Doing the Big Jobs First

EVERYONE COULD make a list of the world's most pressing problems. Everyone's list would be long, unless lazy people stopped work early, or got depressed at the overwhelming undertaking, and chose to adandon the task of solving the world's problems, in favor of sneaking off to the local pub, for a brew. Mine would be perhaps the shortest list of all, the only decision being deciding what exactly to name it. Some options are: environmental degradation...ecosystem decline or collapse...climate change... Racism, disease, war, hatred; all these human made scourages take a back seat to the Big C, climate change. All other world problems, I maintain, are subordinate to this. Ecosystem decline/climate change threatens all life on Earth, even more so than the thousands of atomic bombs laying around in ready for use warm storage. Species of plants and animals are going extinct at a faster rate than ever before, even including the several mass die offs which have occurred over the eons due to natural forces suxh as meteorites,and natural climate cahnge (climate change occurs naturally, as well as occurring due to human activity).On this essay website more essays have been published on climate change than any other topic, with the possible exception of you know who. You know who will be gone mercifully soon, although not soon enough. Climate change will continue until the sun goes nova, one way or another, natural or human made. Natural climate change is good, just like torandoes and hail storms are to a degree good, because they're natural. We want the wind to blow, and, well, strong straight line or rotating winds are, as we say, part of the bargain. We all want rain to end drought without flooding, but not when we have a picnic, outdoor concert, or ball game on our busy ego driven schedules. If and when the Yellowstone caldera erupts, which could be any time between this morning and a few thousand years in our future, life on Earth will have to start over, if it can. We know that Yellowstone will erupt some day or other,and that oceanic life, insects, and bacteria will be confronted with the awe inspring but daunting task of reintroducing natural evolution by natural selection to the planet, which will begin another cycle of life on Earth, another of the several which have already occurred. Vladimir Lenin, who was so important that his body is entombed in glass in Moscow for public viewing and the lines are always long, asked the reasonable question: "What Is To Be Done" in a pamphlet. We all wish we knew. How can we the human species have our cake and eat it too? How can we continue to enjoy our inreasingly high standard of living, our cars and big houses and poison spewing jet travel, and somehow raise two billion people out of desperate poverty? The answer, maybe, is, a little bit of everything, an all strategies approach. Population, leveling off. Standard of leving,kept within a reasonable range for everyone. Nobody super wealthy, nobody super poor. China and Japan are teaching us efficiency within high population density. In Germany, nothing is wasted, not a scrap of paper lies on the ground. Expansion of human habitat into outer space, on other planets,on space faring star base habitats might help. In the background lurks the question: "God/the universe either intends that we exist, or allows it, reluctantly, or so it seems. But are we intended to ruin planet Earth, heaven foribd, or are we intended to survive long, and to spread our species across the galaxy? As we say: heaven only knows.