We End Up Where We Are Going

It has been a while sine I have been back here. Been rather busy. So the Don is the big man on Campus in the U.S., so classic. We had Reagan so why not Trump right? Now we get "alternative facts", a rather nice way to say total and complete bullshit. At this stage it is hard not to just sit back and watch it all burn while laughing hysterically.

Honestly we have brought this on ourselves, we really have. Trump, climate change, outrageous inequality and the slow grinding extinction of species after species on our planet. The death of birth is a way I recently heard that put. Poetic.

Things are becoming so extreme that every single day we can read articles in the main stream which describe the decline of ecosystems, the polluting of the planet, the extremes in weather as a result of our changing climate or examples of brutal inequality. It is all there, freely available for us all to read. Easy to ignore as well, of course. We still have our sports, cooking shows, singing competitions and shopping fests.

The youth, who will bear the brunt of our planets failing life support systems, don't really appear to care either. Sure there are protests here and there, people sign petitions, but with one hand they sign a petition and hold a protest sign while the other hand is shopping for the next trendy gadget. The connection between material consumption and ecological decline has not been made. I guess that is what is so disappointing, because of course we could have our greatest impact on climate change simply by not shopping for material goods. It would probably take from three to six months for the machine to grind to a halt if enough of us stopped shopping.

I guess fear stops that from happening, I mean what would we do right? Jobs would disappear, our income gone we would not be able to pay for the house, the car, the power, the internet or food. So we keep working and shopping, destroying our substrate and one day the climate will take care of it for us. I suspect the majority of people don't want to face the fact that growth and jobs can not be maintained while also maintaining the health of our planet.

We are still good at making other excuses as well, it is not a fundamental problem with our economic system of consumption, it is that we have too many people. Some of us love that argument, it allows us to feel like our behaviour of buying stuff over and over is fine, while blaming people for having too many babies. It lets us off the hook. We don't need to consider the amount of stuff we throw away, or consider the volume of utter and complete crap we buy.

I am not sure how bad things will get, after reading the amount of science I have over the past years I can't say I hold out much hope for our species. I guess i could rattle off some data here to try and make the point, but honestly why bother. You can find it all with a google scholar search and the discipline to sit down and read. Sad fact is I have not seen much evidence to support the idea that the majority of people have the attention span to read to that extent anymore.

There probably really was not much point to this post, me being frustrated, feeling a certain amount of despair, just needing to write this down without putting my name to it. Sometimes I guess it is nice to be able to let out the feeling of hopelessness. I think by 2025 or so things will probably be bad enough that people will start taking serious notice, if the real world state of our environment continues to outstrip the scientific expectations though I am not sure there will be much we can do about it by then.

I guess we will see, I need to get back to doing some more research so I can complete my next project. Best of luck everyone.