City Of God 49

We are at the end of modernity. The planet cannot sustain any more progress. We are at the end of modernity. There are too many of us to make our advances sustainable. And the human blessing keeps on growing. It isn't just that a lot of people don't seem to have ever heard of or believed in using birth control. Capitalism depends on population growth. There has to be an ever-renewing market for purchasing and consuming products and services if the CEO swine want to stay obscenely wealthy, so we have to go on breeding and multiplying like bunnies to keep the machine going. but the earth can only take so much human presence and abuse, and we are already starting to reap the consequences. There is only so much arable land to go around before the natural economy of the planet's essential functions become so impacted and impaired as to make large portions of the earth uninhabitable to humans and other species. We have only the spectre of the new president of Brazil, Jair Balsonero threatening to destroy the Amazon rainforests in the interests of agriculture and resource exploitation and you will have an idea of what I am talking about. The fabled lungs of the earth, the largest and most biodiverse forest on the planet, and much of it could get ploughed under because of stupid capitalist greed. We already have President Dump squatting in the West Wing of the White house, promoting coal and other environmentally hazardous resource extraction while blaming the killer wildfires in California on poor forest management, which is to say, he wants more trees chopped down for the forest industry. And we have here in righteous smug little Canada our own Prime Minister Junior who still refuses to budge on the Kinder Morgan pipeline, making himself deaf and monumentally stupid to the common-sense pleas and arguments on behalf of the environment, given the obsession with putting the economy ahead of the environment, and in the long-run, the viability and sustainability of our Mother Earth. No one seems to be cutting back, on anything. Capitalism, and by extension, modernity, cannot sustain anything that isn't growth. We keep multiplying, putting greater strain on our planet's resources. We keep practicing unsustainable practices of agriculture and resource extraction, straining and compromising the earth even more. But we still can't seem to hold still. I think there is something in our human nature that insists on constant forward motion, hang the consequences. Since some of the big atheist eggheads have decreed that the earth is likely going to cease to be inhabitable in another century or so, thanks to us and our relentless innovation, there is a renewed push for further space exploration and colonization. We are not going to be content with ruining our own planet, but now we are looking at ways of going out and colonizing and wrecking other worlds as we have been doing to our own. If we could only harness and redirect our relentless curiosity and drive for invention and innovation, and harness our creative instincts in ways that could solve the problems that our short-sighted greed and selfishness have created: to not just abandon all fossil-fuels, but to invest all that creative and muscular power in the innovations and development of clean, renewable and green technologies and energy; if we could develop new ways and forms of agriculture that keep us all well-fed while protecting and honouring our Mother Earth, and if we could devise economic systems not dependent on greed or Darwinist domination, but cooperation and adaptation for meeting every human need and harnessing and channelling the human potential and gifts of every single person who lives on this planet. These are tall orders, but once we get away from the old and familiar ways of doing things and ruining and destroying everything in our wake, perhaps we can put our creative potential and forces to work at ways that are going to benefit all of us. We can still have our little space program, too. Let's put Donald Trump, Jair Balsonero, and all the other deplorables on the same rocket ship, and send it off to Mars and beyond. It'll be, of course, a one-way trip!