It is so frustrating for me to sit here in my cabin in the mountains listening to the news every day, detailing the ongoing collapse and death of the earth. All the same ideas keep going through my head, but I’ve said it all before – many times over. On the physical level, the greatest problem is the loss of the trees of our poor planet earth. On the social and political level, the greatest problem is the absence of any coherent source of authority. What we need is a political union of the entire earth, followed by an immediate and massive program of tree planting. But it will take hundreds of years of planting trees to restore essential tree cover to the planet, and there are just too many people on the earth for there to be any room to plant the trees that are needed. People have replaced trees on our planet, to the great sorrow of the earth (She is alive, and feels the pain). The human race is like a parasite on the earth which is rapidly destroying the host. Some observers have estimated that the last chance to slow and reverse this slide unto death was passed about sixty years ago, and that by now the collapse of our ecosystem is irreversible. So, eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.
Perhaps it is already too late, but isn’t it better to make some effort anyway? Perhaps an intensive program of change may yet add an extra ten years onto the short time we have left before all life on earth finally crumbles into dust. But, instead of a concerted world-wide effort to slow down the destruction of the earth, we see escalating political chaos which threatens to destroy the earth even sooner, through the action of “fire and fury.” The world may finally end not with a whimper, but with a bang, after all.
It is too late and useless to plan for some world-wide revolution that might make a change. I figure that the only hope is for the holders of wealth and power to get together to implement a new vision for the earth. I have expressed my views about how this can be done many times, and I am not going to revisit any of that here. So then there is nothing to say, except to express my frustration and sorrow that such a beautiful earth, the only known planet manifesting such an explosively rich diversity of life, must be lost to the folly of the human race.
I remember that some fifty years ago there was a forlorn hope that perhaps some remnant of the human race might leave the earth in spaceships to establish life on some other planet. Perhaps a modern day Ark could contain seeds and at least a few animals together with a selection of the human race, and head off into the wild black yonder in hopes of finding another hospitable host where that remnant of life could try to re-establish itself. I seem to remember that the unappreciated visionary, Timothy Leary, was one of the principle advocates of such an exodus as the last hope of that field of life energy we have come to understand as Gaia. (“Turn on, tune in, and drop out,” and then do something new – my interpretation of Leary’s famous slogan.)
But such a desperate gamble would seem to have an extremely low probability of success. Perhaps, after all, the best remaining hope for life on earth is still to try to salvage something from the wreckage of our planet so that some sort of life might continue to live on this earth, even if the chance that the human race might form a part of that life seems vanishingly slim.
The threat of a nuclear Winter (without any hope of a Spring any time soon) is the greatest threat to life, but there are other threats almost as severe – the increasing spread of toxic chemical waste that is still being distributed over the planet by the likes of such criminals as the directors of the Monsanto corporation – arguably more heinous criminals than Hitler ever was, to say nothing of the rapacious villainy of the banksters, whose depredations are almost harmless in comparison with those who are rendering the entire earth uninhabitable and toxic to life. The increasing spread of the sickness of cancer is the prime symptom of the declining health and vitality of the earth. This is widely understood, yet no one seems to have any idea of what is to be done about it. Of course, I’ve laid it all out, but no one ever listens to me. Donald Trump is not the problem – he is just a symptom of the problem – that the United States has followed the course exactly predicted by Thomas Jefferson at the founding of that country (not my country – I disavow association with that stinking corruption). “The longer any system of government goes on, the more the wealth and power will be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands,” Jefferson declared, and that is exactly what has been happening, as is glaringly evident to anyone who takes off their emerald glasses long enough to see what is really happening in the land of Oz. Thomas Jefferson also just as clearly expressed the only solution – that a new revolution is necessary every twenty-seven years (the “re-set button”).
But I am repeating themes I first expressed forty years ago, and I am trying not to just repeat the same old tunes. But what else is there to do? Lock the emerald glasses onto our heads and eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.
