David Attenborough & Tim Flannery on Climate Change

New Day Rising

It's deeply troubling to me, how much hope we put into technological solutions, none of which help the planet but only demand more industrial degradation to implement and maintain. It's entirely delusional. It seems the entire population is divided between the deniers, the paralyzed uninformed and the delusional. The more we close the gap between industrial civilization and the natural reality and limitations of Planet Earth; currently our only conduit to survival, the more we still slide in the wrong direction toward a finite conclusion which is growing alarmingly imminent.

Kim Cooper

+New Day Rising -- So, what is your solution that is not denial, paralysis, or delusion?

New Day Rising 

+Kim Cooper : Great question with many answers depending what you want to solve. If your solution must maintain this fantasy industrial civilization for longer than the infinitesimal blip of time for which the Earth can make it possible then we need to mine the asteroids, planets, stars etc in an ever-expanding scope until we have become such masters of physics that we can achieve a 100% recyclable life-system of some kind (which I personally doubt the universe would ever support. The universe itself is a recycle system which fails to achieve 100%. All current Earthly recycling technologies are practically futile in their inefficiency by the way). Population control could register an expansion rate aligned with the life of the universe itself, removing the recyclability requirement.

If your solution must demand an eternal humanity then the problem is entropy and I don't think anyone has ever imagined a solution for that. We had the opportunity to get on the above path but human greed, including my own, has probably killed it. I can't imagine we have enough time to make extra-terrestrial mining a reality but some big minds out there suggest I am wrong. 

If you simply want to maintain human life on this planet alone for the millions of years it had the capacity to support it, then you need massive population decreases and a return to hunter-gatherer societies. Fact: The biosphere can support NO permanent industry without some miraculous tech evolution which no competent mind has ever publicly theorized. The functionality for the hunter-gatherer solution barely remains possible because of the massive degradation already happening. I imagine that the total human population would have to drop into a tiny range. Wild guess: a hundred thousand? I have no hope for this solution because of human greed and our proliferation of societies smothered by a corporate-industrial-political-religious-media-education complex which inexorably steamrolls human intelligence and consciousness with pristine efficiency.

Whatever you wish to solve on behalf of the race it would have to include a near-total stoppage on having babies and an epic cultural shift ending cell-phone dronism and normalizing contemplation and solitude that the consciousness-instinct gap be significantly narrowed, ending these lives of 99% illusion and thus: an end to Western imperialism and all of our mislabeled forms of slavery and also the horrible perversions that have infected once-wise religions. Personally I can't imagine any of this happening on a wide enough scale to defeat the current delusional paradigms of control by corrupt elite.

Perhaps there is a solution in which our race could learn to die with dignity instead of the almost certain horrors I've been choosing not to imagine.

Perhaps denial, paralysis and delusion are themselves the only realistic mainstream solutions. I just can't participate.

I would like to say that mass population decrease and a return to hunter-gatherer society looks inevitable anyway, but in the bleakest and harshest of circumstances as the elite survivors embrace it too late, without choice. So perhaps the solution is simply to eliminate these hundreds of nuclear energy sites, which were a brilliant energy option but with the potential to mass melt-down in the wake of inevitable social collapses. Would resulting radiation effectively sterilize whatever elite tribe of humans remain? I need more research here. 

My only real suggestion is for a personal solution which I know with perfect clarity is possible: Outwardly we may pursue any of the half-baked solutions out there because they do help a little, while inwardly we can each end our own illusions and discover our very real capacity for genuine harmony, and live in the present and fully realize that Earth is still a heaven for now; that human individuals are unbearably beautiful as much for our errors and self-inflicted suffering as for all the good we try to do in our own little ways, some brilliant and many misguided. All our little goodnesses are great victories in the face of our brutal instincts which our survival once necessitated but which created all these problems; the inevitable side-effects. And we can celebrate every day our participation in this miracle, and show others by our example. It truly is staggeringly beautiful to fully contemplate, if you can disconnect from these wires long enough. We're the wonder of the universe, however brief we are. Nothing is forever. Our radiance is all the more for our impermanence. Sincerely, much love to you.