We, Homo Sapiens, emerged in south and east Africa about 300,000 years ago.
At that time, the planet had been here four and half billion years.
It took billions of years for the planet to generate the web of life in which and from which we were born.
We immediately began to unravel this web.
With small numbers of homo sapiens, the damage, for the most part, was not life-threatening.
That noted, numerous civilizations self-destructed and disappeared due to combinations of war, environmental degradation, disease, climate change, and related famine.
Humanity’s behavior, driven largely by very normal–once useful, now disastrous–short-term survival instincts has been, and for many continues to be, characterized by the likes of fear, greed, power, control, immediate gratification, self-centeredness, authoritarianism, and denial of inequality.
That “level of thinking” along with antiquated, divisive, and dysfunctional religious beliefs has gotten us to where we are today.
It’s not sustainable; humanity has to evolve to a “higher level.”
The problem is that we are running out of time.
Humanity’s current warming of the planet which has changed climate and produced a wide range of grave and escalating problems is the consequence and culmination of a lower level of thinking, i.e., not understanding the reality in which we exist and its behavioral demands.
It’s not just climate change. It’s the depletion of resources: forests, fisheries, range lands, crop lands, plant and animal species.
The sixth great extinction is ongoing. It’s the first caused by something other than a natural event like an asteroid striking the planet or climate change which caused four of the five great extinctions.
The current great extinction is caused by us, humanity.
With powerful electrical and diesel pumping techniques, we are draining our aquifers and lowering our water tables.
We are systemically polluting our air, water, and soil and, consequently, our food chain. We now have microplastic contaminants in our food and water. That’s from dumping 14 million tons of plastic garbage into our oceans annually!
We are depleting our stratospheric ozone that protects us from harmful ultraviolet radiation.
We are experiencing a wide range of interrelated climate-change symptoms growing in severity and complexity.
While all of this is going on, we continue to fight with each other over most everything imaginable every day in every way up to and including wars.
All of that is way more than enough to deal with.
On top of it all, we have to survive the fickleness of nature: earthquakes, hurricanes (also known as typhoons and cyclones), volcanoes, tornadoes, tsunamis, forest fires, floods, droughts, and other severe weather phenomena. That all comes normally with living on one of these things we call planets.
Then we have the extraordinary number of illnesses we contract and from which we suffer. Countless accidents and injuries that occur daily. All kinds of criminal and deviant behavior going on all over the planet every day everywhere in every way imaginable.
We have created the “perfect storm” for self-destruction.
The bottom line is that humanity does not understand its reality, and further that reality has behavioral demands if one wishes to stick around, i.e., live.
It’s a doomsday scenario unless humanity rises to another level and gets off the track it’s currently travelling on.
Our destructive and unsustainable momentum must be arrested and reversed in order to sustain humanity, advance our civilization, and succeed as a species.
This requires entering into a completely new understanding of the reality in which we exist, i.e., rising to a higher level.
The window of opportunity to make the necessary and monumental shifts in thinking is small compared to the large obstacles in our current beliefs which must be dissolved.
This has got to happen if we and all the other life forms with which we share this jewel of a planet are going to survive.
This is not optional, it’s imperative if we are going to sustain humanity, advance our civilization, and succeed as a species.