Long ago...
No one tore the ground with ploughshares
Or parcelled out the land
Or swept the sea with dripping oars -
The shore was the worlds end.
Clever human nature, victim of your own inventions,
Disastrously creative,
Why cordon cities with towered walls?
Why arm for war?
- Ovid, Amores, Book 3
I recently read Ronald Wrights A Short History of Progress (and have just started its continuation, What is America? A Short History of the New World Order).
It was a very moving analysis of the twentieth century's runaway growth of human overpopulation, consumption and technology, and how they have placed such tremendous demands on our natural capital (water, earth and air) that we may never fully recover from the damage we have done as a civilization in such a minute period of time.
I hope that our civilization will not self-destruct as the early civilization of the Easter Islanders and the Sumerians had done. I find it highly unlikely however, that given the small amount of time we have to engineer environmentally sustainable precautions for running out of our natural capital (namely water, and waters keeper, wood), that mankind has enough sense and foresight to realise that we cannot continue consuming and progressing, as we do. We are burning out of time with the only creature who upholds and supports us and all of our creations, Earth. Like a petulant child who eats all their candy, then feels sick and dies of diabetes.
There is hope; though not for us
-Kafta
