Month: August 2021

The press is one of the many aspects of contemporary human life that was severely damaged by the internet. The current emphasis is on internet news, and it’s subjected to less scrutiny now. Because news gets out so fast thanks to the web, wire services are almost meaningless and the result is a general hastiness and sensationalism and commercialism of internet news sites, even the “legit” ones, the whole culture of internet short sightedness and haste and short attention span has weakened news gathering. There was this woman who claimed to have saved a bunch of young Afghan women from the Taliban, and she was touting her great accomplishment on Today.com and New York Post.com and CNN and Wall Street Journal.com and tv cable news. And they didn’t check her out. It turned out she made up 99% of it. So now they’re all, uh, That story about that woman was not true,s orry…because no one did due journalistic diligence…They’re also obviously selling puff pieces about products, sometimes in special sections with euphemistic titles meaning someone paid them to write an article or “review” but sometimes not, sometimes it’s right there in the news stream, as in a recent Washington Post puff piece endorsing, and linking to, a company selling fruity soda-pop like alcoholic drinks to college age kids…

This is the age of humanity’s destruction of the environment, its blind assassination of most animal species, and its glorying in anti-science misinformation. Being an optimist about humanity is like being optimistic about a band of monkeys of which all but two are infected with rabies.

My blog title is a headline from another Washington Post article. We’re destroying one species after another. In Alternet we learn: A report by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) found that overall population sizes of “mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish” have dropped by 68 percent since 1970, indicating that the planet “is being destroyed by us at a rate unprecedented in history.” .. The study also says, “Radical changes in ecosystem functioning, in turn, may have severe implications on ecosystem services for humanity, such as food provision, disease resistance or economic benefits…Thus, if we continue to lose species at the fast pace our analysis suggests, we will continue to impair ecosystem services to our own disadvantage.”

It was a beautiful world abounding with marvelous, delightful, magnificent, fascinating animal species. 68% already gone. Thanks to our blind, selfish narcissism. Thanks to greed. Thanks to not caring about the big picture. Thanks to just not caring.

Anyone who loves nature is more than feeling merely threatened–they’re feeling like their best friends are being mass-murdered.

The species that deserves to go extinct, Homo Sapiens, probably won’t. Maybe HG Wells was not so far off, envisioning the Morlocks. Some version of us will go on.

We don’t deserve it.

‘Scientists have long been worried about what many call “the methane bomb” — the potentially catastrophic release of methane from thawing wetlands in Siberia’s permafrost. But now a study by three geologists says that a heat wave in 2020 has revealed a surge in methane emissions “potentially in much higher amounts” from a different source: thawing rock formations in the Arctic permafrost.‘ – The Washington Post

My sons are adults but still relatively young. They are going to lean toward denial because anything else is unbearable. But I’m going to have to tell them the truth, if they’re willing to hear it:

“The world is about to change for the worse. The steady incursion of climate change’s extreme weather is about to increase exponentially. We had a window to stop the fall of these dominoes but we can’t do it now, it’s too late. It won’t be the end of humanity but it’ll be the end of civilization as we know it. Our food supplies are going to truncate down to very, very small amounts. Unbelievable famines are coming to places that never had them before. Most of our farming land will turn to dustbowls in short order. There will be no fish in the sea, only in fish farms. Most wild animals are going to go away. Your chances of survival are going to be  much slimmer too. It used to be your chances of survival to sixty years old, say, were pretty good. Now, not so good. I’d say you have a twenty per cent chance of living that long. In fact, if you don’t deal with the coming catastrophe in a pro-active way, your chances of living forty are very slim…So if you want to survive, you have to make a plan. You have to try to work out what parts of the world are going to be safest, and find a way to get there; and you have to figure out how to survive there. I’m sorry. This is the fault of the generations that came before yours, including mine.”