“Gaia, the living biosphere, is infested with humans.” Glen Barry, never one to mince words, goes on to say “Not just any humans, but the type that grow fat and reproduce exponentially by liquidating natural ecosystems. The population bomb has burst and we are seeing daily the predicted consequences of collapse and death in the climate, water, oceans, and on the land.”
Barry, offers solutions “This Time of Great Dying is unlikely to end well unless a global ecology ethic – including a sense of ENOUGHNESS, just population reductions, ending fossil fuels, and massive ecological restoration – is widely embraced with all haste in an unprecedented and overdue Great Awakening.”
“Earth is finite. There are biogeochemical limits to the amount of energy produced on Earth, to the number of any given organism that can be supported by a unit of land, and to natural ecosystems’ absorptive capacity for waste. Numerous planetary boundaries – including climate change and terrestrial ecosystem loss – have already been surpassed as Earth spirals out of control in a state of profound ecological overshoot.”
“It is pure ecocidal madness to individually and societally continue to live in a manner that it known with certainty will kill us all. Despite vast strides in knowledge and understanding of ecological science truths by specialists, most of the world and its leaders wallow in willful ignorance. Many are too concerned with the comfort of their individual nerve endings to understand that their ecological context of being, which they as organic beings utterly depend upon for everything, is collapsing and dying.”
“There is one last hope. We must now embrace an age of ecological restoration, to allow what fragments of natural ecosystem still exist to age, recover, and expand. Of course this would presuppose that we stop logging the last old-growth forest fragments, instead maintaining all old forests as genetic seed stocks and ecological models. We must return to the garden even as we learn to live with the sadness (for however long we have) that we willfully destroyed the ancient ecological tapestry of being from which humanity and all life evolved and have been forever sustained.”
“The answer is less.
Less people. Less stuff. Less inequity. Less technology. Less industry. Less emissions. Less toxics. Less hate. Less war. Less religion. Less ignorance. And fast.
We need less of everything; except for far more natural ecosystems, sharing, truth, justice, and love.
Only by limiting our own fertility and consumption can the human family avoid biosphere collapse and the end of being. It is up to each of us to develop a keen sense of enoughness, which means no old-growth forest products.”
Read the whole thing! While you’re at it, read over Barry’s whole website. Barry goes over all that both can and should be done, but which is not being done. CACOR members all know this and these things. How hard are we working, individually and as a group to move in the required direction?
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