[pf] the future

· I have said that we, using democracy, can no longer "save the world" from
the downhill slide that started in the early '80s.

· If you're the "slotting" or categorising type person, feel free to
pigeon-hole me as a "doom-monger". I am.

· However, I want to point out that, in "save the world" I am referring to
"the world" I know and love, the world I grew up in and brought my family
back to New Zealand hoping they'd also be able to grow up in it. Where
neighbourhoods were full of neighbours; where work, business and industry
was no more than 1/3 of what was important (to the individual or government
- the latter being another third); and where the human race and nature held
roughly equal sway.

· On a world-wide basis, that has been lost forever.

· Yes, in pockets and patches, greens will be able to re-create something
close to that (improved in several ways), and in some of the rest there
will be "light green" changes which will slow down the decay a little. But
in much of the world things will only and constantly get worse - in not a
few cases, much worse.

· Largely, this is a predictable consequence of the conjunction of the
age-old drive for "power-over"-and-control that is part of being human,
with the science-supplied tremendous increase in technical power that
allows kingdoms and war-lords to now have a global reach. I see almost all
the people in the executive suites of the top ~150 corporations
("Fortune-500" list) as the war-lords planning what to conquer next. Their
mealy-mouthed "green-washing" and excuses "we have to satisfy our
shareholders", have got them out from under any effective democratic limits
to their actions; we can ignore publicity like the proposed Microsoft
break-up.

· So because of man's greed and unprecedented power, things will only get
worse, on average, for all living things on earth. I am not saying that we
need "a saviour"; autocracy never lasts, as well as having a great
potential for evil.

· There /will/ be a world in the future, which will still have people and
animals and plants and microbes, but the world we've known will not have
been "saved".

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David.
(David MacClement) davd@ihug.co.nz 
http://www.emucities.com.au/member/davd/index.html#top
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