I've been thinking a lot lately about the survival of the human race. This feeling doesn't come out of any religious belief, just an exploration of the question, "what have we done to deserve to rule this world?". Our extinction may not be too far away. There are many ways that this end might come. Nuclear holocaust. Great floods, famine or even a new ice age caused by climate change. War. Of course, meteors, alien invasion or the dolphins rising up against us are all possibilities, but most likely our demise will be an indirect result of our own actions.
No where is it written that our species will go on forever. And if that notion seems sad I agree, but when you think about it, have we really done anything that makes us worthy of everything we have been given? What gives us the right to destroy our planet, exploit all it's resources and all its' other species? Really, as sad as it may be, I am not sure that we really even deserve to survive. If I have mice, moths or cockroaches infesting my house, eating my food and shitting all over the place I kill them. What makes us any better then them? I can't really think of anything.
I am not sure what exactly we should be expected to do here, if anything, but I know that the destruction of our only home isn't part of it. Sustainability might be a start. "Sustainability" seems to be a new word in our culture. As logical as it is, the notion that we can't take more than we have is completely foreign to most of us. We are so used to thinking only about ourselves and only about right now that we rarely think about the big picture... and I mean the really big picture. The bottom line is this: if we continue to pollute our environment, if we continue to make other species extinct, if we continue to over fish our seas, if we continue to cut down the very trees that create the oxygen we breath, if we continue to grow our population at a massive rate, if we continue to make unsustainable practices a normal way of life, we will not survive.
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