According to many biologists and earth scientists, we are witnessing the sixth wave of extinctions in the past half-billion years. We are the root cause of this mess due to our technology and life styles! Is this a doom and gloom prediction? What do we do as individuals, families and communities to turn this around? Hope lies in the reader herself. Are you up to the challenge? Personally, I have faith in you!

::::::::

Climate change is disrupting natural processes as reflected in higher than normal extinction rates. Consider the following message from the website "The Extinction Crisis:"

It's frightening but true: Our planet is now in the midst of its sixth mass extinction of plants and animals -- the sixth wave of extinctions in the past half-billion years. We're currently experiencing the worst spate of species die-offs since the loss of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Although extinction is a natural phenomenon, it occurs at a natural "background" rate of about one to five species per year. Scientists estimate we're now losing species at 1,000 to 10,000 times the background rate, with literally dozens going extinct every day [1]. It could be a scary future indeed, with as many as 30 to 50 percent of all species possibly heading toward extinction by mid-century [2].

http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/biodiversity/elements_of_biodiversity/extinction_crisis/

Justin Aford of IFL Science reinforces this pattern:

It is generally agreed that human activities, such as the destruction of habitats in order to accommodate our ever-growing population, are largely responsible for this increase in species extinction rate. However, it's also evident that conservation projects have been effective for some species. We need to continue with these efforts if we want to stand a chance in preventing this current crisis from worsening.

http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/current-extinction-rate-10-times-worse-previously-thought

Meanwhile, National Geographic states:

According to a review published on May 29 in the journal Science, current extinction rates are up to a thousand times higher than they would be if people weren't in the picture.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/05/140529-conservation-science-animals-species-endangered-extinction/

Not a pretty picture. Some deny the issue and say the resources are not legitimate. I personally trust resources such as National Geographic as well as other science grounded writings. I also trust the common sense evaluation by my senses of once vibrant forests I had known as a child. These respites from school and community are now filled with Walmarts and fast food chains. Thus is progress: corporate desolation.

We all lose in this, don't we? Work and slave for years making sociopaths rich while the Earth goes to hell in a hand basket? What of our children and grandchildren? Oh, hell, let them suffocate. Meanwhile, enjoy your Happy Meal!

And who are our authorities? Corporations! They own the government and media and they own you. What are these authorities like? Well, corporate behavior has been described as being consistent with the psychiatric diagnoses of Psychopathic Personality Disorder. http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=114x6602

A psychopath has the empathy of a Mafia Hit Man who blows someone away and then says, "Hey, its business!" Thus is the corporate mentality. The Mafia "Godfather" is the God of western civilization.

The movie and book, The Godfather (1972) speaks to the same thesis of the movie titled, "Corporation" (made in 2004). It too compared the behavior of corporations to sociopathic behavior. The mafia and the corporate executive mirror one another. A society run by these sociopaths yields a horrendous outcome. How lovely those words in the movie, Godfather, "Go ahead; make my day." "BAM!" "You're dead! Hey, its business!" Its about profits and control!

A psychopath cares only for himself. He doesn't care about you, your loved ones and the planet. The corporate mentality is never-ending profit or growth. While upsetting to many, this behavior reflects the definition of cancer, which is unnatural growth or "growth gone wild". Does cancer care about the person it is killing. Do psychopaths care? Does it even care or realize that when the "host" body dies, so does the cancer? Thus is the lot of corporations and their behaviors regarding the environment! In murdering Earth they are sealing their ultimate fate: death. Obliteration is the inevitable outcome of the corporate mentality of "never-ending profits". As cancer in the human body leads to death if not caught and cured, our actions based on growth without end will create a dead planet. For example, research dead zones in the Ocean in relationship to our behavior. http://oceanservice.noaa.go/facts/deadzone.html

In the face of scientific data, climate change deniers within corporations and in the general population refuse to see the pattern. We desperately need to question: is the state of this planet and the future of human generations on solid ground? Do we even care about future generations? My observation says, "No we don't care! I'm going to Wal-Mart and get my 20% discount!"

Consider the words of David Korten:

We have been seduced by 'corporate libertarianism', which demands that all political, economic and civic barriers to the free rein of corporate interests be removed. The result of this unhealthy power in corporate hands is ecological destruction, the loss of civil freedoms, the erosion of democracy and community disintegration.

http://www.greenleafpublishing.com/content/pdfs/top50_korten.pdf

Corporations control the market place (i.e., the food), the factories, the schools, the government, the world and us. As comedian George Carlin stated, "they own us." This ownership makes us vulnerable and destroys our freedom.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dY4WlxO6i0

Thus is the power of affect arousal such as humor, horror, love, and sex in relationship to memory consolidation and understanding. (Weingartner, Hall, Murphy, and Weinstein, 1996).

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v263/n5575/abs/263311a0.html

Instead of cooperating within the Earth's processes, we attempt to control them. Likewise, our educational systems are about control and domination. The ethos is "line up, shut up and do as your told." Our children are nothing less than McDonald's hamburgers where our choice, "have it your way", is revealed as a vicious joke. Whoops! That's Burger King! Corporate mentality is all about standardization alongside control and domination. In school, the emphasis on standardized education and tests is about control.

As stated by Giroux: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divide_and_rule

If the right-wing billionaires and apostles of corporate power have their way, public schools will become 'dead zones of the imagination,' reduced to anti-public spaces that wage an assault on critical thinking, civic literacy and historical memory." - Henry Giroux, 2013.

Ask yourself why corporations don't want critical thinking? Dead zones in our children's mind mirror the dead zones in oceans, rivers and forests. The devastation of our minds co-creates the devastation of the planet. Neither is possible without the other; neither can be remediated without addressing the other.

Top down control oriented management structures include a desire for growth without end alongside the corporate ethos of control and domination. This mindset has caused us to make a mess of the planet, our lives and future generations http://www.mollylarkin.com/what-is-the-7th-generation-principle-and-why-do-you-need-to-know-about-it-3/

Chaos allows us some hope in moving beyond our top-down system. Indeed chaos is more bottom-up than top-down, or perhaps we could also use the term systemic more so than controlled by a King? Perhaps true change occurs during times of seeming randomness that gives birth to alternative systems. Perhaps the future entails life on this planet that we would never recognize in our oxygen-based planet and human mindset?

Perhaps the corporations are the instigators of our death and the subsequent arising of a different form of life? Just playing with options. Have to remain positive!

According to Chaos Theory, scientists state that chaos exhibits order. As stated on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory):

Chaos theory is the field of study in mathematics that studies the behavior of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions--a response popularly referred to as the butterfly effect.^[1] Small differences in initial conditions (such as those due to rounding errors in numerical computation) yield widely diverging outcomes for such dynamical systems, rendering long-term prediction impossible in general.^[2] This happens even though these systems are deterministic, meaning that their future behavior is fully determined by their initial conditions, with no random elements involved.^[3] In other words, the deterministic nature of these systems does not make them predictable.^[4][5] This behavior is known as deterministic chaos, or simply chaos. The theory was summarized by Edward Lorenz as:^[6]

Chaos: When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future.

In other words, we don't exactly know what we are going to get in relationship to our behavior. As physicist Albert Einstein quirked, "I can't believe God plays dice with the universe." Such is the lot of Mother Chaos (Tehom, the "Waters" in Genesis 1:2 or Tiamant in Babylonian myth.) https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AwrBT.JUsXJWCrwAVxZXNyoA;_ylu=X3oDMTEyYzlkZzBnBGNvbG8DYmYxBHBvcwMxBHZ0aWQDQjExNjBfMQRzZWMDc2M-?qid=20100721161410AA35jKF)

Perhaps Nature is more "bottom up" than what we realized? Perhaps there is no externalized "God" running the show? Meanwhile, many chaos theorists say that chaos is another kind of order. In other words, every thing effects everything else.

On a more concrete level that speaks to our need to eat, we can ask: "How do we secure our food outside corporate grocery stores and farms while making their polluted ways of doing business a thing of the past?" Consider the likes of Permaculture Gardening https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20111027143335AARuOoJ:

So permaculture will use fewer chemicals, retains soil, uses less water, and without the centralized commercial farms, there will be less need to freight the produce thousands of miles to the consumers who buy it, saving fossil fuels, and cutting pollution and greenhouse gases.

Permaculture works with Nature, not against. It's like the martial arts in the orient. You go with the movement of your "opponent," not against. In permaculture, this mindset means: less water is needed alongside fewer chemicals, no loss of topsoil, more food produced closer to the eaters, which means less fossil fuels needed which entails less pollution. Those are all pluses in my book. It also exemplifies the cosmic law: Change one thing you change everything.

The smaller the farms alongside more backyard gardens we have, means fewer commercial industrial scale farms. Corporate farms use tons of fertilizers and chemicals because they are planted as monocultures, which strip nutrients from the soil, and leave the crops vulnerable to pests and disease. There is also more topsoil runoff in commercial farming.

If you were to walk into any healthy forest, you would see a wide diversity of plants and animals to the point that with every step you take, you can go into a microclimate created in relationship to the plants and animals. A proper Permaculture Garden will do the same for your lawn or piece of land. And, yes, there are city Permaculture Gardens. It allows for creativity, so even in living in Baltimore City, you may be able to foster a healthy ecosystem. Not saying its easy, just saying it takes out-of-the-box thinking.

For more information, visit the Permaculture website:

http://www.permaculture.org/

Permaculture allows you to use fewer chemicals while the environment retains soil, uses less water, and without the centralized commercial farms, there will be less need to freight the produce thousands of miles to the consumers who buy it. The results include saving fossil fuels while cutting pollution and greenhouse gases.

In line with Permaculture is Transition Town. Transition Town is about creating communities that are resilient, equitable and sustainable. Indeed, Transition and Permaculture often go hand-in-hand. To learn more about Transition Town, visit:

https://www.transitionnetwork.org/about

Transition envelops a deeply democratic way of living. Indeed, in some of these groupings, there is often a focus on decision making via a community consensus technique called Holacracy. The beauty of Holacracy is that it's organic. A group's decision entails a "lets see what happens, tweak what needs to be tweaked and if necessary, revisit the issue."

Obviously, if Aunt Edna is laying on the ground bleeding to death, you don't want consensus. You just start saying, "John, you get the wrap to stop the bleeding while Edna calls the ambulance." "Wait," states Jack. "Edna can't speak, she's passed out!" "Ok, Jack you call the ambulance!" (I caught my mistake and decided to have some fun).

Rob Kall interviewed Brian Robertson regarding holacracy:

http://www.opednews.com/Podcast/Holacracy--Discussing-it-by-Rob-Kall-Bottom-up-Top-Down_Bureaucracy_Hierarchy-Hierarchical_Management-151111-204.html

I personally have been in groups using this method of decision-making. Its great until someone decides to return to the old top-down decision making processes. I personally walked out when that happened. Afterwards, others started leaving the group as they too saw the pattern. Saying "oh we do Holacracy" doesn't cut it. The group needs to ensure that the decision making process is not taken over by a top-down dictator and instead follows the process. In this way, decisions will become more organic.

To summarize this article, Steppenwolf sings in their song, "Monster," "American, don't you care about your sons and daughters?" How do you answer the question?

Most people in our country say, "No, our kids are not my problem. Just give me my Happy Meal." So, prove me wrong, I would love being wrong. At this point, caring for future generation is not what I observe.

The choice is yours and ours alone. Don't count on Bernie Sanders or any politician.

Count on yourself in relationship to your family, community, environment and grandchildren going into the 7^th generation.

You are the power and the foundations for what we've been waiting for. The resurrection of peace, love and harmony is in you.

As Christ says in the Gnostic "Gospel of Thomas,"

If you bring forth that which is within you, that which is within you will save you.

If you do not bring forth that which is within you, that which is within you will kill you.

No external god. You and we are what you and we are looking for.

Authors Bio:
Burl Hall is a retired counselor who is living in a Senior Citizen Housing apartment. Burl has one book to his credit, titled "Sophia's Web: A Passionate Call to Heal our Wounded Nature." For more information, search the book on Amazon.

Burl's philosophy entails the idea that "everything effects and causes everything thing else." His spirituality of Sophia i.e., Wisdom is universal as well as within each of us. He also sees the idea of Chaos as not being "all over the place" but as infinite relationships.

The question I present in my articles speak not so much towards the politicians, but how WE the people can empower ourselves within a planet that is healthy, wealthy and wise.