I can’t stand it.  The stupidity and greed of the human race passes all understanding.  It is so hard to read the news these days.  Here we have a dying planet spiraling down into destruction and chaos, while all the money and power is gleefully riding this old horse as it dies.  Wouldn’t you expect everyone to join in a desperate effort to stave off the final end of life on earth, instead of just hurrying on the destruction ?  It is as if we were all in a small boat in the middle of the ocean, in a raging storm, and our boat is leaking badly.  One or two people are trying to bail out the water coming in from the leaks, but most of the others are not only laughing at the futile efforts to keep the boat afloat, but they are hacking away at the hull with axes, causing more and more water to flood into the boat.  

     Is this rational behavior ?  No; it is not.  It is caused by a fundamental collapse in consciousness which leads people to continue their paths of destruction by mindless inertia.  I don’t want to write any more about the incredibly villainous wars going on and the havoc being wreaked by all of it.  Instead of countries spending money for useful projects like health care or education or planting trees, so many countries are spending unsustainable amounts of their budget in war activities ~ building bombs and missiles and drones, and then paying armies of soldiers to use those armaments to destroy the world we live in, instead of repairing it as it collapses all around us.  

     But today I want to return to my Number One Priority ~ the one absolutely indispensable project, without which our planet and the human race is totally doomed.  I read in the news today that all remaining rain forests are now so badly depleted of trees that they are adding carbon into the atmosphere instead of sequestering it.  I read that in Africa over 100 billion kilograms of forest mass is being lost every year.  All over the planet everyone is cutting down trees as fast as they can, clearing land to graze more animals, or to put up big industrial factories or more parking lots for the billions of cars polluting our world.  

     And all the while, a few lonely voices are crying into the wind that we must stop destroying our forests.  Never mind planting more trees ~ no one can even make any headway against the non-stop felling of trees world-wide.  People try to suggest goals of reducing the rate at which our forests are destroyed, but all such efforts fail ~ the trees continue to fall.  Sometimes they use funny numbers, like pretending that to plant a tiny seedling is going to “balance” the cutting down of a mature, old growth forest tree, when most of those seedlings don’t even survive, let alone waiting a hundred years before they are big enough to do any balancing of the trees they have cut down.  

     But even if, by some miracle or fantasy, it were possible to actually succeed in stopping the destruction of our remaining forests, that would be Far Too Little, and Far Too Late.  If there is to be any hope for any pockets of human survival, even at greatly reduced standards of living, it is necessary to Plant More Trees, and Quickly !  If we were to stop cutting down any more trees, and, at the same time, we were planting a trillion trees per year, then, within as short a time as a hundred and fifty years, our planet might slowly begin to come back into some biological balance, under the shelter of whose trees the human race might gradually recover the sense of what it used to mean to be human.  But even this will be useless unless the world also manages to come to some solution whereby they can solve problems without going to war.  And that won’t happen until and unless people manage to raise their consciousness above the primitive levels of savage animals like Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, or Vladimir Putin, to mention only some of the more disgusting monsters fouling up our planet.  

     Short of a deus ex machina, there is no hope.  We are entering the irreversible stages of the decline unto death, and no one seems to care.  

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