Are you ever having a wonderful day, maybe you are viewing a vivid red sunset, and suddenly you think to yourself “that sunset is red because of air pollution.” Or maybe you have nightmares about the extinction of the human species due to global climate change. Do you worry about what will happen to the polar bears when the ice is gone? Do you fret about the end of farming due to dust bowl like conditions in the Midwest? Maybe I am the only one. But I shouldn’t be. Everyone should be worried about this stuff. The whole world should be putting down the guns and bombs and spending all its time on fixing this problem.
But we aren’t. We are heading head long into the biggest challenge our species has faced since global nuclear war. Never has the whole lot of us been in more danger. Simply put none of the cool things we have ever wanted to see are going to happen if we can’t get past this hurdle. We will never colonize space, never cure cancer, never figure out the big bang, never travel to new star systems, and never create artificial intelligence. Instead we will slowly battle for survival as the earth develops a fatal fever.
We buy our SUV’s, start our wars, burn coal, gas, and oil for power, killing ourselves with convenience. We wont use solar energy because then we would have to have less energy hogging homes, we wont use wind power because we want our ocean views, we wont drive the hybrid because it isn’t “cool” looking enough. When the aliens find our ruins in a million years will they conclude that we convenienced ourselves to death? Will future generations live like every bad road warrior movie, because we couldn’t be bothered? Will our grandchildren inherit a world gone absolutely mad?
Imagine a world where global warming runs wild. The middle of North America, the bread basket of the world, is now a desert. Greenland has melted and the seas have risen up to ravish most of the coastal cities. New Deli, New York, Boston, all uninhabitable. Temperature regulating ocean currents shut down due to salinity changes in the ocean, and northern Europe becomes an artic wasteland, while at the same time many other parts of the world turn into desert wastes. Most of the large land mammals die off, large portions of the ocean are barren wastelands. People die left and right due to lack of food. Wars are wagged over the scant amount of fresh water resources, and large refuge populations wander the wastes seeking shelter any place they can. Hurricane season is all year now. The southern United States is an endless wasteland of broken homes and demolished cities. The Sahara expands to swallow most of Africa, while the interior of Asia dries to a brittle crisp. The Canadian Shield and Siberia become some of the few habitable regions left in the world. And on and on and on.
The problem is not enough people are doing enough. We simply are not ready for this. We can not put aside our petty life styles to think about the big picture here. Humans can go the way of the dinosaur. One day an ant or cockroach could crawl up onto the top of an abandoned building and survey a world devoid of human being. It chills me to the core.
Every action we take should be filtered though an “is this good for the species” filter. Every purchase you make, every trip you take, every piece of food you eat, everything should be looked at from a larger view point. Or else we are dead. No more wars, no more freedom to choose an SUV, no more lax environmental laws. It all has to change and change soon or we are screwed. Not just the poor, or the foreigners, all of us. We are all trapped on this little blue ball, and frankly we are in for a ruff ride ahead of us. Wake up people, its time to get our shit together.