| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"stoney" |
| Date: |
13 Apr 2005 10:11:45 PM |
| Object: |
OT: Mark Morford |
Earth To Humankind: Back Off
Say good-bye to your car, computer, everything. We are burning up the
planet too fast to hang on
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, April 13, 2005
The Earth is going down. Way, way down. To the mat, hard and painful
and with a sad moaning broken-boned crunch.
We are chewing her up, spitting her out, stomping and gobbling and
burning and gouging and drilling and sucking her dry and we are
carelessly replicating ourselves so ***** fast we can't even stop
much less even try to slow the hell down, and all we want is more and
faster and with less consequence and pretty soon the Earth is gonna
go, well, there you are, I'm finished, sorry, and boom zing groan,
done.
Don't take my world for it. Just read the headlines, the latest major,
soul-stabbing report.
It's one of those stories that sort of punches you in the karmic gut,
about how they just completed this unprecedented, four-year, $24
million, U.N.-backed study involving 1,360 scientists from 95 nations
who all pored over thousands of satellite images and countless
scientific reports and reams of stats, and they all distilled their
findings down to one deadly, heartbreaking summary.
And here it is: We, humankind, people, sentient carbon-based biped
creatures, only us and no one else but us because it sure as hell
ain't the ***** lions or caribou or meerkats or rhododendrons, we
humans have, in our shockingly short time on this wobbly sphere, used
up a staggering 60 percent of the world's grasslands, forests,
farmland, rivers and lakes.
That's right, 60 percent. Gone. Burned up. Used up. Much of it
irreversibly. These are the basic ecosystem services that, simply put,
sustain life on Earth. The glass ain't even half full, people. It's
about three-fifths empty and draining fast and we are doing our
damnedest to expedite the process because, well, this is just who we
are.
We reproduce. We consume. We use it up and dry it all up and move on
to find more and it reminds me of that line from Agent Smith in the
first "Matrix" movie where he stares menacingly at Morpheus and speaks
about how every mammal on Earth instinctively develops a natural
equilibrium with the surrounding environment, "but you humans do not.
You move to an area, and you multiply, and multiply, until every
natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to
spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that
follows the same pattern. A virus. Human beings are a disease, a
cancer of this planet. You are a plague," and then Morpheus gets all
huffy and righteous and goes on to inspire Neo to prove how we are
also full of beauty and fire and life and he makes it all better by
saving humankind so we can go buy the mediocre soundtrack.
But it doesn't stop there. The study also reveals that our fair and
gluttonous species has altered the planet more violently and rapidly
in the past 50 years than in any comparable time in human history. Yay
accelerated technology. Yay multinational conglomerates. Yay lack of
corporate ethics and rabid unchecked capitalist consumer gluttony.
Whee.
And you read this horrific story about how we are mauling the planet
at an unprecedented rate and you ask yourself the obvious question:
Our government is doing what about this again? Oh right: nothing. Not
one thing. They are, in fact, making it all far, far worse. Worse
environmental president in American history, you remind yourself.
Whee.
And this heartbreaking study, it comes hot on the heels of one of the
most distressing and sobering pieces of journalism I've read in ages,
an excerpt from a book by James Howard Kunstler called "The Long
Emergency," all about the imminent and staggering oil/natural gas
crisis now looming large over the U.S. and the world, a crisis of such
dire proportions that it will very soon reshape American life like
nothing since the Industrial Revolution. Except in reverse.
It's about peak oil. It's coming within a year or two. It means we've
essentially siphoned off all the easily attainable oil on the planet
(about 50 percent of the grand total) and getting to the remaining 50
percent -- the lower-quality stuff that's buried deep in rock or in
impossibly difficult locations or that lies underneath countries where
the people absolutely hate us -- will be so fraught and expensive and
hypercompetitive that it will mean not only, in the immediate future,
much more war and strife and pain but also, in the next decade or two,
a radical -- and I do mean radical -- reshaping of life as we know it.
Petroleum and gas will become incredibly scarce and everything we know
about consumer culture, travel, products, Wal-Mart, easy access to all
daily goods and services, will essentially vanish, and we will return
to a intensely local, viciously competitive agricultural model of raw
survival. Read this article now, and be amazed.
This is the incredible thing about humans. We are capable of such
amazing extremes, such breathtaking beauty and such violent ugliness,
astounding awareness to utter blindness, transcendental light to
staggering dark. Some periods in our history, it feels like we're
actually progressing, calming down, evolving, reaching new heights and
new levels of psychospiritual awareness, as opposed to merely
rearranging the puzzle pieces in a drunken haze of frustrating
anxiety.
And at other times, like now, like the new and violent and fractured
Dark Age so savagely exemplified by BushCo, it feels as though we are
working toward the other extreme, working our last raw nerve, seeing
how far we can go before we implode, how much of the planet we can
abuse and pollute and rape before something pops so violently and
unexpectedly we can only sit back and go, oh holy hell.
Maybe the nutball evangelical born-agains have it right: Maybe it's
best to just burn up this whole godforsaken lump of Earth as fast as
possible and then watch in giddy flesh-rended glee as Armageddon rains
down and only those who've given tens of thousands of dollars to
secretly gay televangelists will rise up and be saved and the rest of
us will merely drive our Priuses off a collective cliff into the fiery
pits of gay-marriage-friendly hell.
Ah, but we have bad news there, too, because, according to the cute
Rapture Index, that adorable little Web site o' righteousness that
charts the various global "signs" leading up to the impending Second
Coming, the Rapture should be happening, like, right now. Or maybe
last week.
In fact, the index now stands at 152, well above the "Oh sweet Jesus
take me now" threshold. Which means, of course, that the Second Coming
might have already come and gone, and Jesus may have swooped down and
taken one look at what we've done to the place and said, you've got to
be freakin' kidding me, and said, sorry but no one here deserves much
of anything illuminative or enlightened right now. Can't you just hear
all those gay-hatin' born-again Christians saying, what the hell?
Of course, no one said this was gonna be easy. Not Christ, not Buddha,
not Allah and not Lao Tse and not Rumi and not Krishna and not the
light beings right now swirling around your head and trying to get the
message across that this earthly plane is one of the harshest and more
difficult and bloody messy ugly lessons in the universe, which is also
why it's so valuable and mandatory and why so many souls want to come
here, to learn. Trial by fire, is what it is. This is what they say.
But if these scientific studies and stories are to be believed -- and
there's little reason to think otherwise -- that fire is about to get
one hell of a lot hotter. Stock up on duct tape. And water. And hope.
Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and
Friday on SF Gate, unless it appears on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which
it never does. Subscribe to this column at sfgate.com/newsletters.
URL:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2005/04/13/notes041305.DTL
©2005 SF Gate
--
Contempt of Congress meter reading-offscale.
Hello, theocracy with a fundamentalist US Supreme
Court who will ensure church and state are joined
at the hip like clergy and altar boys.
America 1776-Jan 2001 RIP
Religion is the original war crime.
-Michelle Malkin (Feb 26, 2005)
.
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| User: "sdq" |
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| Title: Re: OT: Mark Morford |
14 Apr 2005 02:58:10 PM |
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stoney wrote:
Earth To Humankind: Back Off
Say good-bye to your car, computer, everything. We are burning up the
planet too fast to hang on
- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, April 13, 2005
The Earth is going down. Way, way down. To the mat, hard and painful
and with a sad moaning broken-boned crunch.
The earth is fine .... it's the humans that are fucked
.
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