August 15th, 2022

      ​​I am approaching seventy years old and so I think I qualify as someone who has been exposed to humanity long enough to have some understanding of our short-comings. Additionally it is probably worth mentioning that for almost that entire time I have seen the world from the point of view of a naturalist and later a biologist/naturalist.  In some ways it feels like I have been under a state of siege my entire life. As I worked enthusiastically to amass the knowledge necessary to understand the workings of the universe I was aware that , though I could find the company of like-minded individuals, I was mostly alone in my awe for the natural world.  OK – I thought- I can live with that! But I was wrong!  All around me, as people scrambled to acquire all the things that clever marketers promoted as necessities for a good life,  I could see the consequences of that collective action on the natural world that supports us. All through the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s I have felt the anguish of knowing that the world that I treasured was becoming a shadow of its’ former self.  Birds of prey populations plummeted  as a result of a loathing for predators and the effects of pesticides,  mercury accumulated to frightening levels in aquatic ecosystems, many species were in steep decline as old growth forests, prairies, wetlands and almost every other conceivable ecosystem  were annihilated at every opportunity for the sake of some apparently necessary economic expediency. Along the way, some of the devastation became apparent to the public and from time to time awareness would lead to a  tempering of the destruction and some laws were put in place to regulate the degree of damage that  our air and water would be permitted to sustain. At moments it even seemed that there might be hope for a brighter future. But here I am in the 2020’s  and we are in the midst of the 6th mass extinction event   ( over a nearly 2 billion year history of life on earth) and we are the cause of it and maybe it doesn’t matter anyway because we are also steamrolling catastrophically towards an almost inconceivable change in the earth’s climate that will make it much less hospitable to us and most of the rest of life’s diversity- and all these changes are being generated by us. Of course, there are some in denial,  others who are looking to blame someone or something else  - but the evidence has been in for quite some time now – we are 100% responsible and we, as well as nearly every other living thing on earth, will pay the price for our out-and-out negligence.
      There was a time, when I was a child , that I honestly thought that I would be able to go out and save the world once I understood the full picture- because all you would have to do is explain the problem to people and once they understood the dire nature of these changes and recognized what precious good fortune they were willing  to lose in exchange for fleeting luxuries or convenience – they would come to their senses and do the right thing.  Dream on silly guy!  For  the last few decades I have tried to come to grips with the science and the politics and the economics of all these issues and sadly here is the conclusion I have come to.  We have a more than sufficient understanding of the science of all these problems and we also already have the technical know-how to be able to correct  or compensate for the things we have, up to now,  so badly managed. We have the ability to do things differently and live in a sustainable way that would allow for a good life for every human on the planet , without any further loss of biodiversity  or  runaway climate change. And we are not going to bother!
 
  Really? Are we so happy with the bill of goods and short term perspective  that we have been sold by the corporate/political       world? Is the inertia so great that a species of our adaptability is incapable of making any changes regardless of the consequences  of staying on our current path?
    I do know of individuals who have changed the way they live to try to do right by the world and I also know of technologies and systems of approaching problems that work much better than the status quo and would provide equal levels of economic benefit and quality of living but so far it is at a scale that is far too small to make any difference. Why?