Maybe climate change is here but first we have to fix our debt, then we have to make some jobs, and perhaps after that we may do something about these storms, droughts, floods. Obviously we have our priorities exactly reversed. If we were to create a green infrastructure now, a green economy, we would create millions of jobs, our debt would evaporate.. Maybe we could even slow down climate change

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Most of us grew up in a family. Maybe as a single child of a single mother, or as one of many children and a mother and father, or as children of a mother and a father who left and a new father who appeared, and so on. But probably all children everywhere start life thinking that all people are as we are, whoever that we is.

Growing up is finding out that many, most, other people are not like we are. I, and millions of other children, grew up in two worlds. From the time I could talk, I talked two languages, knowing that I must talk one way to my parents and a few others, talk another way to everybody else. Soon enough learned that everybody else was not a homogenous group either, they spoke many languages, had different customs, behaved differently.

Humankind has become a chaos of differences. All the same in that we have two arms, two legs, a head. We all eat, but we eat different kinds of food, at different times of day, in very different quantities. We dress differ- ently, we adorn ourselves differently. But most important, we think different- ly about almost everything. So different that all over the world people kill each other because... Well, because lots of reasons, none of them rational.

I am very old, have lived and worked in several very different parts of the world with very different people. The 20 th century was a time of expansion, what we called progress, endless number of inventions, changes, mixing of peoples and cultures.

Now almost half a century ago I happened to get to know a tribe of people who were different from all the differences; they were remnants of how we all were a few thousand years ago. They had none of the things that define modern humans: no money, no weapons, no country, no government, not even clothes or shoes. They did not have those things and did not want them. They might use an iron pot to cook in occasionally. Sometimes there was a knife or machete. They did not know the concept of "owning."

Of course they also thought very differently than we do. They had grown up in a kind of family that was "flexible." No father and mother but seven or eight men, women, adults and children, that changed. Someone left, another person came. But always tight with each other; affectionate, loving. Babies were held by everyone 24 hours a day for the first few years. Babies often nursed by more than one woman. They avoided conflict of any kind by intense awareness of their environment, hiding. They grew up thinking of themselves as "we." And from an early age that We included animals and plants. They knew themselves as part of nature. As Native Americans said in many different ways "the four footed, the feathered, are my brothers, plants my cousins."

The first thing we, civilized humans, learn is that I am a unique individual, I have a name, a family, a world that is apart from nature. As an "I" it is difficult to imagine another kind of thinking, although that ancient thinking iswhat all humans knew only a few thousand years ago. We lived like that the first many thousands of years of being human.

The greatest and most important difference between the two kinds of human is that one lived sustainably, within nature; the other apart from nature and therefore unsustainably.

It should be clear to us now after some major events this year and last that climate change is here and that it is the greatest threat humans have ever had to face. The fact that the richest and most powerful country on earth does not face this challenge is a national shame and probably will have extreme consequences for all humans everywhere.

In addition to making the planet warmer, much warmer, we have also for a few hundred years systematically and thoughtlessly eradicated thousands of plant and animal species. The planetary ecology needs variety to be bal- anced. It should be obvious by now that we, humans, have allowed to make our own human world, as well as the natural world, utterly unequal. One single species dominating all of nature without a thought for consequences. Our illusionary thinking that we can control Life is cutting our own roots.

How can we not accept climate change? We who are proud of and benefit from the sciences that make our life style possible deny other sciences that keep telling us that what we are doing to the planet is causing climate change. We knew about global warming 40 years ago; we knew that we were the cause of it. But our leaders and their media decided that other things were more important. What I see today is an addiction to money and to violence. Both modern inventions and both making ever more grossly unequal societies.

For almost half my life I have studied and wondered what made us change from non-violent joyful people who owned nothing to warring, immensely unequal, unthinking destroyers of their own planet. It seems more possible every day that if we continue to change the planet, we may well effect the survival of our own species.

I learned from an ancient kind of human how we all lived in order to survive for so long. Living in the middle of an ecology, stronger than some and weaker than others. Knowing ourselves an integral part of all Life. Living in small groups, close to each other, relying on the environment for food and shelter. What I read about other First People confirmed my observations. It was unthinkable for them to kill for sport, to eradicate whole species. We would not have survived for more than a hundred thousand years if we had been as warlike, intolerant, destructive, as we are now.

Recently read A Green History of the World; the Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations, by Clive Ponting, - 1991. Green and environment are my passion. Hard to read, the type is small, the lines close together. A mass of facts, numbers, statistics, which must have taken the author a life time to find and organize. It is so full of detail that it is hard to find the theme. The theme is that Europeans have systematically erased thousands of plant and animal

species for maybe six centuries. Recorded in great detail: what species of bird went extinct in what year and why. And that for thousands of plants and animals.

The first 18 pages are devoted to a fairly detailed story of Easter Island which has become the iconic example of humans cutting all trees on their island and so making their own survival impossible without the help of others. But if we indeed destroy enough species on our planet there are no others outside to rescue us. From page 19 the book is pages and pages of the species of plants we considered weeds, or unpleasant to look at, and systematically killed. Local and regional governments paying for the eradication of an unending list of trees we didn't like. Bounties paid for the eradication of animals. Killing entire species for sport.

All that came as a shock. I knew that we are seriously reducing biodiversity now, but I didn't realize we have done that for so long. Nor did I know that it was Europeans, white people, who started it so many centuries ago. And our aggressive destruction of the earth continues with bigger more powerful machines. Cutting at least half of the tropical forest of the very large island of Borneo in order to plant thousands of square miles in oil palms. Mono culture on a scale never before done. Digging for oil always spills oil into rivers that then poison life, including human life. Blowing up the top of mountains in order to get to coal is as destructive.

I had not realized that extinction goes back centuries, albeit for different reasons. Then, we killed because we could; now because we have powerful machines who destroy more thoroughly. The author of Green History doss not mention human population crashes as a consequence of the diseases we brought with us when we, Europeans, "discovered" the rest of the world.. He does have pages and pages of yet another interference with ecologies: the import of plant and animal species that were considered beautiful, exotic, attractive. All of it meddling in a planetary ecology we never considered, knew nothing about; we still don't.

How did my grandparents, and their parents, think about the earth? Very obviously they thought of the planet as something they owned and could shape as they saw fit. Today we continue this grand illusion with the latest refinements. We have learned how to change the DNA of plants and animals. We "genetically manipulate" and then get a patent on a plant the company then "owns." Of course nature immediately sees to it that the pest the GMO plant is made to repel, evolves so that it can now eat the GMO plant. Which makes Monsanto do some more hocus pocus, gets a patent on a new and improved species they now also own.

Games people play.

But playing games with nature, our food and only home, is not only foolish but has lethal consequences.

The kind of intense, totally unequal violence we have sunk to at present was unknown even half a century ago. Wars fought for oil. Many square miles of landscape denuded or blown up to get at coal, diamonds, gold. The overwhelming power of a nation, flying an airplane flown by a computer controlled a few thousand miles away, to kill one man (and the innocents who happen to be in his neighborhood). We are doing what was unthinkable not long ago. Yes, indeed we have changed.

I have spent half my life thinking about why we changed. After studying and reading for many years I see three possible explanations.

One is that in the very last thousand years of the 150,000 years of our existence we have immensely increased our number at the same time that we increased our consumption not only of food but of all the resources of the earth that we need for an ever more elaborate and expensive life style.

Fifty years ago I attended a yearly meeting of the AAAS (American Associ- ation for the Advancement of Science) where a gifted psychologist, John B. Calhoun, presented an elaborate study of populations. Many scientists experiment with mice that have a shorter life span than humans to make generalizations about humans. His study showed that mice definitely have a culture, a society, that with increasing population density makes individuals more violent, acting un-mouselike, and then always resulting in a population crash. Pandemics also are known to have caused intense behavior changes, violence and then a population crash.

More than half of all seven billion humans now alive live in cities, often in incredibly compressed spaces. in barracks (apartment buildings) or in towers: a thousand people living on top of each other, or in slum cities where a dwelling is 6 X 8 feet or less. However, from what I have read and seen on Youtube the people of those illegal cities are, and have to be, creative, cooperative, and astonishingly non-violent. So perhaps Calhoun's hypothesis that rapid population growth leads to violence, unusual behavior, ultimately population crash, is not the whole truth. Some of the scientists who have studied those compressed cities propose that those people are the future: living almost without money, a minimum of power (electricity). they have to be and are extraordinarily inventive.

A second explanation of why we changed was briefly the subject of science fiction writing in the 80s of the 20 th century. The supposition that human "stock" was experimented on by extra-terrestrial powers. Doing to humans what we now call genetic manipulation. Shikasta, by Doris Lessing, - 1979 comes to mind. Quite a few other books. One of those ideas that may be possible but not provable

The third possibility is what I now think the most likely. My contact with what I prefer to think of as First People impressed me greatly; they changed my life. There was a simple purity about them that from the first made me think that is how all of us were. After the two years when I had an opportu- nity to get to know them I read what others had written about First People in other parts of the world. Probably the first author I read was Laurens van der Post, South African writer, a generation before mine. He wrote three books about who he calls the Bushman of the Kalahari Desert. In one of them he writes that if a Bushman lands in jail he dies; sometimes the first night. Doctors could never determine a "cause of death." Van der Post writes that is because the Bushman is untamed.

By implication that means we are tamed humans.

First people are "wild" humans. Wild in the sense that nature is wild -- not in our modern use of the word wild as crazy, unmanageable. Living in the wild--a desert, a jungle, snow and ice, a tiny island--requires an intimate familiarity of that wild. And a constant awareness in that wild. A small little girl once held me by the hand when we went to join the others of her group. Every now and then she would stop me for a minute, or walked around some invisible danger. She could not explain why, other than that it was necessary. An adult later explained that she and everyone else learned early to be aware of animals, who they were, what intentions they had. When she led me around an invisible something she probably knew to keep a certain distance from an animal. When she stopped for a minute she gave an animal the chance to get away. To be forced into a small concrete space, totally unfamiliar, is ruthlessly being taken out of a known reality. A wild human cannot live in a human-designed world. Tamed humans could not survive in the wild.

Taming is controlling. Dogs are bred to be man's best friend but here in Hawaii "everyone knows" that if you tie a dog to a very short leash, witout human contact other than being thrown a bone or some food. the dog gets dangerous. What the military call discipline is the same short leash taming. Humans have to be taught to kill other humans. We are tamed, conditioned, to live in our human world, a world completely incapsulated within the larger reality of the planet.

The more I think of that the better it fits. Our entire growing up, our education, our monstrously extended system of laws and regulations, all are ways to tame us and at all cost to keep us tamed. Europeans, white people, who were the first to be tamed still seem to think that all other kinds and colors of humans need some extra taming. And if they cannot, or do not want to, be tamed there is always prison; yet another of our proud inven- tions.

What is the difference between tamed and untamed humans? Wild humans grow up much as animals do: learning the laws of nature that are few and easy to learn but impossible to ignore. Tamed people think humans must make the rules. Over the last few thousand years we have made millions of rules and laws, different in every climate, every environment, every part of the world. We blithely continue to ignore the few laws of Mother Earth.

Yes, we say reluctantly, perhaps climate change is a force of nature but we have to fix our trillions of dollars debt first, and then we have to make some more jobs, and perhaps after that we may have time to do something about these storms, droughts, floods.

Obviously we have our priorities exactly reversed. If we were to create a green infrastructure now, a green economy, we would create millions of jobs

while getting rid of our need to burn oil and coal In an amazingly short time the debt would dissolve and global warming might even be slowed down.

America is so superior that it never looks at other countries. But for instance Germany and Denmark did reverse priorities. They changed their economies to be entirely green. Denmark claims ro be carbon-neutral now, Germany is almost there. Their economies are healthy and growing (sustain- ably) and their debts unimportant.

We of course cannot reverse priorities because Big Oil won't let us. We are not only tamed but slaves, owned by Big Money And by the way money is now just numbers in a computer. We are slaves of our arrogance, thinking we can make "our" world the way we want it.

Well, we have that world, and it is not only burning but totally, utterly, unsustainable. The longer we keep it that way the bigger the collapse of course.

Exit homo sapiens sapiens, the wise species; the species supposed to be aware of being aware. In fact unaware of how unaware we are. One of nature's experiments that failed.

Authors Bio:

robert wolff lived on the Big Island, called Hawai'i

his website is wildwolff.com He passed away in late 2015. He was born in 1925, was Dutch, spoke, Dutch, Malay, English and spent time living and getting to know Malaysian Aborigines. He authored numerous books including What it Is To Be Human, Original Wisdom and Rain of Ashes. 

"Original Wisdom is an extraordinary book that every person should read." Rob Kall