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| "Core of the Earth", oil by Tim Holmes |
As the year closes I wonder if the
Mayans are right after all. Maybe this is really it for humanity.
We don't know much about the future but there's one thing we know for sure to be absolutely true: if a population cannot live within its environmental constraints it will die out. Human beings are lovely and all but we're in no way excepted from the laws of nature. The human race today displays about as much collective responsibility and concerned for the future as a typical teenager. That teen, having grown rich and powerful, is now capable of manipulating his environment to feed his every immediate desire. But as much as he's matured in social tolerance in recent decades, the proportion of immediate to long-term vision seems little budged in millennia. He remains incapable of making wise choices to assure his own survival.
There are no two ways about it: he will only survive if he can live within the means provided. If not he will die. At this point he is running out of resources and if he doesn't turn his effort to reducing his consumption to fit within the natural limits, the only choice he'll have left is between a slow or a fast death. This is the tragic cost of his beloved free will.
Humanity
doesn't seem to have the will toward maturing wisdom like we do to
maturing technology. We'd rather develop new toys than clean up our
mess. So how can we possibly survive our own selfishness? The only
humanity that will survive is one that manages to grow
to moral adulthood. There are plenty of wise individuals among us but
the treasure of their reasonable lifestyles can be wiped out by a very
few idiots. Human survival depends on cooperation, involving something
most of us cringe at: embracing painful restrictions on individual
behavior to assure that our progeny will survive.
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