The Future Facing Us – Part One:
Severe climate changes are rapidly upon us and threaten our way of life. This radical transformation is more significant and profound than many other events in human history. Most importantly, nearly every member of the major scientific societies is certain we are facing increased severe climate-altering events attributable to human activities. Many scientists believe that we have entered a new geological age they have named the Anthropocene, because of changes created entirely by human activity on the earth. Since some of our ancestors learned to use fire, the burning of anything combustible was used as an energy source which created our modern world. Burning has decimated ancient forests, great plains, and vast savannahs. This destruction has produced expansive erosion of soil, resulting in water and air pollution, and devastation of many plant and animal species. Ironically, this loss is done in the name of progress. Great quantities of coal and oil have been found within the Earth’s crust and provide more fuel to burn. Burning fossil carbon, hidden for millions of years, releases enormous amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that is not recycled and stored back into the earth. All these human activities cause rising global temperatures, resulting in melting polar ice, rising sea levels, flooding, loss of coastal habitat, and damage to marine ecosystems.
Water from seasonally melting mountain ice, essential for the survival of millions of people, is rapidly disappearing along with many ancient glaciers with devastating results. This water from the high mountains is crucial to agriculture, ranching, wildlife and many human activities. The increasingly severe weather changes have produced huge worldwide wildfires from dry trees and grass, destroying farms, towns and villages in their paths. Excessive heat drives extreme storms with massive destructive power, ripping apart homes, producing unheard of flooding and carrying away entire towns and valuable topsoil. The increasing heat then produces drought, and deserts expand as productive land disappears in many areas. These changes have become our new normal. Sadly, as heating increases, there will be even more disastrous disruption of food chains, with rapidly declining ability to produce sufficient crops and livestock. Starvation will loom over many previously thriving societies. Earth’s future will have mass migrations of people and animals from decimated homelands where they have lived for ages. Deserts will expand and islands will be covered by the sea. Coastal villages, towns and great cities will become uninhabitable. Everything we treasure and hold dear is in jeopardy. Not only are these rapidly increasing events costly for human life but result in a crisis of unimaginable recurring needs for nearly everyone to survive. The financial costs will be massive and beyond the budgets of many nations. We will need to rethink the world economy, the role of government and those governed, and work together to save each of us and not just the wealthy and privileged.
An accelerated number of species have become extinct in recent years due to habitat loss and pollution due to human activity. Scientists Gerardo Ceballos and Paul Ehrlich (Sci. Adv., June 19, 2015) state that we are entering a new mass extinction. There have been five previous major extinction events in Earth’s history. Many other scientists agree we are now in a sixth extinction crisis and are rapidly losing many plant and animal species that are vital to our ecosystem. We human beings have been unable or unwilling to act responsibly for our world. We are unprepared for these cataclysmic events despite numerous warning signs and accumulating evidence that many people continue to ignore or deny. We are destroying the diversity of nature, the stabilizing factor for our living world, and we constantly take more resources than we need, and do not work to reestablish a vital balance that has been lost and desperately needed.
The time to stop the worsening situation has quickly ended. Many scientists and I fear the point of rapid uncontrolled decline is upon us. The only way we will stop and ameliorate these events is to stop burning fossil fuels and quickly go to safer alternative energy sources. Reducing carbon dioxide in our atmosphere requires reestablishing rain forests, old growth forests, ocean carbon sinks such as kelp forests, and considering multiple creative ways to reduce greenhouse gases. There has never been a better opportunity for our world community to work together for a lifesaving common cause.
Corporate and individual greed and our addiction to fossil fuels, that is the basis of many people’s wealth, is the primary factor driving our inability to make needed changes. Switching to environmentally safe alternative sources has been aggressively suppressed by the large energy companies to maintain their wealth while knowingly risking our survival. We must look beyond ourselves and make great changes in our behavior, both personally and as a society. Everything we do must now be for the common good of our planet and its inhabitants. I have naively believed that as rational people we would come together to save ourselves and our progeny. We must all work for the common good. For the first time in my life, I can now see we have completely failed, and an environmental collapse is in our not-so-distant future. This process has already produced the extinction of innumerable species, and human beings are now on the chopping block. We are all responsible through our individual and mutual actions or inactions for many of the world’s most significant problems. We live in the moment and ignore the past and future, yet we wonder why millions of people and even Nature itself are suffering, and everything we cherish is drastically deteriorating and even dying.
As a society, we understand with certainty that we must improve our desperate crisis, yet we continue to make the same mistakes with the same outcomes. We have unending, pathetic reasons for not taking care of our world and every living thing, including ourselves. We are fools for not using our wisdom and critical minds to achieve goals for the common good. We have the power within us as unified intelligent individuals to correct this dire situation. Instead, we have chosen to maintain the status quo, assert our dominance and devalue everyone and everything that is not in our personal best interest. We choose leaders not by their altruism, wisdom, and knowledge but rather by those who promise to give us what we think we need, such as physical comfort, affordable lifestyles and even wealth, power, dominance, and control over perceived adversaries. Many self-centered world leaders want more power and control no matter how much they possess, and their status is gained through lying, intimidation, denial of history, basic truths and scientific knowledge.
Directly or indirectly, we humans have created the problems we are facing, and it is up to us to be the solution for the damage we have done. No one will solve our problems for us. Some pray for God to miraculously fix the mess we have made. Others hope and pray for the coming of enlightened otherworldly beings, angels, the Messiah, or the gods who have promised to return to save us. We want a quick fix, but, as citizens of the world, we must fix the problems we have caused. It is time for us to face the reality of our situation and work together to lessen the crisis. We are at an unprecedented moment in human history. It is a make-or-break moment. We think ourselves weak and unimportant, but we have great power when we work together for our common good. We have learned to eradicate diseases, improve our health and lives, create a vast network of communication, develop amazing technologies, go to the moon, and explore the universe. It is time to save our World and ourselves.
There have likely been billions of civilizations throughout creation that have arrived at this critical point in their evolution. Each being in every civilization must work together to solve and/or survive their common dilemmas, or choose to continue their dysfunctional, selfish existence and become extinct.
Ironically, the answers to our survival and our continuation as a species have been known to us for thousands of years. These are the words of the native fathers, the tribal elders, the sages, the ancient seers, prophets, saints, avatars and wise people:
- Love the Creator and the Creation.
- Love each other as we love ourselves.
- Love and actively care for each other, the world and its creatures.
When everyone and our world are valued, we all thrive. We will change and survive into the future as a species only when we lay aside everything that separates us from the Love that fills the universe. This is the lesson we must learn to survive. This is our home, our mother, and it is all we have.
