Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The scary truth is that the economic, environmental, social, and political crises we’re facing are red flags warning us that the system we’re all counting on is headed for collapse, says LaConte. Global leaders are approaching these crises as though they were distinct and unrelated, when in reality, the problem is globalization itself.
In Life Rules, I compare the world’s presently converging and mutually reinforcing environmental, economic, social and political crises to the syndrome of illnesses an HIV patient experiences when her disease shifts into full-blown AIDS. Among the symptoms of AIDS is rampant high fever. The viral fossil-fuel driven global industrial economy — Earth’s equivalent of HIV — has tipped the Earth’s climate from slow, sporadic, scattered warming events into full, potentially fatal fever.
So the actual end of the world probably shouldn’t worry us overmuch just yet. But the end of the world as we know it probably should.
The obvious and important difference between this potential Sixth Great Extinction and all the others is that they had natural, unavoidable causes. There are fewer and fewer deniers now that our fossil-fueled grow-consume-lay waste-deplete global economy is the cause of this one.
