Humans have been muddling along in cities for around twelve thousand years, says Wikipedia, although if you count using an alphabet of some kind as the criterion of civilisation, the time span drops to a mere fifty centuries.
Still, long enough for the swirl of politics, religion, economics, art, philosophy, science and sheer accident to shake us all up in the cosmic blender, with no sign of purpose or design.
But fifty years ago a new ingredient appeared in the historical flux.
Nobody in the previous fifty centuries had been able to predict the future, owing to the vast and chaotic variables involved. However, if one variable were to grow dominant and overpower all other possibilities, the shape of the future might indeed be discerned.
That variable is the manifest damage we are doing to the planet. All the rest of our activities, our achievements, hopes and plans, life itself, are as nothing compared to the apparently irresistible current sweeping us into an ever-narrowing channel, which even the blindest oracle can predict will end in destruction.
Until we became numerous enough and powerful enough to foul the sky and poison the sea, the damage humans did, however disastrous, was insignificant on a planetary scale.
The Romans extended the Sahara Desert by over-farming North Africa.
Americans exterminated the buffalo and the passenger pigeon and made a dustbowl of the prairies. The Soviets destroyed the Aral Sea with intensive irrigation and industrial pollution, and thousands of other local environmental tragedies have played out in history, through greed or necessity, and usually through ignorance.
The difference now is that we are not ignorant, and the damage is no longer local. The danger of ecological systems collapsing worldwide has been known to scientists and politicians for fifty years.
It has also been known for fifty years to the owners of oil, gas and coal industries.
Today, everyone knows the principal reason for this potential collapse is the Greenhouse Effect – the heating of the atmosphere and the oceans through burning fossil fuels.
What changed human affairs a few decades ago was not the onset of the Greenhouse Effect.
What changed was not even the power to destroy the world; that power has existed since atomic weapons were invented. Fortunately, nobody’s pockets would be lined by their use, so they have remained an unexecuted threat.
What changed was that a tiny number of people decided that increasing their own wealth was more important than the survival of humans and other species on this planet.
Admittedly, nobody else in history has ever been presented with this choice.
Even the most brutal Mongol or Conquistador did not think that their invasions would destroy the world.
But the creatures who own and run the fossil fuel companies made the decision to fight science, humanity and common decency just so that they could profit from extracting every last barrel of oil and tonne of coal from the earth before it burns away.
Because it just looks like business as usual, the essential evil of these people is disguised, although their crimes against humanity are many times greater than those of Hitler, Stalin or Pol Pot.
While they count their, largely untaxed, profits they encourage governments to enact ever more punitive laws against protest and dissent, and in the meantime they build bunkers and buy islands to escape to when society breaks down.
Dante imagined levels of Inferno for treachery, fraud and violence, and he placed Satan, frozen, in the centre of Hell. But imagination fails to conjure a suitable fate for those who consciously choose to destroy the Earth rather than give up one cent of pocket change.
David Lovejoy, Echo co-founder
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