Is our species suicidal? Are we succombing to an inborn drive to usher ourselves out of the biosphere, now that we've almost used up the resources needed for our well-being? Are we - despite our superior intellect and our capacity of foresight - unable to withstand Mother Nature's call to self-destruct now that we've failed to adapt to her laws of sustainability? Is our subconscious obeying secret orders from a primeval, DNA-based safety device in making us do the exact opposite of what might ensure our collective survival? Or why does the majority of human beings ignore the warning signals and keep on doing business as usual? Why do we still allow our food to be produced as cheaply as possible, our meat consumption to soar, our oceans to be fished empty, our forests to be destroyed, our soil to be poisoned? Why do we let multinational corporations and backward governments do as they please, developing and selling weaponry and manipulating genes without restraint? Why do we accept to be lulled by irresponsible, irreverent, lustful media? Have we become 'comfortably numb'? Is our consciousness no longer receptive to positive visions and hopeful messages? Are we unable to pursue worth while goals beyond material inflation at the cost of everything else?

Is our dinosaur brain taking over?

picture: Daroy Lin

Julie was born today on 10:36 am GMT. She is Diana's and my ambassador to Copenhagen. Here's her/our message:





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Though i do not believe that it's equivalent to the end of the world, i'm pretty certain by now that the Copenhagen talks on a follow-up treaty to the Kyoto protocol will be just that: talks. There won't be a binding, fair, and far-reaching agreement, even amidst large-scale, partly violent protests all over the world. Most political leaders won't even attend the summit in person. The reasons are simple, even though they are often overlooked:

- to begin with, the sheer number of people on this planet already makes the shift towards sustainabilty well-near impossible; meanwhile, wide-spread poverty produces too many new births, and insane medicine keeps pursuing the meaningless prolongation of human life expectancy;

- human beings are intrinsically selfish: they care about their own immediate well-being first;  

- for all their media experience and ability to think ahead, most human beings still largely act according to immediate physical perception: they won't stop smoking till it hurts, they won't try the extinguisher till their house is on fire, they won't use public transport till petrol becomes unaffordable, and they won't invest in clean energy till storms and floods devastate their city;

- in terms of the theory of Spiral Dynamics, the large majority of human beings today live according to the blue (faith) or orange (business) meme-code; their consciousness is incapable of grasping the reality and urgency of global ecological challenges;

- for all its advantages over other forms of governance, representative democracy does not produce true leadership; as the term implies, the governments it produces represent and act on the will of the majority, so when the majority care about low taxes, limitless consumption, exquisite foods and cheap flights, that's what so-called 'leaders' will fight for.

In fact, the people getting together in Copenhagen will merely try to minimize restrictions for their own nations while at the same time putting on a clever 'Yes We Care' show for the media. There is no need even to bother the cliché (?) of bad multinational corporations trying to rule the world. The nature of the average individual explains it all. We just aren't ready to sustainably manage our planet yet. And the Earth will know how to get rid of us if we fail her for much longer.

image: Worldwide Fund for Nature