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Though the peoples of the world are of many races and cultures, the way of life they aspire to and their way of going about it makes them one. We are a global civilization. Some have achieved the way of life they aspire to, in some form or another. Others have not and never will because those that have done so has happened at their expense. This is a global order and it holds us all in its embrace. The consequences of inequality, in combination with the environmental havoc this way of life has brought about, gather as a storm of cataclysmic proportions. But let me not leave such a statement simply hanging in the air like that! Let me substantiate it for you, as the issue is central to this presentation.
I don't know if you know of The Doomsday Clock? It was conceived in 1947 by the Bulletin of Atomic Science as a way of monitoring burgeoning nuclear activity at that time. It has gradually been referencing other crises, since then, too. As of the beginning of this year, its hands are at 100 seconds to midnight, due to issues like failures to defuse the nuclear menace; rein climate change in, tame its ramifications, and take issue with disruptive technologies, like AI, cyber, bio and chemical warfare and nanotechnology. This reading was before Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine, with how that is compounding the way the climate, environmental, economic, societal and geo-political crises and the pandemic foul one another! This poses a fundamental question. If, as we take for granted, human progress has made huge strides, how come the Doomsday Clock has got so close to midnight? Actually, how come there is a Doomsday Clock at all!
The Human species is one of many natural creatures that LIFE has created out of itself. Yet, we have become a species in default, for we fall short of the mark for being a successful species, as far as the LIFE that produced us is concerned. You see, if it is a detriment to our health when some internal organ no longer functions properly, so is it for the planet when an apex species, such as we have made ourselves, is aberrant.
What's the evidence for saying this? Well, consider the following. Though the human presence has been calculated to be .01% of the bio-mass of life on Earth, the mass of human made (anthropogenic) stuff is put at more than that of the planet's entire bio-mass (including us)! Take concrete, for example! Can you imagine that after water it is the most widely used substance? According to the reckoning, each of us produces more than our own weight of stuff every week! ... and here we are in 2022 where, for all the harm we are aware of having inflicted and all the talk about turning the tide on the crises human activity has provoked, yet the planet is absorbing twice as much heat as it did in 2005. Meanwhile, major economies water down carbon commitments in favor of the continued use of fossil fuels, in order to keep up with the rampant pace in the evolution of harmful human activity! The upheaval human activity is generating is undermining Earth's being a hospitable environment for us. That is the aspect of Earth that is in upheaval.
However, there is more to the matter than that!
In our planet's story there have been catastrophes that have wiped out enormous proportions of life at a blow. But they did not affect its physics and chemistry. Something remained and life re-established itself. Our activities, science and technologies, however, have been subverting the physics and chemistry of life to the extent that its biology is changing. This matter is more than that of the lives of individual species. The resultant bio-diversity loss, climate change, habitat loss and impacted eco-system services are causing life to spiral in a vicious circle.
The concern here is that, as the parameters within which living systems operate are eroded, the laws of life are affected and there comes a point of no return where life stops and the system, as a whole, switches, gearing itself towards death, instead. In such a state, though the components remain, they sleep until a new system conducive to life emerges. In-so-far as Earth seems to be moving to a point where humanity is imposing such a state of biological unconsciousness upon it, environmental science has come to see this close down of Earth´s life-support systems as heralding a mass extinction event. In other words, this planetary condition is on the way to becoming fatal.
In the grander scheme of things, though, nothing is wrong. As just exemplified, LIFE takes such matters in its stride! In the larger span of time, when there has been the chaos and upheaval of earlier extinction events, LIFE showed its knack for initiating trains of events to adjust, balance, regulate, re-organize and re-establish itself. This is actually good news. So, how could we entertain a frame of mind that encompasses both the good news and the bad? Well, that is what I would like to look into with you, in the following power point presentation, through the material I've gathered together, from various disciplinary sources.