Saturday, December 11, 2010

Just Another Cop-out

“Mother Earth will still survive long, long after we have made the one race extinct that deserves it. Ourselves.

“The good news is that we'll destroy ourselves long before we destroy the Earth's capacity to nurture life.”

These are two responses to recent articles I wrote.

Not to single these two out – it’s a surprisingly common response – mankind deserves to die, ho hum. Earth will be fine once we’ve gone.

Well, no it won’t.

This attitudinal meme is, in fact a cop-out. It denies responsibility by assuming that nothing needs to be done since we’ll be gone in a few years anyway. It gives us permission to carry on going the way that we’ve been going.  It ignores the urgent call of action to which each of us need to be responding right now.

It is just one of the dangerous and toxic mindsets that keep us in our cycle of devastation.

We are irretrievably damaging the earth and the oceans. This article found at Mindfully.Org and the TED talk below by marine ecologist and palaeontologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Jeremy B.C. Jackson map the extent of our destruction.



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