Reply #69: I have nothing against humans. Some of my best friends are humans.

[Speck Tater]

However, humans evolved to thrive in a specific range of environments. While human action alters the environment, human evolution proceeds too slowly for the species to adapt to the changes it wrought in the environment. Like yeast thrown into a vat of sugar water, finding it a tasty environment, they busily turn sugars into alcohol. But in a little while the sugar starts getting scarcer and the concentration of alcohol becomes too great in their environment and the yeast die off.

Humans found a tasty environment and they busily started converting resources into waste products (with a brief period of "use" in the process). But like yeast, they have been too successful, and the environment is becoming overloaded with waste while resources are getting scarcer and more costly to extract.

Evolution never rests. Eventually the human race will adapt to the new environment. But the way that works, the way it has always worked, is by overshoot and die off of maladapted members of the population. In time, the population as a whole becomes more healthy and better adapted to the new reality. But "nature red in fang and claw" is not the comforting, nurturing mother, but the cruel and brutal testing ground where species discover if they have what it takes to survive in a basically hostile world. Of all the species that have ever lived, 99.9% are now extinct. Humans are not necessarily in the top 1/10th of 1 percent of species best adapted to escape extinction. Sharks and cockroaches rank far above us in those qualities.

On the contrary, the person who chopped down the very last tree on Easter Island knew it was the very last tree, and still believed that chopping it down was necessary. It doesn't matter if 10% of humans are forward seeing visionaries who would protect our future. It doesn't matter if that number is 20% or 30%, as unlikely as such high percentages might be. It doesn't matter because it only takes ONE person who believes that it is necessary to chop down the last tree. It only takes one person, desperate to feed his starving child, to pull the last salmon from the world's rivers, or to chase down and club to death the last emu in Tasmania.

Tactically, destruction is so must faster and easier than conservation that unless a significant majority of humans turn their efforts to conservation, the forces of destruction will win out in the end. The human race is not necessarily doomed to extinction, but the kind of civilization we are experiencing right now, based on depletion of non-renewable resources and poisoning of the environment, certainly IS doomed to extinction.

Some day the human race will evolve to live in harmony with nature. Either that, or it will become extinct. There is no middle ground. But the path that takes us from where we are to where we need to be to survive as a species is a path that will see starvation for tens of billions. Sad. Very, very sad. But inevitable.