[first posted on Groundhog Day, 2016; revised on Earth Day, 2018]
Human beings are now facing the greatest challenge that we have ever faced. The incessant, increasing activity of modern times is rapidly depleting and despoiling existing ‘natural resources’, and destroying the ability of this beautiful planet to sustain life. The never satiated enterprises and the profligate ways of what we call civilization are feverishly and rapidly reversing ancient processes, which transformed a bleak and barren planet into our verdant, multi-cellular-organism sustaining Earth. Global warming appears foremost in immediacy among those man-made process reversals, which threaten life itself. Can we yet stop and reverse the rush to ruin? We need to learn quickly what is keeping us from working together to protect the ability of this planet to continue to sustain life as we know it. (more…)