Reply #60: Yes, actually you did.

[GliderGuider]

I know precisely how much suffering and misery will be involved in a die-off. I'm also convinced it's inevitable, and that there is at this point no way to prevent it. From the point of view of every being except us it's a matter of supreme indifference.

No, our screams will not echo to every corner of the universe, any more than did the screams of the passenger pigeon, the Labrador duck, the Javanese lapwing, the White-winged sandpiper, the Rodrigues pigeon, the Heath hen, the sabretooth tiger, the megatherium, the wooly mammoth, the wooly rhino, the quagga, the Red Colobus Monkey, the thousands of species of dinosaur, the trilobites, (deeeep breath....), the Yunnan box turtle, the Tonga ground skink, the Marbled toadlet, the Vegas Valley leopard frog, the mountain mist frog, the golden toad, the Gastric-brooding frog, the thicktail chub, the phantom shiner, the stumptooth minnow, the Maryland darter and all the other millions of uncounted, unknown, unmourned species through the eons.

The only reason we think it natural that these these species can go extinct but object that our numbers should not even decrease is because of our anthropocentric viewpoint. Well, that viewpoint has been under attack since Copernicus. the modern proponents of its environmental incarnation, the Deep Ecologists, recognize that we are similar enough to all other animals that anything that can happen to them can happen to us. But more than that, they understand that our capacity for conscious self-reflective thought has conferred on us a responsibility towards those who share our biosphere - a responsibility we have casually dismissed when it conflicted with our own desires.

My wording may have been a bit hyperbolic (but hey, it sure got your attention didn't it?) but the underlying message remains. We are a part of nature, we have abused the other inhabitants of our planet mercilessly in our scramble to the top of the food chain, and it may now be time to face the consequences of our actions. It's a very uncomfortable thought, but there it is.

I tend to take my morality pretty seriously, and so when it comes my turn to be part of the first wave of payback, I will be personally regretful but I will understand the ineluctability of the event. Until that moment comes I will put my effort where it can do some good - planting and nurturing the seeds of value systems that can survive the bottleneck and make the next cycle of civilization one our species can be proud of.

Paul Chefurka