Apparently, we, as a species, are incapable of changing course. Good luck to all as the age of mammals comes to an end.

We have a plan..

It is spewing into the Gulf of Mexico as we speak !!!!

I wonder what percentage of Bio diversity a 100 years ago has been lost compared to now?
We know rain forests have been cut down across the world at about 80% of total hundreds of years ago.
At least 4 times less. Where will the new medicines come from?
Cement in a test tube?

There's too many people and not enough sense.

Genesis: "Go ye forth and subdue the world"

That will of course lead to runaway climate heating that sounds and will feel suspiciously like Armageddon.

Who needs Bible philosophy after that -it's a guaranteed self-fulfilling prophecy independent of any religion.

"It said more protected areas on land and in coastal waters... At least 31 bird species would have become extinct in the past century without them."

I would imagine the Gulf Coast has quite a few conservation and protected areas. The designation does not seem to deter floating oil. Now if I were caught taking a rowboat into one of those "protected" areas to shoot an egret, what would be the fine? Does the Fish and Wildlife Service plan to levy a similar fine on BP, i.e. the standard penalty per bird, per fish, per manatee that would be levied against any poacher?

We just drove across country, west to east, 2,900 miles. Decent warm weather all the way. At the end of the trip there were about 50 dead bugs on the front of the car. One night time drive of 150 miles was through swampy areas in Louisiana. We also saw a total of five birds, three were at rest stops. We never saw a single flock of birds.

I recall when after driving just 300 miles the front of the car would have been covered with thousands of dead bugs and we would have seen hundreds of birds.

We did see several Wal-Marts, Kentucky Fried Chickens and McDonalds though. Not sure of which signs are our [canaries in the coal mine].

It is probably too late, but what might save us would be to shut down all of this modern stuff and go back to the way of life our forebears led. People worked the land individually or cooperatively. Life expectancy was not as long as it is now, but death was just a part of life. We manured the fields with our livestock. We saved seed to plant next year. We cared for each other as individuals. True, there were the greedy, the robbers, but when they got out of hand, they promptly wore a hemp necktie, often modeling it from a prominent tree.

People were exposed to disease, hardship, etc., and they were tough; they had strong immune systems that fought off most problems. People were in good shape because they worked. Farmers tilled and planted the land, sailors and fishermen worked at sea, even the loggers worked hard to bring down a big tree and skid it to a mill or a river. Considerably different than one man with a chain saw dropping a forest a day, or just using a special tractor to chop off, limb and bark trees and stacking them in seconds.

Most of our pharmaceuticals seem to kill 99.9% of the various germs and viruses. That tenth of a percent is much stronger and harder to kill. When they finally figure out how to kill 99.9% of that, the remainder becomes more deadly. At the end of that line, eventually, comes "superbug."

Meanwhile, we have ways of easing labor. We can have one man do the work of ten and throw nine men out of work. Our kids are not allowed contact with nature without mom with her box of antibacterial wipes to remove any trace of contact. They have little or no immune system. When a modern bug bites them, they're down.

Food is full of additives, pesticides, antibiotics and growth hormones. Every once in a while, they cut out one that causes cancer, replacing it with another additive, that later on is found to cause cancer.

I guess I'm just whistling in the dark, but does anyone get the picture?

10 comments so far and all very pessimistic. Yes it's bad and it's very bad . . . and I appreciate the clarity - I especially liked minitrue's stuff just now.

But by lamenting and giving up, aren't we engaging in a latter day version of the same mentality that got us this far down? Everyone else is doing it etc., it's hopeless . . ."they're" doing it to us.

Do we absolutely know that?

Maybe this is what happens on every planet when a species gets really successful . . . it runs out of planet and has to learn to act differently? I think it's like that and that there's a great deal we can do right now to make it better where we live. Not "the answer" but some ideas are here at www.RadicalRelocalization.com

A recent paper by the Universities of Adelaide, Singapore, Harvard and Princeton rated countries on their role in environmental degradation (species loss, habitat conversion, fertilizer use, forest destruction, pollution, carbon emissions, etc).

The countries are (in order, worst first): Brazil, USA, China, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, India, Russia, Australia and Peru.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0010440

or if that is too much to cut and paste, try this:
http://tinyurl.com/234qnuo

Note that this is not per-capita based, so it is horrifying that a supposedly "green" country like Australia makes the list with it's relatively small population.

The study demonstrates that there was no evidence to support the popular idea that environmental destruction stabilises or declines past a certain threshold of per capital wealth - a concept known as the Kuznets curve hypothesis.

Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."

Dr. Lovelock said homo sapiens is too stupid to deal with problems like these. Greed blinds most people to the simple logic of the problems that need to be addressed. I have a plan that would work and have been developing it for 25 years. But I have no way to publicize it and Americans now ARE far too stupid for enough of them to grasp it to do any good. I would have to mass publicize it across the British Commonwealth of nations for these ideas to even have a chance to enter the arena of global debate.

The first step is realizing that economists and politicians are USELESS in meaningfully mitigating or solving any of our worst environmental and economic problems. Their mindsets and careers are entirely geared around making self-interested decisions using a subjective decision making process based on corporate wants and not common good needs. What we need is a global, democratic, economically & environmentally harmonized, and scientifically objective decision making process using a specially organized system of scientific & economic data gathering and computation to generate sustainable geographic habitat harmonization plans for human populations, animal & plant species. Non-eugenics-based human population reductions to attain optimal habitat population targets would be a core component of such plans. Preserving arable land, fresh water, additional land for wildnerness areas and somatic evolution bio-reserves for wild animal and plant species would be the other major components.

The default is a continuing spread of hundreds of global resource wars (with their misery catalyzed by ethnic, religious and other cultural tensions), and continued reckless, globalist capitalist resource exploitation rendering the planet uninhabitable for upwards of 95% of the human species by century's end.

The politicians and economists have had their centuries to try, try, try and they have failed miserably. It's time to give a global democratic body of relevant scientists a shot.