Is the Earth screwed up? Yes, "more or less" says scientist...

I have been reading that article on the site Treehuggers and though worth passing it on.

That's just a small part of the article here:

Brad Werner, a complex system researcher from UC San Diego, really did attempt to scientifically answer the question if we've really fucked up the Earth. His conclusion is that yes, "more or less," we have.
Werner places the blame on a combination of modern capitalist consumer culture prioritizing short-term profits too highly over any sort of long-term stability. Werner says:

What happens is not too surprising: The economy very fast chews up the environmental resource, depletes those reservoirs, resulting in significant economic damage.

That's hardly a novel idea in environmental circles. But it's in how to solve the situation that disagreement is likely to arise.

Werner comes down on the side of revolutionary resistance: "Environmental direct action, resistance taken from outside the dominant culture, as in protests, blockades and sabotage by indigenous peoples, workers, anarchists, and other activist groups."

Also:


The thing is, as George Monbiot [who] so eloquently wrote in a piece for The Guardian in the middle of the talks, to rectify our current environmental problems we need to do far more than simply try to deal with the details of capitalism, specifically with neoliberal capitalism—which, it needs be said, too much of the modern green movement seems content on doing— and the associated political power structures.
Monbiot concludes:

Neoliberalism is not the root of the problem: it is the ideology used, often retrospectively, to justify a global grab of power, public assets and natural resources by an unrestrained elite. But the problem cannot be addressed until the doctrine is challenged by effective political alternatives.In other words, the struggle against climate change – and all the crises that now beset both human beings and the natural world – cannot be won without a wider political fight: a democratic mobilization against plutocracy. This should start with an effort to reform campaign finance – the means by which corporations and the very rich buy policies and politicians. Some of us will be launching a petition in the UK in the next few weeks, and I hope you will sign it.
But this is scarcely a beginning. We must start to articulate a new politics, one that sees intervention as legitimate, that contains a higher purpose than corporate emancipation disguised as market freedom, that puts the survival of people and the living world above the survival of a few favored industries. In other words, a politics that belongs to us, not just the super-rich

From another article on Treehuggers.

                                                        credit: Stuart Dee/Getty Images

At some point, nature reclaims everything.

That's just the way of the world. And never is the evidence more poignant than when we see roots wrapping around ancient relics. The photographer writes of the Thailand location, "Ayutthaya was one of the wealthiest and largest cities in Asia at its peak, and is UNESCO World Heritage Site."

Myself? I believe that it's the human species that is screwed, and we brought it onto ourselves. There are plenty of evidence in history of what has happened to all "civilisations" around the world: they have all disappeared. Ours will, too. The planet does not care and will survive our departure. I'm sure most other species left from the carnage we're causing will breath a sigh of relief.