I was watching an interview with Eddie izzard last week on the France 24 channel. Now I know that many of you will not be fans of Eddie but I hold him in quite high esteem. Not only is he a brilliant comedian but he is also a bit of a thinker.
As some of you will also know I am concerned about the situation with our own environment and the damage we are doing to this planet.
With that in mind, Eddie was talking about this being our last century on the planet. With the damage we are creating and the problems we are causing it is likely that this century, the one we are currently in is going to be the last one of successful human behaviour and access.
We already know that we are running into problems with air quality with the increasing bacterial activity to which our own antibacterials are becoming less and less effective, we also know that our continued use of fossil fuel and deforestation is going to cause further problems. This is going to be exacerbated by our constant production of and dumping of plastics and a growing population. All of these things will continue to grow over the next 50 or 60 years and leave us with a fairly major problem.
We are already seeing mass extinctions over a relatively short period of time, animal species are dying out as we speak and these will not return. Already we have seen some 97% of species on the planet disappear.
When you Factor in the issues in relation to biodiversity and the number of plants that are becoming extinct you’ll notice a clear pattern. It is not going to be long before us as humans are affected quite substantially, global warming will of course melt the ice caps which will mean large chunks of the planet will not be usable, we will also be then faced with a large number of humans concentrated into a small mass of land, with antibacterial drugs becoming less and less effective and more people living together in an enclosed space, without the ability to grow the quantity and quality of food required. You can see that a mess very quickly occurs.
Even if we ignore the bacterial activity then there is the viral activity to be considered. There is absolutely no reason why a horrible disease won’t spread through our population very quickly.
Yeah you can call me a doom monger or a harbour er of doom if you want, but the evidence is already there in front of us to be seen by all. The damage we are doing to our own environment is colossal the increase in population is causing more and more pressure on the land, and there is the burgeoning middle classes in the Asian countries we are likely to be drawing on more resources and not less.
I’m not saying they shouldn’t have their middle classes, just pointing out that if humans don’t start to act different we’ll all die. It’s obvious that capitalism is driving much of the damage to the environment, yet at the same time we are uncovering scientific facts which may help us.
It’s likely that we have a few years left before we get to a tipping point, a tipping point where the planet will be on a point of no return and a whole series of mass extinctions will apply very quickly. The species known as humans are going to be the worst affected.
You should also note that it’s only taken us around 2000 years to get to this point. Perhaps this is going to be a short-lived time in the history of our planet.
But there are some answers, we know that population growth needs to be dealt with, we know that we can’t continue to pollute our oceans and our air, we know the damage we are causing. We just need to start to reverse some of that and pay very serious attention to our use of resources and to the way we treat our planet.
We don’t have anywhere else to live. We can’t continue to shit in her own back garden and not expect that shit to build up to the point where we can no longer live with it. It’s obvious that the path we are on does not make sense it is not sustainable. And it’s not until us humans realise that is a truth and that we need to change. Only then will we start to own up to the fact that we have very serious problems comma what has gone on in the past cannot continue into the future. We are only damaging ourselves.
There are of course many solutions to this, we need to be focusing on local issues and dealing with local matters. If we can’t collect rubbish from the local park and look after local wildlife how can we expect it to look after something that is tens of thousands of miles away in rainforests or on the plains of Africa. all of the solutions start with each one of us taking personal responsibility for our actions and owning up to in actions.
For far too long each one of us has passed on the responsibility to someone else thinking that it wasn’t our problem. The problem is it is our problem we do need to deal with this and being in denial about it is not an answer.
Until next time.
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