E.L.E. Prediction

I may well not live as long as many. I have an innate anxiety that will supress longevity as sure as the sun rises each morning; I have a gnawing worry.

In relative terms my time on the planet is but a blink of an eye but I have seen enough to know the world is spiralling into decline. Increasing populations and CO2 levels, climate change, shortage of water, the pressures of food provision, an ever increasing need for power generation, chemical and biological pollution, depletion of the planets raw resources and the looming inadequacy of antibiotics all contribute to this decline. I don’t worry for myself you understand; my days will be well gone before these problems really start to bite. However, our children will endure a single insurmountable inevitability.

Despite us surrounding ourselves daily in irrelevance we have the technology to rid ourselves of these problems and where the technology doesn’t exist I have no doubt we will invent it. We also have the ability to organise the political will (eventually) to make these things happen. So what’s the problem?

The problem is that everything in our world is finely balanced. If we correct one thing it affects another. If we take action to modify a problem another will wriggle out from the woodwork. All we will ever do is delay the inevitable. You see we are no more than a species individually and collectively defending our ability to survive. That survival comes at a cost and that cost is at the expense of the other occupants of our planet. As we rid the planet of life we seal the fate of our own species. Our own success will be our eventual downfall.
Every day between 35 and 150 species of plant, insect or animal become extinct. As we hurtle headlong towards a world of a mono-species we exclude species after species from survival.

That is … until Mother Nature presses the restart button.

I predict in the next ten years we will lose the Turtle Dove as a breeding bird in the UK and it will become extinct in the next thirty… but that’s some half a million species down the line.