Very optimistic article...

I always worry that we won't have time to party for another week or two, or send our mass murderers around the world to kill a bunch more people.

by Daniel Geery (26 articles, 58 quicklinks, 121 diaries, 690 comments) on Saturday, January 12, 2008 at 9:31:34 AM
 

We might have only 4 more years.

This article http://www.oilempire.us/climate-time.html suggests that our window of opportunity to avert disaster was during the 1990s.  And if the melting of the polar ice caps that scientists now estimate may be only 4 years away actually happens, that may release the methane hydrates in the sub-polar tundra and lead to the kind of mass extinctions a similar event did during "The Great Dying" 251 million years ago.  Will humankind survive such an event?  Perhaps some remnant, greatly changed.  It reportedly took sea coral, a relatively simple life form, 10s of millions of years to recover from that event.  How long might it take humankind?

Or, maybe we could decide we really don't need mass global air and sea transportation, mass carbon consuming national surface and air transportation and private automobiles, 3000-8000 square feet per family private homes, food and clothing and gadgets imported globally at high costs in CO2 pollution and reserve our aircraft, ships, trucks, and cars for transporting only police, firemen, ambulances and emergency supplies of food, water, clothing, and communications equipment?  Maybe we could give up our domination and consumption lifestyles and find new purpose and fulfillment in nurturing the earth, our families, our communities, and ourselves?  We could heavily tax all forms of pollution and waste and use that money to innovate.  Maybe we could replace transporting our bodies locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally with projecting our voices and images via the internet to our family, friends, and associates.  Clean the rust off our bicycles and limit our local travel to an area we're willing to pedal to and from?  Shrink our communities down to that size?

Global warming, peak oil, global-oil-based-agriculture collapse, and global financial disruption may soon force us to consider making this transition from consuming to nurturing - and the wealthiest 1% could be asked to finance the transition with the trillions of dollars they have accumulated in the last 30 years of unprecedented productivity growth that has not yet been broadly shared.  Money is really just a concrete form of shared credit or trust that generosity will be reciprocated.  Everyone would be expected to contribute whatever energy and skills they have toward maintenance of the community with the assurance they would share equitibly in the community's shelter, food, water, clothing, equipment, etc.  Status and self-esteem could come from being able to nurture self, family, community, and earth rather than from being able to dominate and exploit.  The first 2 million years that we lived in wandering tribes required us to be much more cooperative, generous, and humble - and those impulses are more deeply buried in our minds, hearts, and souls than the competitiveness, greed, and arrogance that have developed in the last 50,000 years.  Our true human nature is founded in nurturance, generosity, family, and community.  Competitive exploitation is a relatively recent corruption that will need to be unlearned.  Those energies can be channeled into local participatory sports and our children encouraged to believe in their relative equality of potential.

Survival will be challenging.  It need not be war.  We are capable of caring and sharing.

by Man (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 7 comments) on Sunday, January 13, 2008 at 2:44:56 AM
 

Just remember...

We can't engineer the end of the world. We can only end us. The world and life itself might do better after they shrug the crazy bugs off, or maybe, just maybe, we'll get sensible in time.

by John Sanchez Jr. (5 articles, 0 quicklinks, 12 diaries, 1172 comments) on Sunday, January 13, 2008 at 2:44:28 PM