The concept of fossil fuels as a generator of energy, even with improved technologies, has to be radically altered or humans will bring about the next great extinction all by themselves, within the next two generations. Industry is investing in alternative technologies, and in more advanced technologies for extraction and refining, but far too little, too late. Generating energy from oil and coal is way too profitable, and the entrenched idea of profits justifying anything and everything is so pervasive as to amount to a kind of mass psychosis. The fact is that we can’t eat, drink or breathe either money or oil, so either we embrace radical change or we die. But we’ll take most other forms of life with us. To make genuine progress on sustainable development, industry needs to look at the bigger picture - to move from having one strategy for “responsible environmental practise” and an- other for “making money.” We urgently need to “move toward an integrated stewardship of resources, ecosystems and communities, and to take responsibility for the impacts of their operations along the entire supply chain - from cradle to grave, from one generation to the next, from one species to another, from one society to another and from one country to another.” (GIN: greeningofindustry.org) Just over 30% of the earth’s population uses 80% of its resources.

 Undeveloped countries are paying the price for the first world’s luxurious lifestyles and profligate habits, as is the earth itself. Industry needs to find ways to make more than money. Wealthy industrialists can fool voters, consumers, media, politicians and entire nations, but there ain’t no fooling nature. Exponential growth in populations will result in there being 50 billion people on earth within the next 50 years, and if they continue at the current rate of using non-renewable fuels, global warming will destroy the earth itself. Let’s hope all those wealthy moguls flying about in the private jets derive satisfaction from the big numbers in their bank accounts, as they gasp their last breath. Crisis management has always been mankind’s strong point, but it’s astonishing that even that personification of freedom, justice and democracy - the almighty US of A - has been bought. The enemies of all things environmentally sound are shamelessly running (ruining) the show.

So now we have that scary automaton that talks real funny and calls himself the President right there in the Whitehouse, in charge of the biggest polluters on earth. It’s like putting Herod in charge of a creche, or the Great Train Robbers in charge of a pension fund. The only consolation is that he’s so embarrassing, and his policies are so blatantly myopic, that even the staunchest conservatives are becoming democrats.

The end is nigh so let’s consume till we die!

 Sometimes it seems like we got caught in the Evil Empire Matrix, that we’re puppets in some goth industrial nightmare. “Nature is the world’s largest development cooperation agency, delivering food and shelter to more than six billion people every day. All development cooperation together cannot do that,” Tamas Marghescu, Director, World Conservation Union, Europe What percentage of the profits from the worst polluters - mining, chemicals, fertilizers, forestry, manufacturing, coal burning power stations, factory farming - are being used to mitigate the environmental damage they’re causing? Ultimately, everything that human beings do on earth is measured in terms of profit. We do not recycle effectively because it’s cheaper to make new products and throw used ones away. We use outmoded technologies because industry has massive investments in them, and it’s too expensive to change. We use fossil fuels, even though we are systematically destroying the planet’s fragile atmosphere, because they are plentiful and cheap. If we had to look down at the earth, we would see shrinking pockets of wild areas, not one of them remaining uncontaminated by man-made pollutants. We have affected every single cell of every single species on earth. For the first time that we know of, the insatiable greed of one species is destroying the very substance of life on this planet.

Money Makes Our World Go Round

Once upon a time a few folk invented a strange commodity, an idea called money.

 They chose a shiny metal and some stones, and decided these were more valuable than any others. These, they declared, could be exchanged for all the food and comfort we craved, so we extracted everything from the earth, giving nothing back, to supply this bottomless greed, this terrible craving for more comfort, more food, more playthings.

We can’t eat, drink or breathe either money or oil, so either we embrace radical change or we die. But we’ll take most other forms of life with us. Looked at in perspective, it is as if our ever diminishing pockets of wilderness are being consumed by a cancer called human beings. Just look at our quaint vehicles belching noxious fumes, our weird factories, our comic book smog laden cities, exploding bombs and strange moving machines! Imagine you are up in the air, taking a little whiz around the globe. Does it look odd to you?

See the melting snow capped mountains, the polluted sapphire oceans, the shrinking glaciers and disappearing rain forests. Go a little closer to see the millions of life forms, all quietly going about the business of surviving, all intricately linked in a perfectly synchronized ancient survival pattern. Watch closely and you will see them silently becoming extinct, a different one every day, each leaving a gap that causes something else to disappear forever. Listen to the underlying silence, broken by the song of birds, the burble of rivers, the sigh of waves foaming against the once pristine sands. Peer under the glistening surface of the ocean, to admire what’s left of the spectacular variety of marine life, flitting about silently, weightlessly. It is divinely exquisite - beyond the power of all the words, the poetry, the music in the world to describe or comprehend its unutterable beauty. We see but the most miniscule fraction of its majesty, the divine perfection of its ineffably intricate intelligence.

The Fatal Flaw

But wait…there are blood, claws, flurries of feathers, slime, terror, pain, dying; and it’s not all brought about by humans. There’s a little s ome t h i n g here that seems strange in this paradise of halcyon peace and ineffable beauty. Everything is in fact consuming something else.

Every single living thing, from the most microscopic protozoa to the largest mammals – has to consume something in order to survive. Some of it seems innocent enough - but there it is. The food chain. Big things gobble smaller things, which consume even smaller things, which eventually die, and become transformed into the particles, atoms and cells that are born and grow back into big things again.

We are everything that is, and has ever been. We are simply transformation accelerated. We are entropy on steroids. Perhaps we’re trapped in some kind of existential monster movie, the living instruments of war between the forces of good and evil. Maybe it’s not our fault - we were given some intelligence but little wisdom, some will and discipline but lots of greed, hedonism and selfishness. If we are the real life entertainment, mere pawns in a cosmic struggle between good and evil, the baddies are clearly winning. But there’s another little incomprehensible irony - we are the baddies, and the goodies too.

Every one of us is a conglomeration of warring forces, addictions, thoughts, habits, disciplines, neuroses, psychoses. Every person tries to be what we think is good, only to succumb to duality - heaven and hell, god and the devil, life and death, beauty and the beast, the jester and the judge. What made this strange affliction called life, and does it care that we are systematically destroying it? Every living thing on earth dances together in exquisite harmony and balance, living and dying in a perfect system apparently designed to sustain itself for all of eternity. Enter humans (dadah! stage left). Looked at from afar, we do not seem to fit. Everything lives, breathes and consumes a little of something else - but we live, breathe and consume everything in sight. We are obscenely obese with manic consumption of every possible resource the earth can yield.

Again And Again, The Earth Pays The Price

Everything we create has an alien feel to it, as if it doesn’t belong here on this beautiful, peaceful planet. Every particle we transform with this abstract concept called 'economics' is fatally flawed as it pollutes every other life form. Within the next 10 years the earth will experience major droughts, floods, tidal waves, earthquakes and hurricanes.

At the present rate of carbon emissions the glaciers and polar caps will melt. At the current growth rate, within 40 years there will be 50 billion people on earth, unless some die in epidemics caused by monster bugs that we created through genetic engineering and indiscriminate use of antibiotics and other drugs. The seas will rise and flood the coasts of the globe, where 80% of humanity lives. The methane from billions of creatures that have decayed under the ocean floors will be released as ocean temperatures rise, and anything left alive will suffocate in clouds of noxious gases.

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a fart, a flood and a whimper. Will the last person to leave the planet please switch off the lights?

Story: Arlene Cameron   Illustrations: Len Sak