretty much all of it's scientific community, are in on some gigantic conspiracy to hurt the United States, and that big polluting corporations, particularly the oil industry, have miraculously come up with the pseudo-science to try and counter this evil, dastardly plot. Yet, that is apparently what millions of Americans seem to believe. Roughly 30 percent of Americans do not believe that climate change is real, yet somehow, these people keep managing to get other skeptics to be elected as our national leaders, and with disastrous results. To say nothing of what else has been done, the United States now stands alone in the world as the only nation that is not a part of the Paris Climate Accord on the grounds that it does not believe in climate change. Strangely enough, while Americans are on a completely different page from the rest of the world in terms of climate change - much like we are also on a different page from the rest of the world in terms of healthcare and gun control - those who are skeptical of climate change remain as cocksure of themselves as if they had all of the science and scientific data on their side, even though they have almost none of it.
Yes, the scientific data backs up the notion that climate change is real. After all, the planet is getting undeniably warmer, and weather patterns have grown more extreme. Mere decades ago, climate change deniers would boldly laugh at the arguments of those who warned of climate change, and dismissed it as absurd. Only recently, since the days of Hurricane Katrina and the aftermath that saw George W. Bush and his administration reluctantly admitting that climate change is real, did many who oppose action on climate change alter their arguments. Now, they often preface their arguments by stating that they themselves are not scientists, but the climate is and always has been changing, and they do not believe that human activity is responsible for climate change, even if they grudgingly agree that said climate change is indeed real. Even Donald Trump had to quickly lie and claim that he never sent out that tweet about climate change being one gigantic Chinese hoax when directly confronted about it during a presidential debate in 2016. Regardless of the shifting arguments of climate change deniers, the facts are that it is indeed changing. In this regard, all of the scientific evidence is suggesting that global temperatures are indeed getting hotter, that weather patterns are growing more extreme, and that polar ice caps are melting, leading to rising waters. It does not take a genius to see that the climate has changed. My father remembered snow and very cold temperatures being a regular feature of winters in the Paris area of France, and it has since become rare to see snow or serious cold there. In my own lifetime, I remember much colder and harsher winters being quite routine during my own childhood, even though we seem to have gravitated towards much milder winters, to say nothing of much wetter springs, generally speaking. We can see climate change in our everyday lives. All that is required is to open one's eyes, and to not allow our stubbornness or egotism or desire for profits to get in the way of accepting this as truth.
Let's face it: we here in the United States should have managed to get over ourselves on this topic. Claiming that we are not scientists is not a legitimate argument to counter scientific research and consensus. Conspiracy thinking, trying to hang onto that small toehold of any doubt that we have left does not qualify as reasonable doubt that we can build a case, and truly believing that climate change is some kind of conspiracy meant to hurt the American economy is ridiculous and laughable. At least it would be, anyway, if the consequences were not so dire. This kind of thinking is knee-jerk reactionary thinking and counterproductive. It betrays our egotism, our arrogance, our ignorance, and our selfishness. I mean, you just know that no matter what is proposed, whether it is more development of alternative energy using unlimited resources like power from the wind or the sun, or trying to at least limit, and even better eliminating, single-use plastics or plastic bottles or Styrofoam or demanding more fuel efficient vehicles, or any other measures that we can think of to cut emissions and our contributions to pollution on a massive scale, there will be plenty of nitwits who argue that these measures will be costly (as if losing the livability factor for the entire planet is not) and that trying to eliminate these things is taking away from our beloved American freedoms for majorly polluting corporations to blindly and recklessly pursue short-term profits, no matter what the cost for the rest of us.
We Americans should be ashamed.
And again, it is not like we are bending the rest of the world to some kind of realization that maybe climate change is some big scam. Far from it, more and more Americans - roughly 70 percent now - are conceding that climate change is real, and that we need to take serious action to try and curb the excesses. Yet somehow, we keep electing leaders who literally laugh at any notion of climate change, and who not only drag their feet, but do everything possible to throw obstacles towards any action to even begin to seriously address climate change.
As Kathleen Parker wrote in a recent article for the Washington Post about just how serious and dire the consequences of climate change really are:
Finding out that 1 million species face extinction without radical corrective changes in human behavior is akin to finding out you have a fatal disease. One day you have a thousand problems; the next, you have just one. Nothing in today’s headlines compares to the catastrophic potential posed by climate change and the decimating effects of careless consumerism around the globe.
The four horsemen of the apocalypse — generally considered to be conquest, war, famine and death — weren’t far off the mark. Today, we might revise the New Testament version to include plastics, emissions, deforestation and Homo sapiens.
Yes, we have met the enemy. And it is us. A recent report by the United Nations suggests that one-eighth of all this planet's species - nearly one million different types of species - are facing extinction, and clearly, this will have ramifications for us. That is not one million creatures, which would be horrible enough, but one million different kinds of species. It is no exaggeration to suggest that our mindless, for profit consumer culture that shirks at any notion of self-restrain is beginning to resemble a genocide for all of what many in the human population would consider the world's inferior species. They keep having to die off, so that we can have more space for human beings and the requirements that larger human populations translates to. So, more forests will be clearer, more land converted to polluting farmland, and more energy and pollution produced in order to sustain (temporarily, anyway) the creature comforts that we apparently so blindly enjoy and bask in, even congratulating ourselves for.
Plus, this trend is getting worse, because the human population keeps on growing. It had taken thousands of years for us to reach the one billion mark, but there were about one billion people on the planet around the time of the French Revolution. Shortly after that, relatively speaking (a little over 100 years later), we reached two billion right in between the end of World War I and the beginning of World War II. By the year of my birth in 1974, the population globally of human beings had reached 4 billion. By the turn of the new millennium, we had reached 6 billion people, and we presently have 7 billion people on the planet. We are expected to reach 10 billion by mid-century, and clearly, all of these people are going to need food and place other demands in order to sustain themselves, let alone live in the kind of comfort that we westerners have grown so addicted to.
Collectively, we barely even register that we are playing with fire in having created, and now acting to sustain, such a deadly way of life. It is killing the very life that we have grown to rely on, and which we indeed need, in order to continue surviving on this planet. And that stubborn refusal is nowhere stronger or more entrenched than right here in the good ol' United States of 'Murica.
Again, let us read what Parker says about it in her article (see link below) and the warnings of this most recent UN report:
The report makes the essential connection to human wellness, as opposed to merely caring about the horrors endured by sea creatures dying with their stomachs packed with plastic or Arctic animals starving to death as the ground melts beneath their feet. If something hurts economies and schoolchildren, we eventually get around to paying attention. As Watson noted, “We need to link it to human well-being; that’s the crucial thing. Otherwise we’re going to look like a bunch of tree-huggers.”
Yes, apparently, outright warnings that life on this planet as we know it are not enough to wake consumeristic people up. We now have to convince them that we who are concerned about climate change are not merely crazy tree-huggers, but people with humanity's best interests in mind.
Meanwhile, the main problem that contributes to the rise in severity of climate change and greenhouse gases just keeps on growing, unaltered:
Meanwhile, the world’s population is expected to reach nearly 10 billion by mid-century, according to the United Nations. Already, it has tripled since 1950. Collectively, we humans have altered 75 percent of Earth’s land and more than half of the marine environment. More people require more crops, more land and fewer trees, which ultimately results in warmer temperatures — and you know the rest.
Who knows? The end of everything may be the great unifier we’ve been looking for.
Maybe, but even then, given the levels of stupidity and hubris that we are now witnessing, I am not entirely sure that even this would unify us, or finally force some kind of consensus that the threat is real, and action should be taken.
I have long suspected that the increase of apocalypse survival themed books and television shows and movies seem to be preparing us for that post-apocalyptic world that we seem to all be in agreement that humanity will face, sooner or later. It might be a Biblical prediction come true, or it might be a nuclear war. Or it might be some plague, or something else.
But my own money would be on what the world's scientists have outright warning us about for decades now: climate change.
Indeed, maybe facing our own extinction could be what we have been longing for, in terms of unifying the country, or even the world. If so, too bad that it takes that for us to finally come together. And too bad that it seems to be leading to that scenario becoming increasingly inevitable, because of our own inability to get past ourselves and our selfish desires, and to recognize that there is indeed a crisis, and we might do well to finally begin to address it, once and for all.
Here is the link to Kathleen Parker's Washington Post article that I reference several times in writing this blog entry. Underneath it is a link to another article showing that the first species (the first of many more to come) to go extinct because of climate change has happened already. Please take a look at both articles:
Nothing in today’s headlines compares to the coming catastrophe by Kathleen Parker Columnist May 7, 2019:
Climate Change Wiped Out Its First Mammal-A Tiny Island Rodent in Australia by The Science Pages:
http://www.sciencepagenews.com/2019/05/10/climate-change-wiped-out-its-first-mammal-a-tiny-island-rodent-in-australia/?fbclid=IwAR09JtP6VloL79H5tTAJQXryxJLQeR739b9XhAHx_PAKp21EeGvD-Gar2a0
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