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‘Civilisation’ — The Rotten Myth at Our Core
We’re on a train headed to destruction; complete civilisational collapse. I won’t insult you with statistics. Ice caps are melting. Seas are rising. Oceans are acidifying. The atmosphere is changing. Temperatures are increasing. Plant and animal diversity is collapsing. Whole continents are burning. And on and on we go.
We know the story and we’re all experiencing its impacts. We even know the science of what’s happening — our earth is built upon an almost impossibly complex series of interconnected feedback loops, beyond our capacity to understand, let alone engineer, and these loops are collapsing. We can argue about timeframes but that’s all, the destination is clear.
Most of us know we’re on this ill-fated train, but none of us seem to know how to get off. We don’t even know who’s driving. Often it feels like the train is driving us. So we go about our lives as if everything is fine. As if leaving our children with a nice little nest egg will protect them from the impacts of our ignorance. It won’t. And that annoyingly nagging voice deep in our heart knows it.
We find ourselves at the precipice of a change so big, so absolutely fundamental, that the mere mention of it brings up decades of repressed emotions. Just ask Greta Thunberg, the teenage Swedish girl who had the audacity to highlight the conventional…
