NATURE BOY ON APOCALYPTIC SCENARIOS

Whatever the threat may be, or combination of threats, it will come from our breakneck race to be superpopulated, supersophisticated and superconnected, which ultimately makes us vulnerable from any number of quarters.

With the human population ballooning, and the rest of the populations of plants and animals which support the viability of life on the planet crashing, and local areas dependent on continent-wide food/power grids–the homo sapiens digital aircraft is heading into a nosedive, people. It could be terrorists, volcanoes, military and/or solar events–the point is that almost none of us, with the possible exception of the Amish, are prepared to take care of ourselves should the Grid be compromised.
For just one other example, our bloated numbers inhabiting mostly urban environments are prime habitat for mutating germs eager for the feast…In the past (under what we might call the Gridde–i.e., Nature), if one spot in a certain territory got damaged or wiped out, at least part of the rest would just go on functioning its local way, like a worm that’s cut in half will just grow back the other half.  But now the land is so degraded and polluted that I don't think we can count on that.
Our civilization may never be hit with a huge solar storm, but it still makes sense to plant gardens and put in cisterns and create earth-friendly energy sources, and to reverse our population and economic “growth”. Doesn’t it? Any way you slice it, at some point in the foreseeable future our UNsustainable path is going to boomerang back on us, and people are going to die off in huge numbers, hell on Earth, and, yes, you could make a movie about it.  But it wouldn't be much fun.

…You could make a movie about it, but that movie would only take into account one main eco-cidal factor, so as to be able to employ the entertaining two-hour format, and leave room for (Nicholas Cage’s?) romantic interest to develop its passion-friction-distance-reunion cycle, which would make the whole idea of the cataclysm look silly, and make it fodder for on-line bulletin-board smart-asses, and rightfully so.

Here’s the rub: the further we push the makeup of our world away from the world within which we have evolved–the ecosystem to which we are most adapted–the less adapted we will be, and the more vulnerable to any threat, great or small. Compare the Earth we live on now to that on which we first appeared–in terms of genetically varied, viable biomass: She, and as a result we, are now much less stable because that variation and viability are in tatters.

Rats, if too many of them live in too small a space, will go insane and tear each other apart.

We are the rats.

Rats with guns.  Rats with nukes.  Rats with chainsaws and bulldozers and chemical fruits.  Well funded, insane rats.  With public relations departments.