Deep Green - April 2008
Lord of the Fruit Flies
History shows that human society can change if some moral force (civil rights, women’s rights) challenges convention. However, before we can be optimistic about solving the environmental crisis, we must be realistic. Otherwise, our confidence is delusional.
Human analysts struggle to assess our predicament because we live inside the experiment we are attempting to understand. We are the fastest changing variable in the experiment. Sixty-thousand years represents only a blink in the story of life on earth (one-thousandth of one percent), yet those millennia comprise the entire history of humanity from a million wide-eyed hunter-gatherers to six-billion humans clinging to a shrinking resource pool. From inside this surging human wave, particularly from one single lifetime, it is difficult to witness the forces that erode civilization. We must take a step back. Read more »
