Fragmentary

 Overpopulation. There it is, the word that you never see in discussions of climate change and humanity's future. Nature's grand experiment: the human race. Our species is now on the road that leads to extinction, or at least reduction to levels that no longer allow us to evade nature's hand in keeping species populations within sustainable boundaries. Whatever the outcome of our response to global climate change and the degradation of earth's biosystems, we will no longer have the power to destroy without compunction the very basis of life on earth.  How do we define overpopulation? At what point in the numbers can we say that there are too many of us? Overpopulation is the number and the point in time where the earth can no longer compensate for our depredations. When it can no longer recover from the damage. We have already gone past that point, yet continue to blindly function as if nothing stands in our way.  It's all over but the shouting and the suffering. It...

 I spend too much mental energy on trying to justify the continued existence of the human race. The cost of the few true creators throughout our history, the intellectual and artistic flowers of the species, is waste: the unremarked lives and deaths of the billions who have contributed only their labor and their blood.  Their lives have enabled war, slavery and the plunder of the earth's riches.  They rise in rebellion only when they have nothing left to lose, when they've lost the fight to protect and sustain the conditions of their little lives. And in doing so, as often as not, they become the mirror image of their oppressors. The human species learns nothing from its own history, its past. It sees into the future only as far as necessary to get through another day, week, month. To say that humanity deserves the chaos descending on it, misses the point. That chaos is the inevitable outcome of species flaws that we have proven unable to overcome. The flowering of creati...