Speaking Out

What convinces me that our species is 'doomed' (I wish I could avoid using that term, but can no longer deny the applicability) is the global pathological denial of the train wreck. Additionally, human civilization has already dragged down other species, and continues to do so at alarming rates.

As a scientist, I intellectually understand that denial is a defense mechanism to help cope with anxiety (coupled with explaining away problems and blaming others). Denial enables ignoring or refusing to believe an unpleasant reality, protecting psychological well-being in any situation that produces anxiety or conflict including challenges to one's standard of living or power status quo. But when one is looking into the jaws of a lion ready to bite off your head, or staring at the giant wall looming before the speeding train, denial no longer serves as a defense mechanism. Here I lose understanding, and I blame my science colleagues as much as the politicians and financiers that perpetuate the fuel of denial.

Most of the scientific community, including medical, is either in denial, or running to look for technological solutions rather than evaluate the root origins of our problems and address 'how we got from there to here.' Our politics, economics, policy, and, many times science are based on 'bandaid' cures. Put a bandaid on it, cover it up, and it will go away. Ignore the festering wound underneath; its origins, the process and interrelated changes of its development. Ignore the peripheral interacting relationships and far-reaching impacts. "Let's amp up production; don't pay any attention to consumption." "Give them a pill; who cares about prevention?" "Collect the species DNA and we can ignore life extinction."

At this rate, our civilization will collapse. As history teaches us, it will also arise again like the Phoenix. But perhaps a Phoenix with a limp. My sympathies and grief are for the non-human species on this planet. Their collapse and extinction is finite. And they have no concept of denial. The ubiquitous law of supply and demand is a part of population dynamics. The changing supply of resources -water, food, shelter- will trigger changes in population. I suspect that without modern industrial sustainment of large scale food production, water collection and long-distance distribution, human population everywhere will decline, possibly quickly collapse. Earlier civilizations, even other species, have experienced these cycles; we are not immune.

Sometimes I have to look beyond the doom and gloom and find specks of hope that we can change this trajectory. But my brain isn't convinced.