Planetary Perspective: The Big Picture---Seeing the Forest for the Sake of the Trees.
It is not easy for me to be concise. With this topic the challenge is daunting.
Our planet and life on it is millions of years old. All of us living on this planet today are but a brief and miniscule portion of the life having existed on the planet before us. We do our best to invent notions that try to make us more important in the whole scheme of God's created evolutionary process, but these are defensive efforts to assuage our fear of death. None of us wring our hands over not having been present in the past and none of us should spend time wringing our hands over our future after our death. All we have, for sure, is the present. The past could not affect us personally and neither can the future of the planet after our death.
I sense most people, everywhere, realize something huge and tumultuous is about to happen on our planet. But we can't see the forest for the sake of the trees. This discourse is about the forest, not the trees. I kind of separate the new factors facing our planet and societies, and the old, usual factors. In the interests of being concise I will refrain from any elaborate discussion of any of these factors. Books are written about each. The object here is not to get lost in detail.
THE NEW FACTORS:
Overriding everything is human overpopulation of the globe. Global population has doubled in my own lifetime, and for it to double again will be catastrophic for all species on the planet. To date, humans---for all our cleverness----have not been able to practice responsible reproduction. We still pretend the individual right to reproduce like rabbits overrides the welfare of planetary life as a whole. Of course individual rights never trump the rights of society as a whole. And more amazingly, politicians of almost every ilk won't even talk seriously about this topic. Of course not, people just don't want to hear it. This is a brand new factor in the history of evolution---human overpopulation on the globe. In the past there was always frontiers of some sort, some place to run and start anew. Not anymore. Where would one run to?
Consequent to the above all sorts of natural resources are becoming depleted, whether it be gases in the atmosphere, life in the oceans, species extinction, loss of arable land, depletion of fresh water sources, energy sources. building materials, fish in the ocean, trees on the land, etc. Right now, today, there are not enough natural resources for all humans to live the kind of lifestyle the affluent now live.
To deny any of these two NEW FACTORS is purely a faith based denial, much like many people accept their inherited religious beliefs on faith. What separates humans from other species is our ability to reason and our inherent ethical nature.
Whenever humans fail to use reason to solve problems or fail to practice and develop their inherent ethical nature, the eventual consequences will be grave. All humans everywhere understand the Golden Rule. For the most part, it is not a question whether we understand right from wrong, but whether we will do the right instead of the wrong.
THE OLD FACTORS:
Every civilized powerful society has collapsed and most of the time it has been for two reasons: the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few at the expense of the many, and the financial burden of trying to maintain a global empire of some sort.
To this old factor has been added a NEW TWIST: In the past societies were relatively self sufficient. Not anymore. We now have a global economy. That may or may not be a good thing, but it probably is not an avoidable thing. HOWEVER, to have a global economy without minimum wages will reduce every national economy to a third world type economy with production of more and more things being done with slave labor (without plantations). The price of all these 'bargains' will be self destructive in the not so long run. Freedom will be reduced to nothing left to lose because we have nothing with which to purchase anything. For millions and millions of people, they are already there. Even in the United States, right now 30% of children are being raised in poverty; not the old fashioned type of poverty where a family lived off the land peacefully and healthfully. No, many children today live in refugee camps or urban/rural/suburban ghettoes, socially isolated, over stressed, undereducated, and fearful of personal harm from others.
The social fabric is changing rapidly, even in our own country. The social unit now is rarely the neighborhood, the community, an economic class---but the family unit. Family values has been promoted as an ethical concept when it is really an excuse for circling the wagons and viewing all matters as self serving family challenges. The concept of spreading wealth around or taxes around, or anything else around has become passé. In our own country we wage war on borrowed money, we fight drug addiction with an expensive police War on Drugs instead of treating it as a medical problem, we give tax breaks to the wealthy and reduce benefits to the poor, we have eliminated the steep graduated income and inheritance taxes on the wealthy to ensure none of the money gained gets returned to the society from which it came, and we spend three times as much to educate some of our young and three times less to educate most of our young, the very ones most in need of a good education.
Regulation, and 'enough is enough are no longer legitimate and necessary restraints on free enterprise. The concept of "I earned it" is being replaced more and more by inherited wealth. To pay off state and national debts we use political clout and maneuvering to pit one group against another as to who is going to pay off the debt. Ironically, in many cases those who supported all the wars, and military expenditures on weapons of little use in modern warfare, and the police War on Drugs, on maintaining military bases all over the globe, are the very ones who demand the debts incurred be paid off by others and they get a tax break. Greed flourishes and fairness becomes something only on a personal basis.
To me, all of the above is the big picture---the context from which all the particulars we address are being fought. We see today, for our immediate self interests, and have no objective view of the future. All forms of government seem to be failing, for different reasons, and the multitude of complex endangerments to our planet have left us relatively paralyzed. In some respects we are like deer in the headlights, we see it coming but until it hits us we cannot bring ourselves to act. Of course then it may be too late.
The good news, which we as individuals need accept, is that the process of God's evolutionary process will continue. Our 'free will' can help make our personal lives better, but in the big picture, we are but one species participating in moulding the future nature of the planet, and it will be the laws governing this process which determine the future. We are not, as individuals, or as a species, any kind of end product nor do we have any reasonable basis to assume we are a favored species, or a favored individual member of our own species. Believing otherwise does not bring any real contentment (the religious right of any religion are not exactly known as happy campers brimming with contentment). What we have received, by chance, and our environment, is a chance to exist as part of this evolutionary process for a very limited time. Humans are blessed with the ability to reason and an inherent sense of ethics. To the extent we use both in all aspects of our life we can be contented. Remember, it is ethics which allows the less fortunate to reach a level of life for which to reach contentment. Yes, we are our brother's keeper both for his sake and our own sake. One can choose not to help the less fortunate as much as we help ourselves, but in so doing we can never be a really contented person. We are wired to use reason and we are wired to be ethical. Success in these areas is the basis for contentment, and never one without the other.
