Global Civilization

An article by Paul and Anne Ehrlich published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society asks, "Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided?"  Their short answer is "probably not."  Of course, they don't rule out the possibility.  But they do conclude that most people don't understand the signs of impending collapse and that the biggest barrier is the fact of paying now to benefit those in the future.  That would take a rather conscious choice among most people in most countries. And I would guess most of us just don't give it very much thought.

Update (January 19):  Chris Hedges writes about the difficulty of accepting what is happening to us.  He quotes author Ronald Wright:

We all have the same, basic psychological hard wiring.  It makes us quite bad at long-range planning and leads us to cling to irrational decisions when faced with a serious threat.

If we fail in this great experiment, this experiment of apes becoming intelligent enough to take charge of their own destiny, nature will shrug and say it was fun for awhile to let the apes run the laboratory, but in the end it was a bad idea.