Noam Chomsky comments on the latest climate talks: “the richest and most powerful nation in history is leading mankind and much of Creation off a cliff. The point of no return is now around 2017, when the carbon budget will be spent.”
I know we are attached and desirous, not seeing and accepting things as they are. The coming crash may be unavoidable. All compound things are impermanent by nature. We are the desirous fools God made us to be. We have already eaten of the tree of knowledge. That horse is out of the barn. If God is banishing us from the Garden lest we gain eternal life, well, too late on that one too. Poetry is eternal. We made that. So are Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations and perhaps the infield fly rule. The moments I held my children for the first time are eternal, and I plan to take them and hundreds more with me when I go. There is a difference between eternal and everlasting. If God fears us gaining everlasting life, he can have it. As Woody Allen says, who wants to sit through the Ice Capades again.
We will probably take our licking in the evolutionary woodshed, retreat towards the poles as the earth warms and dessicates, drop our population drastically, if that is the price we must pay. We made it through the last evolutionary bottleneck when our numbers dwindled to under ten thousand, and we will make it through another. With Lovelock, the author of the Gaia principle, I believe we will become the new oxygen, the highly caustic byproduct of evolution itself that eventually becomes the catalyst for a whole new fluorescence of life. We will adapt, we will evolve and yes, sadly, many of us and our brethren flora and fauna will perish. We did not ask to be put here, nor did we did not ask to be so successful as a species. But we will do precisely what evolution programmed us to do: adapt and survive, even if adapting requires the exact opposite of what it took to make it this far. I expect that the new Eden will likely be strange and wonderful, in it’s own way too.
