Humanity had an okay run.

A mere week or so ago another oil rig went splodey in the Gulf.  To almost any sane person that would be a warning sign that maybe, just maybe, we might be barking up the wrong tree energy-wise.  After all it’s not as though Deepwater-Horizon was exactly anamolous; in the past few years we’ve had rigs go all Michael Bay on us in the Gulf, in Cape Cod, in our lakes, and in the Gulf again.  What is the response?  No contrition, no proactive steps, nothing.  Merely a childish and borderline pathological passing of the buck.  As for the administration — one would think this would be the catalyst for a sweeping overhaul of emergy policy with windfarms, water turbines and solar panels stretching far and wide.  One would also apparently be giving far too much credit to our ability to learn from mistakes.  So where do we go from here?

That is a damn good question and one I find more and more difficult to answer optimistically.  I think there is a very good chance we are marching towards extinction.

There.  I said it out loud (or, in typeface).  Humanity is driving itself to extinction.  And it’s not just Tony Hayward or Dick Cheney or any of the other evil plutocrats people like me get our jollies demonizing.  The vegans, the environmentalists and the Buddhist monks will be going down along with the rest of the species.  To that I say, maybe it’s for the best.

Which isn’t to say I LIKE the idea of being fried by sun/drowned by the Charles/shot when the rampant looting for potable water begins.  Trust me — I enjoy this whole “being alive” thing as much as the next Joe/Josephine.  My brother and sister-in-law also just welcomed a daughter into the world and above all else I wish my new niece a long, happy and fulfilling life.  I just can’t help but wonder; if one segment of a species sees absolutely nothing wrong with poisoning our waters, clear-cutting our forests and belching toxins into the air we breathe and the other segment was complicit in allowing them to call all the shots and/or is now incapable of stopping it, isn’t it possible that this species is simply unfit for survival on this planet?

Ever since the agricultural revolution humanity has worked longer for ever diminishing returns, eaten more and more poorly, and managed to create a perfectly stratified society [Diamond, May 1987, "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race"].  We pollute, we run out of room to pollute, we conquer industrialize other nations so we can pollute over there, and the cycle begins again.  Bafflingly, despite our species’ capacity to learn, induce and deduce, we continue the same course of action.  We don’t alter our activity.  We deny and rationalize away the information that’s staring us in the face.  We concoct any sort of explanation we can think of, from sunspots to oil-eating microbes, in order to justify continuing our war on Earth.

The ones of us who don’t are too powerless, or too weak, or too busy, or too “reasonable” to stop it.  Or we simply don’t know how.

I sure as hell don’t.

If that is indeed the case why should we expect to have any preeminence over any other species on earth?  If we are indeed becoming unsuitable for our environment, maybe it’s our time.  Maybe we are no longer “fit,” from an evolutionary standpoint.

Maybe we just don’t have what it takes.

I want to believe we have a chance.  I really do.  I want to believe we’re better than our actions over the past thousand years or so (after all, a thousand years is not all that long in the history of homo sapiens).  But never have the actions of such a small number had such a catastrophic effect.  If there is a god I am positive that right now she or he is screaming “stop screwing it all up” over and over again. 

I’m not too afraid of sounding like a thundering loony right now, because the looniness is pretty self evident, at least to me.  In the past year we have had blankets of snow in the south and a hurricaine in the northeast.  We have had oil spills from Louisiana to Brazil to Siberia.  I am afraid of the world my nieces and nephews will be growing up in and regret my part in creating it.

For all I know there might be a god screaming “stop screwing it up” at the top of her or his heavenly lungs.  One thing I do now is that, at some point the earth will more than likely be flatly stating “you screwed it up.  Now the rent is due.”