For Earth’s Sake

earthset from the moon, from the Artemis II crew, via NASA David Ehrenfeld, in his 1993 book Beginning Again, forecast that the final decades before civilization’s collapse would be a time of violent, destructive chaos: The most terrifying thing about this disintegration for a society that believes in prediction and control will be the randomness of its violent consequences. The chaotic violence will include not only desperate ruthless struggles over the wealth that remains, but the last great rape of nature. What will make it worse is that, at least at the beginning, it will take place under a cloud of denial and cynical reassurances. And as his title indicates, he was an optimist back then. I hope his forecast for the now-dawning era of chaos and collapse turns out to be untrue, though I no longer have much hope. Everything he predicted is now occurring. For Earth’s sake, I wish and dream for collapse to progress more quickly, and to end sooner, than I dare believe. The more…