Today I received an e-mail in which the sender went on and on about the purported "death" of the real Paul McCartney in 1966,and his subsequent replacement by a double, a twin, a stand in, whatever. Many people have been talking about this old news for years. I don't happen to know the truth of the matter, one way or the other. It could be true. I don't know.
The newspapers and mainstream and alternative news websites are full of piffle about impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump, the stock market's trajectory, riots in Hong Kong, and more.
More and more, most of it leaves me cold, unmoved.
Here's why: all around us the planet is rapidly dying. Soon, very soon, all of these other issues will be rendered mostly or entirely moot, because the biosphere of which humanity is a part will be largely dead, and so will most of humanity.
The Mother Of All Human Die-Offs lies straight ahead, and not in the far flung future, no sir, no ma'am. At the rate things are going, we have 25 years at the very most, and most likely ten years or even five years or less, before things get really, really grim. In fact, crop shortages will begin to kick in with a vengeance over the next year in many countries.
The root problem is that the ecology is dying. The biosphere is failing very fast.
The Russian news site, Sputnik, today featured a story about the rapid die-off of the world's insect population.
'Unnoticed Apocalypse': Dying Insects Put Humankind's Existence at Risk
https://sputniknews.com/science/201911131077298095-unnoticed-apocalypse-dying-insects-put-humankinds-existence-at-risk/
According to the article half of the Earth's insect population has perished since the 1970s, because of loss of habitat and chemical use. Chalk all of that up to human activity. Why does that matter? Only because most of the human food supply depends directly or indirectly on insect pollination. As the insects die off, bees, wasps, butterflies, flies, etc., so will humans. No insects = no insect pollination of crops = no crops = no food = mass starvation = mass die-off of human beings.
Think that can't happen to you, because you live in Memphis or Little Rock or Boise or Indianapolis or Knoxville or Spokane or Fresno or Albany or Fort Worth or Reno? And you have an iPhone, high-speed fiber optic Internet, a car, credit cards, a bank account or three, stocks and bonds, a career, a house?
Because of the mathematical Law of Exponents, the end game, the final stages of ecological collapse, will go real fast, dizzyingly fast, with morbidly grim results. It may seem implausible that billions of people could die in a short period of time, but they can, oh, they can. Population biologists have observed the rapid decline and extinction, or near extinction of species time and again. It's happening now to insects, the world over!
And to animals and plants.
Humanity Has Killed 83% of All Wild Mammals and Half of All Plants: Study
https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/humans-destroyed-83-of-wildlife-report/
In Ecuador I have noticed a drastic decline in butterflies, in just the decade that I have lived here. I still see a few bees, but frequently they seem unable to fly, and are just crawling around in circles on the ground or sidewalk. I have seen first hand the destruction of the Amazon forest -- it is going, going, going -- being cut down for new housing, for farmland and pasture, for electrical power line rights of way, for oil well fields and pipelines, roads and highways, parking lots, athletic playing fields, for timber, and more. Ecuador is hardly the exception, but the rule. This is happening to forests all over the world, including the great tropical forests like the Amazon.
In my long walks on the beach on Ecuador's Pacific coast I repeatedly encountered dead dolphins and giant sea turtles. They get caught in the nets of the artisanal fishermen and factory trawlers that ply the coastal waters, and drown. This is quite common, all over the world. There are international conventions and regulations in place to protect marine fauna such as dolphins and marine turtles, but the reality is that a global population of 7.5 billion people demands endless thousands of tons of tuna, shrimp, cod, haddock, sardines, crabs, etc. Because of the miles of nets that fishing fleets put out there is indiscriminate slaughter of sea life, including many whales, dolphins, marine turtles and countless millions of non-commercial fish which are summarily caught up in the nets and killed. This is the reality.
We are slaughtering the oceans. We are annihilating the great forests. I have seen this myself, in recent years.
The insects are dying off. The great seas and forests are being brutally killed. The Earth's animal populations -- birds, amphibians, reptiles, mammals -- are dying off and being killed off.
These are the hard, uncomfortable facts.
The 1950s appear to have been the approximate, negative tipping point for the Earth's ecology. Everything has accelerated in a downward, death spiral since then -- more and more natural habitat loss, more and more pesticide and herbicide use, more and more hunting and fishing, more and more urbanization, more and more environmental contamination, more and more raw resource extraction -- logging, mining, petroleum and natural gas drilling, faster and faster, massive population growth -- do we ever like to f*ck, and how! We're screwing ourselves right to the edge of extinction, as our teeming billions overrun the planet.
Setting aside the nontrivial possibility of a genocidal nuclear war, it is entirely possible that the great bulk of humanity will die in a series of mass mortality events directly related to precipitous decline in the Earth's carrying capacity, i.e., due to terminal, over-exploitation of the natural systems of the planet, resulting in extinction or near extinction of Homo sapiens sapiens due to lack of food.
Global starvation. We're skating on the edge of that now.
I highly recommend tree and wildflower planting, and wildlife preservation activities, for those who are so inclined, or who are in a position to do so.
Many billions of trees urgently need to be planted right now, all over the world, and countless thousands of tons of wildflower seeds need to be broadcast along highways, byways, fence rows, vacant lots and fields everywhere to provide habitat and a food source for insects and birds. Massive ecological remediation projects of all sorts need to to be urgently kicked into high gear at local, regional, national and international levels.
If we fail to do that -- and at present we **are** failing to do that -- then our goose is cooked. It's all over. The end will not be much longer in arriving.
By the way, the solution is not likely to be religious or political. With rare exceptions, major political and religious figures pay scant heed to the impending doom of humanity, and the ongoing, rapid collapse of the Earth's biosphere. When has anyone heard Donald Trump mention the issues that I have raised here? Or Hillary Clinton, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Angela Merkel, Benjamin Netanyahu?
Or the captains of industry and finance such as Elon Musk, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Sir Richard Branson, Mark Zuckerberg, etc.? No, they don't mention these pressing issues. They're busy wheeling and dealing, raking in billions of dollars, playing political games, strutting on the world stage.
Look in the mirror. That person staring back at you is the only person who is going to save you.
It's time to grow up and put away childish games of dependency on power figures, who are, with rare exceptions, traitors to humanity and the Earth.
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