HAVE WE EVOLVED ENOUGH TO DEAL WITH GLOBAL WARMING, PLUS...?

Every young human on the planet, whether rich, poor, powerful or weak is now confronted with the probability that civilized life and life itself on this planet will soon be destroyed. We face a return to the Stone Age and the law of the jungle. The impending crisis, noted by many, is due to the population explosion, finite and diminishing sources of energy, soil, and water, global warming, and a fragile uncontrolled market economy. Jared Diamond in his 2005 book Collapse made us aware that civilizations have perished in the past for reasons similar to those that will cause the collapse ours. Some raise the question whether or not we have evolved enough to deal with sustaining ourselves and our civilization. That is a very good question.

An evolved rational response to our human predicament would compel us quickly to set up a political economy whose first priority is to sustain and conserve our planet and its resources. We need to rid ourselves of our planet wide political economy based solely on greed for quick profits and greedy consumption. We need prompt public planning by entities with the governmental power to preserve resources. In a word, we must do away with capitalism as we now know it. We should also be doing the following:
Stop all pro life policies and flood the world with free contraceptives.
Stop cutting trees immediately, everywhere.
Stop all pollution of our air, our rivers and lakes and halt all discharge of sewage and pollutants into the oceans.
Require all engines everywhere to have zero emissions.
Stop using water and soil to feed cattle, chickens and pigs. Humans must learn to eat corn, beans, and squash and soy bean products.
Stop all flood irrigation in agriculture and compel the use of drip irrigation. Seriously conserve topsoil everywhere.
Prohibit building or paving on tillable top soil.
Establish and enforce planet wide regulation of fishing to prevent over fishing and destruction of species.
Make a massive transition to solar cooking, solar water heating, solar power, wind power, wave power, and current power. Adopt all energy conservation strategies.
Recycle and reuse everything. Compost all human excrement and garbage.
Study and copy what Cubans have done with organic farming and worm culture to get food without oil, and oil based fertilizers.
Put a huge tax on gasoline.
Stop building subdivisions in deserts.

We in the West need change our own values, curb our own consumption, and determine what is really important to our civilized life and is possible to have. We need an all out research effort to develop new sources of energy, and to reduce our energy use. We need a means of rational debate and communication among us.

We in the US as a national community are doing absolutely nothing about any of the foregoing imperatives for our civilized survival. In fact, we as a nation are leaving no stone unturned to make things worse!


We have no public community with the power to plan for our sustainable future. We worship our uncontrolled profit seeking market economy. Privatizing, and enlarging profit making opportunities, are the dominant ideas of our age. We, as a human community are not planning, are not thinking ahead, and are not conserving. “All government is bad. Get the government off your back!” “Planning is socialism.”

We ruthlessly plunder the finite resources of the planet to make a short term profit and to gratify our greedy consumption wishes.

We buy ever more, consume ever more. Our economy and our jobs depend on our increasing consumption. We are not rethinking our priorities and we are not curbing our consumption so that we consume only what is really needed. “There is no need to sacrifice. Buy more! Create more jobs.”

We encourage the births of more humans everywhere. We reject public implementation of family planning. Some religions and some governments make “pro life” a central tenet of their belief systems.

We waste resources on wars to control resources and to enlarge profit making opportunities for those in power.

We have no means for reasonable objective communication and enlightenment among us. Our media propagandizes and encourages our existing uncontrolled market economy and encourages even more consumption and larger SUVs. Our right wing radio ridicules and belittles the very idea that a crisis exists. Those who make profits from our uncontrolled market economy control what is researched and taught in our universities.

So our children and grandchildren will almost certainly live in the Stone Age and with the law of the jungle where the strong and powerful kill and starve the weak.

We could plan and prepare now. We could now spread the consciousness of active non-violence, of truth, of justice. We must of course learn how to solar cook, compost, and grow sustainable foods. However, our thinking and planning now could make this life for our progeny much more pleasant. It could help to preserve our existing body of knowledge, know how, and wisdom. It would be nice to preserve our computers, and the vast store of knowledge on the web. It would be nice to preserve our ability to make glass, and metal objects. It would be nice to preserve our knowledge of medical care and public health.

December 1, 2007

Douglas R. Page, Tucson, AZ dougpage2@earthlink.net