There are so many problems nowadays. I hate to even think about them anymore. I can understand why some people are just escapists, and drink themselves into a stupor or something, just to not think about all this.It seems obvious now, always in hindsight, that we would crash and burn. I have always written of the issues with the environment, with social ills, greed and so on. But no matter how pessimistic I was, it was Pollyannish instead. To be an optimist, I would say that at least the animals won't miss us. The planet will someday return to a quiescent state, with the normal carnivores and herbivores living their sometimes dismal lives, but with less humans to destroy the place.
No one likes to imagine that their family will be the ones who are sacrificed for the good of the planet. No one looks at their children and thinks, "they will someday starve to death," unless they are already living in a state of starvation. Around the next corner there will be a big chunk of meat to roast. Just beyond the horizon will be a crystal clear lake full of clean water. Next week there will be a scientific discovery that eliminates all disadvantages of technological progress. All the pollution will be solved somehow, and energy will be free.
Somehow, I don't think so. As I look around, in my vantage point upon a hill, I see a world that is drilling deeper and scraping the bottom. It takes more and more money to get a barrel of oil, and the average person makes less and less money. That can't last too long. So, unless there really is some magic solutions in the near future, our long term future seems pretty grim.
I don't want to look at my grandchildren and think of that. I don't want them to be slaves in some dark world like the world my grandfather had to exist in. But it is a real possibility that it could even be worse. For, even in the days of World War 1 (they didn't call it that, then) and the flu pandemic that killed off so many that it made the war seem insignificant, there was a great future ahead. Many discoveries were being made even then, in science and physics and energy production, that would someday pay off -- at least for a few decades.
But, like coyotes surrounded by rabbits and birds galore, we gorged ourselves without regard for the future. And only when the rabbits and birds became scarce, we the coyotes turned to eating lizards and bugs. And only when the lizards and bugs ran out, we the coyotes could only eat other coyotes, until there was nothing but ourselves to eat. Then all us coyotes would be dead.
Then, a few birds from far away might land in the world with no coyotes, and find themselves surrounded by seeds. And more and more birds would grow, and have even more baby birds who would have even more, until all the seeds were gone. And then all the birds would die, simply because there were no coyotes to keep the birds from eating every seed.
Of course, in nature, this is a sine wave of negative feedback, and the coyotes and birds and rabbits and seeds all keep the world in some kind of equilibrium, and the complete extermination of any one species is usually avoided. Usually, but not always.
Humans, as vastly intelligent as we are, compared to the rest of life on Earth, are about to become one of those species that either completely exterminates itself, or a very large proportion of the other species on the planet.
