preaching to the choir?

“On the one hand, the development of environmental problems…is accelerating exponentially. On the other hand, the development of public environmental concern, and of private and governmental countermeasures, is also accelerating exponentially. Which horse will win the race? Many readers of this book are young enough, and will live long enough, to see the outcome.”
-Jared Diamond, Collapse

These words chilled me to the bone when I read them. And I ask myself the question I have asked so many times: What kind of world am I inheriting? I do not feel that I am watching a horse race, passively, but rather running a footrace, and I feel myself facing a very real risk of failure. I feel we are all facing it, even if we prefer not to think about it.
The question of sustainability on a human level has been on my mind a long time. Can we provide real human needs, including the need for satisfying work, in a way that uses only Earth’s annual interest, and not her long-stored capital? In a way that doesn’t destroy Earth’s very ability to produce what sustains human life?
The time is upon us to dismantle the Tower and get back to the Garden. With the same energy and focus with which we tried to build to the heavens and make a name for ourselves, we need now to cultivate the earth and protect it. I can foresee the end of the modern First World, centered so much of the availability of fossil fuels and mineral deposits, production and consumption at ever-increasing rates. I know it cannot last, though I don’t know exactly when its end will come. But the earth cannot support this kind of life, though the earth has supported Life for millions of years. And if we want the earth to be a place where humans can continue to live, we must first and foremost not destroy all the conditions that made human life possible in the first place – such as stable climate and complex ecosystems, particularly forests.
What I have come to believe is that we cannot destroy the forest for the sake of the field (or for the sake of the mine, oil derrick, or factory, for that matter), but we may destroy it anyway, without even realizing what we are doing. The foundation of human survival rests on whether we can feed ourselves, and thus on agriculture, and our ability to practice agriculture depends on the health of the broader ecosystem. We must develop agricultural practices that sustain the life of that system. We must tread lightly on these fragile soils.