OURS is an age in which the transcultural mind is nearly consumed by the prospect of global warming, greenhouse gases, and the consequences of such warming on ocean levels and seacoast cities, the carbonization of our atmosphere and other devastating results of excessive pollution created by our species. It is our apocalypse. It has become the great myth of our age.
- To speak or to write in any genre with the intent to persuade others regarding the perils of global warming without considering the devastating role of human population growth is vain, irresponsible, and works against any hypothesis for meaningful contributions to delay those cataclysms that occur as the result of global warming. The exponential rates of population growth drive an ever-escalating demand for necessary goods and services, and without green alternatives, the irresponsible production and consumption of coal, oil and gas, non-biodegradable refuse, along with increasing deforestation, continue unchecked.
- To speak or to write in any genre with the intent to persuade others regarding the perils of global warming, without considering the magnitude of past global extinctions including the early stages of the sixth great extinction, or the Holocene extinction in which we are now living and our species has been living in for the past 10,000 years, is vain, irresponsible and strongly suggests that most of our species has no idea of, and cannot imagine, the scale, or the dimensions of a global extinction, no more than we can imagine the effects of geomagnetic reversals. The Cretaceous Mass Extinction, which occurred about 63 million years before our earliest ancestors arrived, flooded 40% of the continents, increased sea levels 300 meters higher than current levels, and increased global temperatures 6-14 ̊ C above those recorded today.
- The fact there are countries, international organizations, citizen groups and individuals working desperately to reverse such cataclysms brought on by excessive human population, and the forthcoming extinction, incapable of correcting the first condition, or objectively acknowledging the second, should stand as a clear illustration of human arrogance; its inescapable anthropocentrism, and a vanity that excludes the realities of contemporary scientific thinking and geologic awareness. We are increasingly reminded of this cause in our ecological literature, romantic in scope, melodramatic in populist appeal, which insists on a grossly exaggerated role of human beings to reverse what is ultimately and unavoidably a case of recurring geophysical phenomena or, to our species, its last great disaster. In defiance of all this, to tenaciously adhere to the idea that our species may somehow reverse what it believes is an imminent tragedy is Sisyphean: both noble virtue and sad folly.
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