![Nature Calls](http://i330.photobucket.com/albums/l429/BobboSphere/Nature-Calls.jpg)
I learned a new abbreviation today: ELE, Extinction Level Event. Yep, the Big One. The Apocalypse. The End Times. The Last Days. The Final Checkout. Now that we have ripped a hole in the planet that is erupting deadly poisons into the ocean to join all the other crap we dumped there AND we are choking our air with excess carbon maybe its time to examine that possibility.
I learned a new abbreviation today: ELE, Extinction Level Event. Yep, the Big One. The Apocalypse. The End Times. The Last Days. The Final Checkout. Now that we have ripped a hole in the planet that is erupting deadly poisons into the ocean and are choking our air with excess carbon maybe its time to examine that possibility.
No this not Judgement Day as detailed in the mythology of the Christian Book of Revelations. There will be no Rapture, no God to dole out rewards and punishments, no Jesus wielding a flaming sword on behalf of the Righteous. Those myths may alternately frighten and comfort some of the world's dazed population, but they have only a tenuous relation to reality. There may be some spectacular fire and brimstone-like phenomena but they won't be coming from some tribal god on high.
We create gods and goddesses in our own image and the next ELE will most likely be of our own doing. We have assumed powers that ancient societies would immediately recognize as god-like. As the Late Arthur C. Clarke once put it, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
We have become our own homegrown Kali, the Hindu goddess of creation and destruction. We can brew life in a lab as well as to unleash a worldwide annihilation of millions of species. Pretty impressive stuff for a swelled-head primate fresh out of the Pleistocene veldt of East Africa.
But there is a critical difference here between our godlike powers and the ones possessed by Zeus, Yahweh, Odin, Coatlicue or whoever. They could decide on their own whether to smite down some poor SOB...or not. Our godlike powers are distributed among a population of nearly 7 billion people. Hopeful New Agers talk about the emergence of a global consciousness. Well if such a thing is possible, it better happen quick because as a species, we have big decisions to make and the clock is running down.
As individual humans we have a tough time imagining our own individual mortality. So most of us just go about our daily affairs and try not to think about it much. We comfort ourselves with illusions of an afterlife or a reincarnation. We make kids to carry on our genes and memories of us. Poets write verses they hope will outlive them. Ironworkers construct tall buildings knowing that the results of their labor will survive their demise. In the cosmic scheme of things these gestures of immortality may not be much but there all we've got.
But an Extinction Level Event is whole different kettle of fish. Because if we go extinct there won't be anybody left to have delusions, make kids, read verses or admire magnificent buildings. It will be the end of death for humanity, because in order for people to die they first have to live. There go even our piteous attempts at immortality. Kaput. Game over.
Maybe that's why it's so dang hard to get people to focus on the destruction of our biosphere. The Endgame is just too big for even our swelled primate heads to comprehend. It's hard enough to imagine one's own mortality much less the death of death itself.
And to get even a significant minority of our near 7 billion population to focus on it? Whew! You think herding cats is a bad joke? Try herding humans, especially humans who are divided by dysfunctional class, race and gender differentiations. So here we are with our godlike powers busy smiting ourselves into an Extinction Level Event. We aren't even goddamned fools. We're self-damned fools.
In the face of all that,"What is to be done?," to quote a certain early 20th century revolutionary. In WWII some optimistic GI coined the phrase,"The difficult we can do today, the impossible takes a little longer." Or as the French student strikers of 1968 put it,"Be realistic. Demand the impossible."
Because really, who the hell knows for sure what is impossible? So, to hell with pessimism. So what if more than 99% of all the species on Earth have gone extinct and we have less than 100 to 1 chance of survival? Maybe we'll get lucky and beat the odds.
So lets keep on fighting for a green renewable future and while we're at it, let's have some fun too. The odds against us may look like a La Vegas crap shoot, but Vegas always has good entertainment, win or lose. And even in Vegas a swelled-head primate has at least a fighting chance.