Heck, why wait ’til then? Let’s start now.

Wasn’t McKenna the one who said we should always live as if the end of the world have already come?

The end of the world happens every day to someone in this planet. What makes us so sure we will all be alive 4 years from now?

“But don’t despair! The news is not all awful. Science, medicine and technology promise to explode into the stratosphere in the coming years.”

In fact this is THE PROBLEM not the answer — and, of course, no one wants to hear that. So what’s the answer?

There’s, of course, a “third option” — that humans are just a part of ecology and that global destruction is part of a larger cycle, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy for humans. For example a recent high-profile “global business network” article argued that global warming actually started with the origins of farming and since humans have had such a profound effect on climate then we can now REVERSE our profound effect (to stop global warming). This, of course, retroactively presumes that humans understood that we were creating global warming originally (starting 10,000 years ago) and it also presumes that if we rationally plan to stop global warming we won’t have the opposite effect.

Environmentalists (and I speak from experience) are often labeled as wing-nuts for using hyperbole, but, in fact that’s just using systems theory. Just like if a car is too far off in one direction you counter it by turning the opposite direction even though the end result will be to go straight. But rational planning instead always works in a straight line, without these opposite reactions, so that the effect is the slow cooking frog problem.

Science is a relatively new world-view when in fact there are models of sustainability in human culture: The Bushmen are the best example and represent 90% of human history (from 10,000 BCE to 80,000 BCE they were the dominant human culture). What they practiced is essentially the same as Taoism or Dravidian culture in India — tantra, etc. I’m
not suggesting that human civilization could return to such sustainable cultures I’m just stating that those philosophies are not based on humanism, rather they are based on consciousness as the source of reality — with humans existing WITHIN ecology.

Take Slavoj Zizek for example — he keeps attacking environmentalists because they promote ecology as some pristine harmony when, in fact, he argues, Nature relies on catastrophe and so, therefore, should science! He states that oil, for example, came from catastrophe (the extinction of the dinosaurs). A lot of people confuse the tar pits as the source of oil or carboniferous trees when in fact oil came from the algae of the oceans — a slow development. So Zizek is projecting onto Nature more than actual ecologists and more importantly he’s projecting Western thought onto the concept of “harmony.” True harmony is ONLY formless awareness or consciousness — not something that is materialistic.