choose our future?

Don't we always choose our future by planning ahead for our great human endeavours? Look at how successful we are and look at the amazing things we have achieved with our society, technology and arts!  Modern humanity, particularly western modern humanity, has achieved a life of comfort and security that was unknown throughout our prehistory, and is unparalleled in any other species.

 

But we never really chose our future — we only plan ahead in a piecemeal way, looking ahead only as far as we have to in order to achieve our short to medium term goals, and then only in a narrow dissociated way. 

 

Because we don't really choose our future with long-term holistic planning, the Earth and its human population are now facing many serious issues that threaten our society, our existence, the existence of other species and of entire ecosystems.  If we fail to resolve these issues we risk wasting the generations of life on the Earth that have brought humanity, and only humanity, to our comfortable and secure existence, and we risk sending humanity to a future existence far worse than anything our species has known.

 

The issues that we face are caused or exacerbated by the ways we live and the way we run our societies.  For most of our existence, from our pre-human ancestors to early modern humans, we have been able to take as much as we could get from our environment: there weren’t very many of us, we weren’t very able to take much, and if we took too much there was always somewhere else to go while the damage we had done recovered.

 

But things are different now: there are so many of us and so many of us have such a great capacity to make a big impact on the Earth, that we are affecting all of life and all environments.  We have extended our evolution with our technology so much that we are risking extinction of our cultures and of our comfort and security, possibly even extinction of our species.  Our technology and society make our lives easier for us as individuals, but make it harder for us to continue as a species.  We are threatening the continuation of the comfortable existence that so many of us experience now, and  are threatening our ability to extend that comfortable existence to those of us that don’t.   We need to make changes.

 

We share the Earth with innumerable other life-forms that are equally an outcome of the Universe and of the Earth and of the physical and biological processes that have made us.  We, however, are different from all other life on Earth in one important way: more than any other life form we are able to make intentional choices about the nature and the quality of the world we live in and we are largely able to implement those choices. 

 

We are nearing a time when we must become clear about those choices.  If we make the wrong choices we risk wasting this Universal development, and the uncontrolled suffering of the inumerable generations of human and pre-human lives that have brought us, and only us, to our comfortable and secure existence: we risk losing our place of comfort and security on the Earth. 

 

Choose the future! is about the circumstances that have brought these choices into existence and the consequences of our decisions about these choices.  Choose the future! is about the choices that we can make to maintain a comfortable existence in the long term, for ourselves and for our descendants far into the future.  The right choice may allow humanity to remain comfortable and secure on the Earth for millennia; the wrong choice risks sending humanity to an existence far worst than that of a pre-historic, stone-age, hunter-gatherer.


Choose the future! is about making the right choices.

 

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Comments: 2
  • #2

    Choose the Future (Sunday, 23 April 2023 17:10)

    Thanks for you comment, Nigel. Sorry about the delay in approving it!

  • #1

    Nigel Grinsted (Saturday, 22 April 2023)

    Good analysis. To be able to choose requires an ability to widely understand - another human skill probably not shared with any other species. Sadly understanding does not rely on truth. So evolution is understood but billions of humans “believe” in devine creation by a range of gods, invented thousands of years ago. Many believe stories spun by corrupt politicians and mega-businesses - these people have an agenda not based upon truth. So their followers don’t believe that Nature and the Environment is threatened - convincing them will take considerable time and money. It will only happen when it’s too late and most of the irreparable damage has occurred. Very very sad.