Life was given to us a billion years ago. What have we done with it?

Earth is home to millions and millions of animal and plant species, yet just one dominates it. Us. We have modified, changed, altered, fabricated almost every part of our planet; and not always for the best. In fact, our species has had a profound impact globally on the planet, and now space, as junk from extraterrestrial exploration has little our orbit with mechanical crap. All of the problems we have created are accelerating exponentially. We are working towards a global population of nearly 10 billion! We are heading for disaster. 

We currently have no known means of being able to feed 10 billion of us at our current rate of consumption and with our current agricultural system. Indeed, simply to feed ourselves in the next 40 years, we will need to produce more food than the entire agricultural output of the past 10,000 years combined. Yet food productivity is set to decline, possibly very sharply, over the coming decades due to: climate change; soil degradation and desertification – both of which are increasing rapidly in many parts of the world; and water stress. By the end of this century, large parts of the planet will not have any usable water.

Diverging further...Animal life on earth goes back millions of years, yet most species only use three to five percent of its cerebral capacity. But it isn’t until we reached human beings at the top of the animal chain that we finally see a species use more of its cerebral capacity. And what have we done with this higher cerebral capacity? Commit wars, famine, pain, slavery, devastation, annihilation. What have we done as the apex predator on this earth? This is the nothingness that Nihilism professes. 

The only solution left to us is to change our behavior, radically and globally, on every level. In short, we urgently need to consume less. A lot less. Radically less. And we need to conserve more. A lot more. To accomplish such a radical change in behavior would also need radical government action. But as far as this kind of change is concerned, politicians are currently part of the problem, not part of the solution, because the decisions that need to be taken to implement significant behavior change inevitably make politicians very unpopular – as they are all too aware.

So what politicians have opted for instead is failed diplomacy. For example: The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, whose job it has been for 20 years to ensure the stabilisation of greenhouse gases in the Earth's atmosphere: Failed. The UN Convention to Combat Desertification, whose job it's been for 20 years to stop land degrading and becoming desert: Failed. The Convention on Biological Diversity, whose job it's been for 20 years to reduce the rate of biodiversity loss: Failed. Those are only three examples of failed global initiatives. The list is a depressingly long one. And the way governments justify this level of inaction is by exploiting public opinion and scientific uncertainty. It's all bullshit, hidden in plain sight right in front of our very eyes.