Key Precept: How to know whose advice to follow to save yourself and loved ones from disaster.
15,000 scientists just signed the largest-ever warning about Earth’s destruction
On Nov 13, [2017] the journal BioScience published the “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice”…The first warning was issued in 1992 when 1,700 members of the Union of Concerned Scientists argued that humans are “on a collision course with nature.”
…Since 1992, with the exception of stabilizing the stratospheric ozone layer, humanity has “failed to make sufficient progress in generally solving foreseen environmental challenges, and alarmingly, most of them are getting far worse,” the paper states. Its authors say they are especially troubled by “the current trajectory of potentially catastrophic climate change…from burning fossil fuels, deforestation, and agricultural production—particularly from farming ruminants for meat consumption.”
They also point out that this rapid heating has “unleashed a mass extinction event, the sixth in roughly 540 million years.” Scientists predict many current life forms could be annihilated or near extinction by the end of this century...
Time is running out, the scientists remind us.
And if that’s not bad enough, there’s always the threat of atomic warfare.
Think the human race ends in a win for mankind? Think again. Even the scattered survivors of an apocalyptic event will wipe each other out if left to their standard modus operandi. William James, “first among the Harvard faculty giants a century ago”, wrote in “one of his most eloquent, utterly ageless essays, a sweeping denunciation of war and at the same time, a paean to military values.”
“History is a bath of blood.” The Illiad is one long recital of how Diomedes and Ajax, Sarpedon and Hector killed. No detail of the wounds they made is spared us, and the Greek mind fed upon the story. Greek history is a panorama of jingoism and imperialism — war for war’s sake, all the citizens being warriors. It is horrible reading — because of the irrationality of it all — save for the purpose of making “history” — and the history is that of the utter ruin of a civilization in intellectual respects perhaps the highest the earth has ever seen…
But I do not believe that peace either ought to be or will be permanent on this globe…A permanently successful peace-economy cannot be a simple pleasure-economy. In the more or less socialistic future toward which mankind seems drifting we must still subject ourselves collectively to those severities which answer to our real position upon this only partly hospitable globe…Martial virtues must be the enduring cement; intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command, must still remain the rock upon which states are built — unless, indeed, we wish for dangerous reactions against commonwealths, fit only for contempt, and liable to invite attack whenever a centre of crystallization for military-minded enterprise gets formed anywhere in their neighborhood.
In the article Is War Inevitable? by E. O. Wilson, he argues that, yes, it is.
Continue reading “The End of the World”
