Will there be, “a new heaven, and a new earth” after this one is destroyed? Perhaps, but we cannot afford to rely on it. Really, it is a nice sort of idea, that everything will be renewed and made good by the end of society as we know it. But it is just an idea, a dream, a philosophical vision, blended with humanity’s senseless wish for the destruction of everyone who thinks differently to ourselves. But can we afford to be philosophical, given our actual situation as a humanity?
The sobering reality is that Climate Change threatens to cause vast destruction, an apocalyptic scenario, within a hundred years. Rather than hoping that following the destruction would be a beautiful new world, we should consider whether we leave this earth to the coming generations as a beautiful or horrifying place. We are living out of harmony with nature, due to the vast greed of some and the apathy or ignorance of many. Yet rather than confronting this, some create outlandish theories in an attempt to deny our living reality.
Anyone who has been alive a perhaps a bit more than twenty years will likely have noticed how the weather is changing. Warm sunny days in February, followed by April snows and a summer of grey rain. It seems a new temperature record is set practically every year, and nature seems unbalanced, unsettled, wildfires burn out of control. We go on as normal, convinced by the strange nuclear faith of the boomer generation that the threat of apocalyptic destruction of the planet is just “business as usual”.
We are attacking nature, She is suffering. We cut down rainforests to plant soy to feed cattle, while spewing toxic fumes into the air. The electricity we rely on for our normal daily lives still often comes from fossil fuels, or nuclear energy with all the separate problems that entails. We pump the soil full of chemical pesticides, destroy animal life on a vast scale due to our addiction to eating flesh and animal products. A normal day, creating the greenhouse effect as is our habit, living with no concern for how much is destroyed our wake.
If we recognized that we need to live within the limitations of nature (something so obvious it could almost be called a priori) our lives would become more peaceful. Those who profit from the climate emergency may be skewing the story, but undeniably the weather is changing, it is visible and tangible in many countries. It is corporations who are profiting from it the most, and they are entirely self-centred, and only concerned about short or long term profits. So as public opinion leans towards sustainability, they put on an appearance of sustainability. This should not be confused with the foolish idea that climate change itself is an invented problem, only the product of an agenda. In fact, business considerations of monolithic corporate entities have more to do with any agenda that is being promoted than any speculative shadowy cabal.
Capitalism has always exploited crisis for its own ends (as Naomi Klein shows us in “The Shock Doctrine”). We have a choice to confront the climate emergency in co-operation, a spirit of non-sectarianism, brother and sisterhood. If we ignore it or choose not to, then the governments and corporations will deal with it in their own way, making human life even more painful than it is now. But, in confronting it, we can develop the inner capacities to overcome crisis in the proper way, leading to a higher level of human civilization.
Both our credulity and our scepticism are utilized by those forces seeking to advance their own agenda at the cost of us all. Confronting a problem in the wrong way may worsen it, but denying that a problem exists does nothing whatsoever to resolve it. We must learn to look through the lens of the Dialectic, comprehending that affirmation and denial are each sides of the same phenomenon. We must learn to act in such a way as to bring about universal human ends, rather than being preoccupied with our own problems, beliefs, and ideas.
Now is the moment for us all to come together. We cannot delay action, nor assume that without our own commitment the cause will triumph of itself. We must repair the situation, if we leave it to the forces of selfishness and greed then they will use it to bring about a real dystopia. We must learn to live in harmony with our Earth, a thing which should really be very simple to achieve, if only we begin working towards it.
A change in orientation is required, a turning away from theory toward practical action, from opinions toward concrete facts. An awakening to the spiritual reality in all things, a recognition of the life and beauty in nature, who we are harming due to the senselessness of our present civilization. The future is our own script to write, and we must not believe that it is predestined to be bad, for this is no more than a philosophical disguise for the worst kind of fatalism. Together we can work to heal the earth, to protect nature, and heal ourselves in the process.
