There's a couple of new documentary films on Netflix I'd like to recommend to you if you haven't watched them yet. One is "Seaspiracy", a film about the degradation of the oceans and seas. It reads like Sea Conspiracy, but I think there's a play on words here because it also reads like "Seas Piracy". The other film is David Attenborough's most recent, "A Life on Our Planet".
These two films offer us the opportunity to take a hard look at how far the 6th mass extinction has progressed in the 100 years since it started.
A corollary is a book titled "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Noah Harari", where he avers we anatomically "modern" humans are the most destructive species in the history of the planet. It's interesting that anatomically modern humans were the most intelligent of the seven human species that roamed the Earth when we Sapiens arrived. What happened to the other six species of humans? "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" is a fascinating read on many levels, I will recommend that also.
And yet we don't think of ourselves as destructive. Perhaps it's time to collectively take a hard look at ourselves by absorbing Freud's message in its most accessible format, his summation work, the book "Civilization and it's Discontents". There's this idea out there that Freud has been discredited. Closer to the truth is that we don't want to see the aggression that is in every human. In every species in fact. There is no capacity for survival otherwise.
The question arises; why can't aggression be modulated from within our human species? Freud's answer is something to the effect the survival instinct springs up (for unknown reasons) from primordial biology. It is literally outside of our purview in spite of the fact it is within us and drives us. We also call it life force energy, and on this planet it's all around us...and it is us also.
The simplest illustration of this I can think of is: "breathing is not a decision". Or, "holding your breath is not a reliable form of suicide".
The life force drive is paramount, it literally overarches everything biological, and we don't control it, it controls us. But there is a point it collapses of it's own accord, Freud called that the death instinct, together forming the complete life cycle. And as Mandelbrot noticed, life cycles occur on shorter and longer time frames, but share the same structural characteristics. And here we are in the 6th mass extinction, this one caused not by a volcano or meteor, but by the activity of a single species, us.
Is there anything we can do to stop the collapse of biological life on Earth? Maybe, but the job is way bigger than it looks because we are driven by the biological imperative to grow. And we humans do not have the same structural checks and balances of egalitarian predatory forces imposed upon other species. Who was it who said "I have met the enemy and it is us"?
From a macro perspective the blame for the 6th mass extinction can be put on overpopulation. And it can also be put on industrialization. And perhaps the root cause is industrialization, it was the force that caused parabolic human population growth with the advent of "free energy" (fossil fuels), when combined with increasing human technological prowess.
Industrialization began about 200 years ago, the 6th mass extinction about 100 years ago. It's very unlikely this is a coincidence.
Conspiracy theory abounds...the industrialists feel the way to survive is to reduce population. Perhaps a better plan for all humans collectively is very significant levels of deindustrialization. Well, the industrialists do not like that idea very much, and they have all the wealth and political power. In addition they are (mostly) in deep denial. So we don't know what is going to happen. Or to be more accurate, what is already happening.
But wait! Lest we forget, Elon Musk has the answer! We'll simply transplant our species to Mars!
Humm. Even Mister Musk is intelligent enough to know that we sprang up from the fertile soil of this one planet, and we have no knowledge of another that is remotely similar. Surely there's a technological solution?
Let's see...we're going to leave a planet with biological sustainability that has been reduced by some significant degree, and go to one that has zero innate capacity to create and sustain biological life. What degradation of biological sustainability has to occur to have us trade it for zero? 25 percent degradation? 50 percent?
Humm. Let's do a rough test of Earth's biological sustainability. Let's plant seeds of local flora all over the planet and then wait breathlessly to see what happens. WOW! Who knew, it still grows.
I'm partial to the idea of radical deindustrialization. Think we can get it through congress?
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