Stewarding Insanely

THE IVORY BILLED WOODPECKER, a beautiful bird with a melodious song, is now extinct. No human will ever again see a living one, unless they are cloned. No human deserves to. Another beautiful exotic bird, native to Hawaii, has suffered the same fate. No members of either species have been seen in decades, but hope was held out, until just recently, when they, along with more than twenty other species of missing animals, were officially declared extinct. Pronounced extinct, off hand, matter of factly, and nobody paid much attention or even noticed their being gone. Mostly birds and fish, a mammal here and there, and how many people know or care? We may not miss the fresh water mussels for awhile; all they did was filter and clean the pollutants from water. I remember October first, 1996, exactly twenty five years ago. I was forty one. A couple of friends and I went for a long run on a hilly tree lined trail deep in the woods in the Ozark mountains, and the trees were already far along changing colors. They were an explosion of shades of red, orange, and yellow. In those days that was normal. Back then October was still a cool weather month in the Ozark mountains. Now, October is a summer month, and the leaves start to change color around Halloween in the Ozarks. Both extinctions and climate change are caused, of course, by us. Over the next coupld of decades as many as one million species of animals will likely become extinct, being already threatened with extinction, and the climate, crazy as it has already become, will become much crazier, crazy beyond recognition. any meteorologist wil tell you that the climate and weather from day to day in most areas is already crazy beyond recognition. This, no matter what, if anythyng, humans do to ameliorate the dire situation, no matter how drastice the steps we take, assuming we take any. Its merely a matter of time, extent, and degree. There is no such thing as harmless human infrastructure growth and development, unless we are wliing to drastically reduce the humanpopulation, revert to stone age technology, or crowd thogether in hig density towns in high rise buildings, and leave the rest to nature, which we obviously are not willing to do. We are not willing to abandon our addiction to suburbs and gated communities, McMansions and strip malls, to fossil fuels and general material prosperity and extreme wealth for the few. We are unwilling to live simply that nature may simply live. Humans are irratinal enough to destroy the ecosystem in exchange for short term material prosperity, luxury, and comfort, irrational enough to trade our descendants future for our own profligate lifestyle. Most human are sufficiently irrational not to even care or remain aware of this dire human made situation. Many pretend that climate change and envirnmental destruction do not exist, or tha tit does not matter even if it does because their imaginary skky god is going to come down from the sky any day now, and rapture the saved, by which they mean themselves, into heaven. That is the extent of their insanity. These insane people who call themselves "believers" tend to devout worship capitalism, the freedom the compete ferociously for the acquisition of personal wealth, other people and nature be damned. The intellectual father of modern capitalism, Adam Smith, in his seminal 1776 book "The Wealth of Nations", the bible of capitalistic theory, said that capitalism works for everyone, or should, if people all behave rationally in their own self interest. The problem is that nobody behaves rationally in his or her own self interest, unless you consider drinking, smoking, becoming obese, violence, and an endless list of other destructive human behaviors to be self interested and rational, and an economic system rsulting in the eminent destruction of the Earth's ecosystem to be rational, in society's best interests. If you do, you are not merely irrational, you are flat out straight up crazy. Adam smith knew that in pratice, capitalism cannot and will not work, such is the nature of human nature. People seldom mention that.