The collapse of all interconnected biological systems has been accelerating exponentially.  We have suddenly reached the point where the end is now clearly in view.  We are not the first generation to believe that the present inhabitants of the world are living in the last days.  I have just been reading Boccaccio’s Decameron, which starts out by setting the scene of the Black Death in the city of Florence in 1348.  Death was so omnipresent that many people lost all reason, and abandoned all restraint, morals, property, and precaution.  It was a descent into Chaos, literally the Black Death.  

     Mirabile dictu, there were actually some survivors of the human race to soldier on, putting new human beings on their God-forsaken planet, who somehow managed to go on living to suffer another day.  And now it is upon us again.  Every day’s news brings more evidence of the Last Days.  Amidst escalating pandemics and climate change, we have the Russians launching a war of aggression against Ukraine; we have melting Arctic ice sheets raising sea level by another ten inches; we have 1000 year droughts and floods; we have our poor planet literally burning up with out-of-control forest fires; we have monsoon floods in Pakistan credibly nominated as one of the worst natural disasters of all time; we have raving lunatics being elected President of the United States, and we have almost half the country supporting the guy; we watch dumbfounded as the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant melts down in slow motion, ready to rain down destruction over the whole of the contested area; we have maniacs like Bolsonaro in Brazil rampaging destruction upon the last remnants of the Brazilian Rainforest ~ all we need now is another Nero playing his fiddle, or Gabriel blowing his Horn.  

     So what else is new?  Are we all suffering from catastrophe fatigue?  Are we waiting for Aliens from outer space to land on our planet, or a new Messiah who will lead us all back to the Garden of Eden?  Or is it time to crack open another bottle of absinthe and go down laughing, like the desperate revelers of Boccaccio’s Decameron?  It looks like the human race has collectively given up the struggle and we are all “sleep-walking towards the destruction of our planet,” as warned by António Guterres.  

     The root of the problem is that our planet is and always has been ruled by Money, Power, and Greed.  There is no hope of survival short of a planetary-wide total system change, to put the direction of planetary survival in the hands of new Stewards who will consider the Earth First, not America First, not the Russian, German, or Hebrew Motherland or Fatherland First, nor the Faithful of Allah, nor any other parochial interest.  Let us put the Earth and her Trees First, that the survivors of these times, in case there are any, may have some chance of finding shelter on an otherwise desolate planet.  

     Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.