Human Extinction

Risk ‘misunderestimated’: War, sleeping pills, and the Extinction Rebellion

By Kurt Cobb, originally published by Resource Insights

May 5, 2019

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-05-05/risk-misunderestimated-war-sleeping-pills-and-the-extinction-rebellion/

Just when we need wise leadership and global cooperation, what we are seeing is internal fighting over rigid local opinions.  It is like people on a train that has jumped the tracks and is headed down the mountain fighting over who gets access to the dining car first.

“The ultimate question that the Extinction Rebellion poses is this: Why should we care about human extinction? The geologic record suggests that humans will one day go extinct no matter what they do. So, what if that happens sooner rather than later?

The answer to those questions hinges on whether a person defines his or her community strictly in spacial terms and does not include temporal terms. In other words, are we a community of people only by space (and then only weakly at that) or are we a community that extends through both space AND time?

In other words, does it matter whether human culture continues?

Those who deny climate change are answering the last two questions “no.” If those who accept that climate change is largely human-caused do not see it as an existential question, they may as well be deniers.”

“The hardest minds to change are those who accept climate change as a reality, but cannot embrace the necessary steps implied by that belief. Will the Extinction Rebellion change that? I’d like to think the answer is yes. But I think a more thoroughgoing change in human hearts and perceptions will likely only come from actual catastrophic consequences hitting much larger groups of people and only if they understand that those consequences are the result of climate change.”