Your Road, My Road.

There are nearing seven billion of us sharing the planet now. All of us eating, drinking, shitting, pissing, copulating and carrying on with our lives. Living as large as our personal resources allow. Not as soon as those culture of life cocksuckers would like but soon enough, certainly within the lifespan of most of those alive today, there will be fourteen billion.

It would be nice to believe that all of us could live in balance with the natural world. Save the whales and the rain forests, icecaps, pristine oceans, giant redwoods and every little monarch butterfly. What do you suppose the chances are of that? I think we passed that tipping point a hundred and fifty years ago, maybe more. Sure, if we all scaled back to minimal lifestyles, shared everything out, only about half of us reproducing and then only one child, for five or six generations, then things might be salvageable. The entire world would have to get on board with the plan. No problem.

We're humans. That means we don't live in pastoral balance with nature. We build things. We change things. We kill things. We have a shit load of progeny. It's the way we are. It's what we do. Technology and exploitation may not be the solution to all our problems but that's the path we've chosen. There is no going back.

What does this mean for us? It means we do whatever we must. Open up the gates to cheap labor. Open up the mines and smelters. Divert the flow of rivers to generate power and irrigate the barren wastes. If we produce too much CO2, so be it. let's modify algae to convert it back to oxygen and carbon and burn the carbon again. We need a lot of stuff. We're only going to get it by plundering the earth. A nice balanced ecology would be nice but there's no free lunch.

Welcome aboard, shipmate! Get to work. You want babbling brooks and alpine meadows, buy the video.