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Nudge to humans from planet Earth: How many warnings do you lot need?

“Hi Humans. Lately you may have noticed that I have accelerated the melt rate of my Antarctic Glaciers. Lately you may have noticed that I have been experimenting in my lab with the creation of even bigger and better super storms. Lately you may have noticed that I have been expanding my deserts at an ever increasing rate.

I use the term ‘may have noticed’ under decided advisement because it actually appears to me that you have taken no notice at all of my warnings. Well I am running out of patience and I am fast forming the opinion that I need to step in strongly and start protecting myself.

And I’m feeling a little crowded.

Wherever I look there is this huge mass of you human beings waddling about consuming things. Consuming food. Consuming water. Consuming my resources. And at some point there will be so many of you that you will, inevitably, arrive at a point where there will be nothing left of me to consume.

All around the world you, as a species, are gathering up every possible resource to either throw down your gobs, blow out of your exhaust pipes, or feed your insatiable greedy need to have more and more of that nihilistic human philosophy called unlimited economic growth.

Don’t you get it? You are sowing the seeds of your own destruction.

Like a pack of absolute drongos you lot wander along with a startlingly dense belief that you can keep expanding your numbers at exponential rates and that I will always continue on and supply resources to satisfy your ever increasingly voracious maws.

Well guess what? My resources are finite. That word means that your rapacious grazing of my limited resources is ultimately going to come to a screeching halt. At some point things, my things, are going to run out.

Already, on various parts of my being, you are starting to have wars to secure regional hold over things like dwindling water supplies or shrinking amounts of arable land. Already, millions of you are becoming modern day economic nomads as you wash over the borders of neighbouring countries in your quest for any sort of resource to keep yourselves alive.

From my point of view you are like a plague of locusts. You make no real effort to diminish your breeding rates. You keep supporting fossil fuel burning Governments who do not have the intelligence to realise that my day of retribution is coming. You keep wanting more and more and you keep creating more and more of you.

Well I’ve had enough. It is fast approaching the point where I cannot even breathe my own air, I cannot keep my oceans damped down at reasonable levels, and I am less and less inclined to dance along to your merry tune.

So this is my final warning.

Decrease your population growth rates now … there are far too many of you. Your locust swarm, for that is how I see you, is eating me alive.

Stop using fossil fuels now and covert to solar energy capture … period … I went to great efforts to position myself just the right distance from the sun to enable you to do so.

Throw out your Governments who believe that my environment, my resources, are handy cannon fodder for their destructive ‘growth at any cost’ nihilism.

This is your last warning. I’ve had enough!”

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23 comments

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  1. miriamenglish

    Growth for growth’s sake is the ideology of the cancer cell.
    — Edward Abbey

  2. Rosemary (@RosemaryJ36)

    Don’t laugh – this is serious!

  3. Eugene

    I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you’re not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You’re a plague and we are the cure. – Agent Smith

  4. Nettescape

    Sorry Gaea. Like most other humans I expected that a combination of good governance and techno fix would sort us out. That was before Big Coal, the Murdoch Press and the Corporate Menace decided to bribe our politicians, discredit our best scientists and infiltrate the environmental movement.

    What I really regret is all the amazing life on this planet which we are likely to take with us in our attempted murder/suicide. If we get our acts together this year; quit coal and fracking, stop all deforestation and use minimal amounts of oil to change to basic renewables we may still be in with a chance for some survivors. May they be indigenous people who haven’t forgotten how to work with and respect the Earth.

  5. stephentardrew

    Survival of the fittest is just one more dystopian rewriting of the works of Charles Darwin. A term peddled by the unknowing and uneducated.Unless you have read “The Origin of the Species” you have no idea what you are talking about. Fact is Darwin never used the term survival of the fittest. Fact is Darwin emphasised cooperation and what we now call sustainable use of the environment and communitarianism to achieve optimal outcomes. Those that adapt new strategies will survive while those that don’t will become extinct while others become future fossils that lose the capacity to change seeing they are efficiently adapted to their specific environment.

    Those who promote Social Darwinism invariably do not believe in evolution or have any idea of the complex interplay between organisms and their environments. They do it to promote an agenda of greed and self-interest. Self-interest and cooperation are vital mixes in a process driven by a causally contiguous nature that does not need to think about consequences. Sentient beings, on the other hand, are provided with nominal choice (there is no actual free will which is empirically provable) to make decisions based upon community and cooperation to build a sustainable world that will not collapse under the weight of greed and self-interest. But no the facts are just too complicated for the naive and ethically challenged. Nature produces mirror neurons and cooperative strategies to provide the grounds for reason, logic and rationality yet we fall back into the dysfunction of an over active limbic system driven by our lack of tooth, claw and a overactive fight flight mechanism built for survival on the savanna not in city life. It seems we must chose to overcome our primitive greed infested fearful primitive drives or suffer the consequences.

    In fact, if anything, evolution is progressive adaptation while conservatism is heavily fear based clinging onto a past that was and remains cruel and unjust. In logical terms only a fool would repeat the same idiocy that leads to war, environmental degradation, gross inequality and unsustainable wealth by the few while the very environment required for survival is destroyed. No wonder conservatives hate education and science because they do not support their irrational magical mythical nonsense.

    Love and compassion are the tools to a more sustainable future in which we accept the causal facts that people do no create their circumstances and that primarily most people are victims of cultural, environmental, familial, ideological, educational, sociological, class conditioning and a raft of contingencies born into.

    The funny thing is ideology is much more brutal and judgmental than the facts of evolution. If one understands evolution the whole notion of judgment, blame and retribution can be dispensed with for recognition of the causal contingencies that lead to suffering, injustice, inequity, ideological-brutality, exploitation of victim blame and the necessary fact that we must cooperate. Therefore it is how we treat the most vulnerable amongst us that is a measure of how successful we will be as a species.

    There are a whole raft of confounding paradoxes and counter factuals that can be derived from physics, cosmology, mathematics and so on that demonstrably prove that what we think we know is partial and incomplete and no-one can claim absolute truth or knowledge. However scientific proofs are much more amenable to social justice than the rantings and ravings of ignorant ideologues. In the long run I don’t care what ideology you have just get the facts of causal necessity right and then act out of love and compassion. Only then will we learn to get along together.

  6. donwreford

    Because society tends to alienate individuals for many reasons such as being used as consumption units to make money with what we are told will fill the hungry gap within, individuals desire to have something like a child to fuss around to justify ones existence of meaning on a planet that is obscure as to why we are born and become just another mouth slurping in energy such as petroleum, and what ever is around to exploit, to make one feel BETTER.

  7. mark delmege

    Boiling frogs indeed. We need neo calvinist solutions. Oh wait we have a neo calvinist leader, horray, we will all be saved.

  8. Ricardo29

    Dear Earth. I think you are talking to the wrong people, and in the wrong language. I may be wrong but I think that it is not those in the English-speaking world who are recklessly overpopulating, I think it is those in poverty stricken countries where you have as many children as possible to ensure you are supported in your old age. I don’t think these people actually know about the problems you mention. That said there are a lot of people in such countries who are hell bent on reducing their populations through war and genocide, and there is always disease, hunger, polluted drinking water helping to reduce populations. Sadly it’s not the pure numbers that are the cause of your despoliation, it is the numbers in the wealthy countries and I guess they/we are the ones who need to heed your message. Earth, nice of you to keep trying to help us. Some are listening.

  9. diannaart

    Gaea

    Well put, couldn’t put it better myself – which brings me to the problem – preaching to choir?

    Such worldly words require cramming down the gullets of those who will not listen, with repeated crammings until the stupid greedy sots realise they really do have to change the way they live on this planet.

  10. Rossleigh

    So, Jammy is now telling us that he ran an unsuccessful pig farm, as well as claiming that he’s a member of the Apolitcal Party which is based in England and that he’s a personal friend of many Catholic Priests. Not only that he’s recently claimed to be Baron Munchausen…
    I suspect that he’s just Lord Lord Marty Feldman Sheik Von Monkeyton writing under an alias.

  11. Michael Taylor

    That just about sums him up, Rossleigh. He’ll be here later, no doubt, to tell us about the time he climbed Mount Everest.

  12. Michael Taylor

    Backwards.

  13. corvusboreuscorvus boreus

    diannaart,
    I adhere to the principle of restricting my level of argument to my own levels of credible learning and verifying experience.
    I can only make a limited plausible argument supporting the case for altered atmospheric composition being a substantial factor in the equation of overall human influence upon the climate of the planet, because of the limitations of my in-depth knowledge upon the subject.
    However, if someone claims that humans cannot change the temperature on the surface of the planet, I will ask them to stand in direct sun, whilst I stand in the shade of a nearby tree, then commence a protracted discussion on the effects that human actions can have upon biospheric habitability.

  14. Harquebus

    Reducing populations will reduce the destructive impact that we are having on our world. The planet will do just fine, it is our world that is dying. Our planet is also witnessing the first ever plague of humans. All plagues end the same the way and same again, the planet will do just fine without us.

    http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/unprecedented-mass-die-offs-as-pacific-ocean-turning-into-a-desert-off-california-coast_05212015

    Soil Science Spelled It Out A Whole Century Ago

  15. mark delmege

    don’t worry the trees are getting thinner and smaller and less but don’t worry we are growing more concrete and roads and more hot areas. but jammy is right you cant keep cramming more people on here – we have taken nearly – everything – already.

  16. corvusboreuscorvus boreus

    Last Thursday I flew by black helicopter to an undisclosed location to engage in important negotiations for the NWO.
    As I was talking to Vlad (who is a really nice guy and a great bridge partner) I mentioned that personal observations during my time as a cosmonaut(reinforced by the opinion of a guy I know who makes batteries) had taught me that the world was entering a period of catastrophic global glaciation. Vlad said to me (with a slap on the shoulder and his trademark avuncular wink);”Corvus, me old China, I know, that is why I have been drilling big holes in the tundra. Our carbon emissions measures are proving insufficient. We need methane eruptions to keep us all from freezing to death.”
    Barrack’s eyes went really wide and he said “My god, Sarah P(who has nice legs and a wicked backhand, by the way) was right. Drill, baby, drill”.
    He was obviously shaken, so I took him out to the balcony for a relaxing (non-cancer causing) cigarette. He offered me a lift home in gratitude.
    As I parachuted out of Air Force One(big minibar, but all the scotches are blends) and descended towards my stud farm(I grow press fastenings for leisure wear; a very profitable enterprise that keeps me in touch with the cycles of nature), I closed my eyes and floated tranquilly, secure in the knowledge that our future is in good hands.
    Living the dream by dreaming the life.

  17. corvusboreuscorvus boreus

    I own the patent to dental floss, which I invented by feeding teflon to silkworms. I was trying to make non-stick ecclesiastical attire, but serendipity intervened. I can now afford to drink Crown Lager every day.

  18. corvusboreuscorvus boreus

    Benthos,
    That you swill low-grade piss first thing in the morning is the first plausible statement you have made.
    Do not address me again.

  19. Awabakal

    “May they be indigenous people who haven’t forgotten how to work with and respect the Earth.”
    Really?
    And the first hand experience of this comes from …?

    Blind ignorance does not an attribute make.

  20. Harquebus

    Like on the Titanic, whether in first class or steerage, our fate is the same only, survivors are unlikely.
    Forget 2deg. We are headed for 4deg min and possibly 8 by the end of this century and that will cause mass extinctions and probably our own as well. Climate warming is, due to positive feedback mechanisms, going exponential.

  21. corvusboreuscorvus boreus

    Vast swathes of burning (once was permafrost) tundra and mass die-off of N hemisphere forests are probably not good signs.

    Methane monster wakes,
    rampages, throwing tantrum.
    We’ve let go the leash.

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