The Great Leap the Human Race Needs to Make -- And Fast [View all]

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Maranoa Girl
@GDixon1977
“To our systems & institutions, we have no intrinsic worth. The ‘economy’ matters more than our lives, hence the false tradeoff between the economy & public health. Therefore, we don’t deserve much of anything, from healthcare to retirement…” — @umairh

eand.co
The Great Leap the Human Race Needs to Make — And Fast
What the Next Historic Wave of Progress, Leadership, and Innovation is Really About
4:29 PM · Feb 9, 2022

https://eand.co/the-great-leap-the-human-race-needs-to-make-and-fast-be0906b9df06

Sometimes, an especially tragic fact hits me.

Koalas are on the verge of going functionally extinct. “Functionally,” meaning their numbers will soon be too small to produce the next generation of koalas. Like me, perhaps you grew up thinking of koalas as little and beautiful things. If you want to split hairs, by the way, there’s been some debate about it, mostly because nobody has the resources to really count how many koalas there are…but that’s telling in itself. Let’s say simply that koalas are in profound trouble, and their numbers are declining swiftly.

It’s a tiny example of the stakes we face, my friends. We human beings have to make an epic shift to taking care of the world all around us — including ourselves. We need to become a nurturing species now, not a predatory one. And our whole politics and economics must reflect that. How are we to do that?

I’m the furthest thing from a tree-hugging green radical. I’ve never cared much about the environment or the planet, on some kind of intense personal level. But when human-caused mass extinction becomes the stuff of everyday headlines…I think any sensible person has to conclude: something has gone badly, badly wrong. With our politics. With our economics. With our culture. But what, exactly? How did we get here?

Another way of asking that is: what would it have taken to have saved the koalas? I want to answer that question backwards. (And I don’t think “but the koalas aren’t all the way extinct yet!” is in any way an appropriate defense, except to someone with the moral fibre of a Zuck or a Bezos. I mean: “to have saved all those which died needlessly?”) By the way, I’m going to put the following in unfamiliar terms, which might feel strange and even outlandish to you. That’s because I want to reduce the challenge before us to its simplest and truest essence.

*snip*