If you are not happy on the inside, you will never find happiness on the outside.  Yet today, it is common to see people seek happiness on the outside without having done this inner work.  They seek some sort of lasting fix from something out there, somewhere.  They expect the next TV show, consumer gadget, website click or paid-for experience to provide some happiness, even when it never does.

The urge to find happiness on the outside leads to addiction and delusion.  It is possible to be addicted to anything in this world, even pain.  The root of all addiction is simply the urge to find pleasurable stimulation, to cover over the emptiness felt on the inside.  It is not possible to treat addiction without addressing this very emptiness — you have to teach the addict how to create happiness first, then the addiction will go away, naturally.

And it is possible to be deluded about anything.  So many people today are so obsessed with their religion, with their politics, with their ideas about how the world must be.  They cling to some belief system to interpret their emptiness and sense of existential anguish, to give it meaning, to give it some dignity  This is a very human thing to do, but no matter how much you dress up the empty void inside, it remains an empty void.  The fundamentalists of religion, of politics, even of science — those who refuse to question — have made this world a very difficult place for the rest of us.

I want to point out that our entire economic system today — consumerist corporate capitalism — is itself a product and reflection of this attitude that we can find happiness on the outside without doing the self-inquiry and personal work necessary to make ourselves happy on the inside.

Indeed, the entire premise of our society is that happiness can be purchased.  It doesn’t matter what it is you purchase, as long as you are purchasing something.  You could be buying a flat-screen TV, or a pet, or a year supply of Prozac.   In each instance, we make the assumption that the purchase itself leads to happiness.  That moment when cash exchanges hands, when units of money are swapped for some consumer experience or consumer item: this is the sacred moment of our society, worshipped as the sum total of human civilization.

If you want to understand the damage cause by this philosophy, all you need to do is look at the waste caused by consumerism.  Consumerism and waste go hand in hand.  Humanity has generated more waste on this planet in the last 200 years than in the last 200,000 years.  Thanks to consumerism, we have littered the world with our plastics, which scientists say carry a toxic poison.  We have created so-called “dead zones” in the ocean where life can no longer exist.  An entire island of trash, twice the size of Texas, floats between San Francisco and Hawaii.

Our need for cheap energy to fuel non-stop consumer acquisition threatens the habitability of life on this planet.  Fossil fuel emissions, air pollution, spent nuclear energy — all these things are produced because we give short shrift to the consequences of waste.  We prefer to have the luxury of cheap energy and fast cars even if it means poisoning the air quality and melting the ice caps.  There are so many evils associated with these waste products — health evils such as cancer and asthma, as well as environmental evils such as climate change — yet today, these evils are ignored.

Consumerism generates internal waste as well.  In addition to the physical garbage produced by consumerism, we accumulate mental garbage in our minds.  Short attention spans, fix-it-now attitudes about life, seeing people as worthy of respect only if they look like the people we see on TV: these are the types of mental waste we produce when we dedicate our lives to consumerism.

So we live in a world where we are told that buying things on the outside will soothe the inner void on the inside.  But this never happens.  Instead, all we end up doing is creating and living in our own waste.  Can you see how destructive this logic is, how truly brainwashed we must be to buy into the consumerist point of view?  We are so brainwashed that we cannot stop our behaviors even when they are toxic to the planet and to ourselves — even when we recognize the damage we are causing.

But let us look on the bright side.  The bright side is that more and more people are waking up to the reality that consumerism is a poison that prevents us from being happy.  More and more people are taking a holistic approach to the problems of our society — the problems of happiness, the problems of health, the problems of waste and climate change — and seeing that these problems are all linked together, linked to the very basic desire to find contentment.

Today, it is possible to talk of a world based on sustainability, and not consumerism.

What is sustainability?  Sustainability is a way of life that asks us to cultivate happiness from that which we have, instead of expecting happiness to come from that which we can purchase.

A sustainable world will look very different than a world based on consumer acquisition.

A sustainable world begins in our own minds.  Sustainability says, “what I have is enough,” and uses that foundation as a basis to do the inner work necessary to cultivate happiness.  Instead of seeing the world as a vast resource to be exploited, the attitude of sustainability seeks to live in harmony with the world and minimize human impact in order to preserve it for future generations.

A sustainable world will not be focused on the production of new consumer items.  Today, we all work to get rich, so that we can purchase things.  In a sustainable world, we will not work to get rich, but to maintain our essentials so that we can have the free time to cultivate happiness.

A sustainable world will honor mental and physical health.  Today, there are a variety of diseases that accrue due to our unhealthy lifestyle, diseases of the mind as well as diseases of the body.  Because we sit for so many hours of the day, we get heart disease later in life, and we develop cancers due to the poisons we put in the air and the earth.  Because we are constantly looking for happiness in consumer acquisition, we develop addictive and delusional traits that lead to psychosis and greater feelings of unhappiness.  A sustainable world will ask us to confront these ills, and heal them.

A sustainable world will ask us to take individual responsibility for our every day needs.  In a sustainable world, we will have to take a hand in guaranteeing our shelter, our food supply, our modes of transportation.  We will have to work with our friends and neighbors to ensure that those common necessities of life are shared by everyone, so that all can pursue their happiness in the way they see fit.

A sustainable world will have a different attitude towards technology.  We won’t use technology as a stand-in for human happiness, but we will use it as a tool in making our lives easier.

A sustainable world will be a world of peace.  Our current attitudes about acquisition play themselves out on the world stage this very moment.  What are the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, if nothing other than America’s desire to acquire stable energy supplies and greater power in this world?  No, we don’t need to acquire any of those things.  We can do with what we have.  Ninety-nine percent of the wars in this world result from a desire to acquire resources from another.  When we adopt an attitude of sustainability, we will come to see war as the disrespect that it really is, both to its victims and to ourselves.

A sustainable world is a world based on the wisdom that we cannot acquire happiness.  Happiness comes about through cultivation of the soul, through self-examination, by looking at our lives and making constant improvements so that we can feel ever closer to the grand consciousness which permeates all of existence.  If we can adopt this attitude internally, then the world will reflect this attitude as well.

The problems of the world today are the problems of unhappiness.  We are all just looking to be happy.  There is nothing wrong with this desire, but we should be critical of the methods we use to obtain happiness.  And we must discard those methods that do not in fact bring us happiness, ways of life like consumerism.

We can fix a lot of the problems of the world today with a new attitude: an attitude of sustainability.  It is a difficult thing to examine this collective way of life called consumerism which we live day-in and day-out, without thought of any alternative.  But it is a way of life that is killing us, and killing the planet, and prevents us from being happy.  It is time to think of another way.

What do you have to lose in this endeavor, other than your own misery?

To be plain, the energy free ride we’ve received from fossil fuels — cheap, abundant, and easy to refine — is over.

Every week, oil prices hit new records. Last week, they were at $112 a barrel.

Last year, oil prices were $75 a barrel.

In 2003 — just five years ago, and before the war in Iraq — the price of a barrel of oil was under $25 a barrel.

Oil is the blood of civilization. It powers everything. It is used in every manufacturing process and is the key component of plastic, which is ubiquitous in our society. It is used to make fertilizer and power tractors — the basic elements of modern food production.

Without oil, our lives change dramatically, and not for the better. All the modern conveniences we take for granted are a result of cheap energy, of cheap oil.

Because oil is so important, it is no surprise that the control of oil has led to war. This is what led the British to seek control of the Middle East and install puppet kings in the 1920s, and what led the United States to continue this legacy after World War II. It’s why the Shah of Iran was overthrown in 1953, and why the United States gave weapons to Iraq in 1980 against a nationalist Iranian regime. It’s why the United States went to war with Iraq in 1990 and rescue Kuwait — to preserve the balance of power in the Middle East and preserve its access to cheap oil.

It’s why the United States invaded Iraq in 2003: to control the oil of the Middle East.

Today, people are beginning to suffer from the effects of high oil prices. They are the poor, the marginalized, the invisible — the people who cannot afford to pay the high premiums for gas in cities without functional public transportation (e.g., cities in states west of the Mississippi), who have to choose between food and energy (and God forbid that there is a health need, because health care is largely unavailable as well), whose faces are not the faces that you see on the six-o-clock news because they are neither light-skinned nor rich (so there must be no newsworthy stories about them); today, at this very moment, it is these millions who act as unchosen vanguards of a future without cheap energy.

And their experiences appear to indicate that life without cheap energy will be very difficult indeed.

There is so much hope placed on technology — fuel cells will save us, or solar power, or wind power, or geothermic, etc. The list is endless, the snake oil salesman undusting their tried-and-true techniques to get a little private funding (or even government funding) on the hope that the energy free ride can continue.

In the meantime, there continues to be little concern over the effects of oil: that the use of cheap oil is melting the polar ice caps and leading to a world of potentially dramatic changes in terms of environment.

Oil has allowed humanity to live a way of life that is just not sustainable. This is especially true for Americans. Americans are five percent of the world population, but produce 25% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, consume 25% of the world’s resources, and generate roughtly 30% of the world’s waste. If everyone in the world lived like Americans, we would need the resources of four Earths. That isn’t possible. We only have one Earth.

Yet countries like India and China see the American way of life and they are motivated to obtain it as well. For centuries, so many countries have been mired in poverty and oppression. They see the good life of America — a society powered by cheap energy, and all the benefits of that — and they want that way of life as well.

As the prime users and beneficiaries of cheap oil, Americans will have to take the lead in coming to terms with its overuse. They will have to take responsibility for an unsustainable way of life, and start to develop a new way of living — one that is more sustainable and healthier. Americans will have to give up some of the comforts and benefits of cheap energy. That is a difficult thing to accept, but if there is any chance of dealing with the effects of climate change and expensive energy in the future, then it will have to be done.

We are not talking about buying Priuses and putting the thermostat lower. Our habits, assumptions, and behaviors are intimately tied to our thinking about energy: that it is cheap, plentiful, and harmless to the environment. None of these things are true anymore. Energy is no longer cheap; it is no longer plentiful (at least with regard to fossil fuels); and it is now generally accepted science that the use of fossil fuels produces carbon dioxide, which is contributing to climate change.

We need a totally new way of thinking that is based on that reality. Then we will be able to successfully deal with the problems that arise from the consumption of cheap energy.

Think about how difficult that is. I write these words on a computer made from plastic (and thus made from oil), powered by energy coming from an outlet in my wall that comes from electricity (produced either by natural resources such as coal or even nuclear power). If I am hungry, I will go and eat food that was grown with fossil-fuel based fertilizers and gas-powered tractors, and delivered by a gas-powered truck to a grocery store, where I went and drove my gas-powered car. Every moment of my current existence and all of my basic needs are based on the availability of cheap energy. This will all change in the near future.

Instead of waiting for the effects of this to ripple through society — and those effects will be harsh — people need to start affirmatively changing their lives. The best way to do this is to live a life where less energy is consumed. Live in smaller communities, walk more, use less energy; the suburban sprawl that we have generated in the past 50 years must come to an end. People will have to start living together again as they once did before the advent of the suburb.

This may mean a return to urban areas, but new (and better) models of social living can be created as well. Suburbs can be transformed to incorporate elements of food production — yes, growing food in the suburbs — so that food is local and doesn’t have to be transported hundreds of miles by truck to get where it needs to go. In fact, all sorts of manufacturing and light industry can be recreated within the suburb so that all basic needs are met within a small radius. There is simply no need for our goods and services to be manufactured in China and then shipped (by a gas-powered ship) to the United States. This may benefit the industrialist who saves on cheap labor, but it is destructive to the common good and to the environment as well. American industry will have to be reborn and retrofitted for sustainability and incorporation into the community.

But the most important change takes place in the mind. We have to learn to recognize the waste of everyday life and seek to change it. When you walk into a drug store, and find yourself surrounded by aisles and aisles of plastic goods, consider the energy use (and the oil use especially) in manufacturing all those plastic goods and shipping them to that store. Consider how many of those items will be wasted. That way of life is just totally unworkable in a world without cheap oil. It is nice to go into a upscale grocery store and see so many different items from around the world — but that way of life is just not workable without cheap oil. We’ll probably all have to eat locally grown food in the near future if we expect to meet our food demands.

We’ll have to rediscover the fact that global problems — no matter their size and scope — can be best met by local solutions. Let the people, at the local level, come up with the solutions on their own and they will learn to take care of themselves. This is the essence of American-style democracy, and in reality, that way of life is the key in confronting the challenges of the 21st century.

Everything I’ve described here will become obvious in the coming months, if it is not obvious already. Oil will climb higher, more people will suffer, the economy will falter as it starts to stall on the decline of cheap energy — cheap oil is its blood. At some point, the news of melting of polar ice will become difficult to avoid and shut out. This is all inevitable.

What is not inevitable is the reaction to these events. They may seem catastrophic, but these problems can be managed. But that will require effort, and a change of thinking about the world we all live in. It will require a recognition of reality. Sometimes, reality is the most difficult thing in the world to accept.

The British Times writes that the world is only “ten weeks away from running out of wheat supplies.” The shortages will be eliminated within a year, but this is the first time in 50 years that food stocks of wheat have been so low.

The Financial Times, in a piece entitled “The rising cost of food,” quotes food-industry insiders who note they are seeing “cost increases that we’ve never seen in our business” as a result of increasing demand for food.

The Sydney Morning Herald comments that corn is reaching all time highs on the Chicago exchange.

The BBC reports that the United Nations is calling the rising price of wheat and corn a “major global concern” and that food shortages rose 40% last year.

The Los Angeles Times writes that food prices last month jumped 1.7% — or 20.4% annualized if that rate stays the same.

All of this is a result of growing demand all over the world for food, as well as our increased use of these basic materials for our way of life. Bio-fuel anyone? People who think that we can grow our way out of global warning on the back of corn or soybeans are leading us to a world where we’ll have to literally choose whether to feed our car or ourselves. That sounds like a nightmare world. But it’s where we’re headed.

In the meantime, the destroyed housing market in the United States, a bubble purposely designed by the Federal Reserve to off-set the economic effects of a protracted war effort in the Middle East, is shrinking the credit supply. Creditors no longer want to give people credit, but the lack of real money means that without credit, people don’t have a way of buying the things they want, or even need (as in the case of food). And if people aren’t buying things, then our economy stalls and grinds to a halt.

The economic problems facing America are deeply structural and there is no quick fix. They are the problems faced by all empires at the beginning of their decline. The military is overextended; meanwhile, the lack of investment in the home economy causes a break down in infrastructure (such as the “lights out” in Florida). Things literally start to fall apart. The middle class disappears as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

In these times, where there is so much distraction all around us, with non-stop entertainment and technological gadgets, it is rare when a person can put two and two together. The longer the United States is at war with the world, the greater the economic instability and turmoil.  A society’s resources cannot be dedicated towards making the weapons of war without negative consequences. You can spend your time investing in yourself, or investing in a bomb. But you cannot do both. For now, the American government chooses to invest in the latter, and not the former.

The greater the economic instability and turmoil, the more significant the repercussions that eventually arrive. In times of great economic stress, people have turned to demagogues like Napoleon and Hitler to lead them from their troubles. As food prices rise, civil liberties will fall in tandem; those who start to ask questions will become a threat to those who profit from the breakdown of a civilized order.

The United States must remember its republican roots. It must come to see the danger of neverending military adventures. It must decrease its federal government and give freedom and money back to the states, and to the people. If it does not, then it risks a serious social breakdown. Societies do not thrive in conditions filled with food shortages and war.  They suffer, and decline, and often commit horrible atrocities against others.  This is the historical reality.  If nothing is done, it will become an avoidable destiny.

No one knows why the bees are disappearing. Some British scientists think cell phones are causing the wipe-out. The theory is that waves emitted by cell phones are interfering with the navigation system used by bees. Other’s blame viruses, fungus, poor bee nutrition, pesticides, even stress.

The crazy thing about CCD is that it is now spreading. Bees are disappearing in Canada, in the United Kingdom, and in Germany.

Like most things that are in the process of being destroyed by modern social organization, the absence of the bee will not be mourned. After all, there is a glorified karaoke show that has to be watched, in addition to countless acts of fictionalized and real violence flooding the airwaves, plastic reality stars, endless media distraction. The bee has neither the sex appeal nor the capacity for distraction that might let it compete with Fox programming.

That is, until the food products that depend on bees for pollination skyrocket in price. Almonds rely entirely on bees, as do apples, strawberries, cucumbers, pumpkins and cranberries. Without bees, some fruits and vegetables simply will not grow.

This, in turn, will mean that the heavy burden of existence that falls on the poor will be increased. There is a lot in this world — rent, energy, transportation — that is already extraordinarly expensive. Now food will be added to that list.

Any person with a modicum of common sense would see that the disappearance of the bees, if truly irreversible, is a portent of dire things to come. It means that the ecosystem is unalterably changing. Things we take for granted — such as our food being pollinated — may no longer be true.

What other organisms are disappearing that we simply don’t know about? What other critical linkages in the food chain are changing?

If the bees are gone, then that means less agriculture. Less agriculture means less food. Less food means more hunger. More hunger means more conflict. More conflict means more violence. More violence means more war.

The urban legend is that Albert Einstein once noted the importance of bees.
Wenn die Biene von der Erde verschwindet, dann hat der Mensch nur noch
vier Jahre zu leben. Keine Bienen mehr, keine Bestäubung mehr, keine Pflanzen mehr, keine Tiere mehr, keine Menschen mehr, he supposedly said. Translation: “If the bees disappear from the Earth, then Man has only four years to live. Without bees, there is no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more Men.”

Einstein wasn’t a beekeeper, but he certainly used his brain in a way that produced some levels of common sense.

It’s a shame there aren’t more who might follow that example.

I suppose there’s just too much good TV these days to pay attention to the humble bee.

Yet as millions prove everyday, the mind can also be made to accomodate the most trivial of inputs, such as the neverending products of consumerism and consumer culture — the magazines, TV shows, mass-produced movies, technological gadgets, and the myriad of other media products that are produced daily by the American consumer economy.

This, despite the fact that in America, you can think and say what you want in a way that would get you imprisoned or killed elsewhere. Such an impressive liberty that is today under threat by unsupported fears of “terrorism” — but also under threat from atrophy.

Only in a country in which you can say anything you want do people not say anything at all.

The very heart of consumerism is envy of the rich. Consumerism’s fascination with the rich and popular — actors and celebrities, socialities like Paris Hilton and Donald Trump — is indicative of America’s youth. America is a young country, which explains its capacity to innovate, but also its immaturity. In foreign relations, America is no better than Paris Hilton writ large on the world stage. It has become a spoiled child who wallows in the wealth given to her by by Daddy — no matter how it was that Daddy obtained his wealth. America is content to live off the fruits of slavery, genocide, exploitation, and war, because it is comfortable to do so. And, as spoiled children are apt to do, when it make horrendous mistakes that affects the lives of others in disastrous ways, like invading other countries, it denies that anything is out of the ordinary.

Deep down amongst the collective unconscious of the culture, there is a recognition that something is wrong. But because the minds of the people are wrapped up in consumerist fantasies, there is no capacity to hear what the soul already understands. There will be a terrible increase in psychosis and delusion as reality becomes more disjointed from the consumer world so many people choose to occupy.

Heaven and Hell are on this Earth, at this very moment. There are parts of this planet that contain more suffering and misery than could ever be dreamed up by Dante. I speak not only of the physical brutality and violence that exists in places like Iraq or Darfur, but also in the hearts of the superficial who have become so devoid of love that they wish for nothing but more power, more wealth, more cronies, more servants, more emptiness. That is a Hell, too, where consumerism acts as a useless armor against the daily arrows of loneliness.

In the face of struggle, one chooses either defeat or triumph. It is possible to leave the Hells found on this planet, and even combat them and free others. But this requires courage, and strength, and an understanding that the glass towers of civilization are built on the bones and blood of the oppressed and destroyed. The spirits of the dispossessed will forever haunt the present until their debt is repaid. They are not vengeful — they do not wish to contribute to the vast misery the living inflict upon each other. All they ask for is recognition and an acknowledgment that their sacrifice is what has shaped the present. This seems minor, yet they have waited centuries for such recognition. So long as consumerism casts its spell at every moment and enshrouds the minds of the people, they must continue to wait — even as humanity continues its present course towards environmental and social conflagration.

Thursday March 15, 2007
The Guardian

If you think Britain is intolerably crowded today, you might well want to brace yourself before reading the next sentence. Because this country is going to become much, much more densely populated over the course of this century as millions of people flee the uninhabitable desert that mainland Europe is doomed to turn into.Such at least is James Lovelock’s fear. The esteemed – if controversial – environmentalist and futurologist (he prefers to be called a planetary physician) also believes that by the middle of this century, the America-sized chunk of floating ice that currently covers the Arctic will melt. As a result, the current habitat of polar bears will eventually be the place where we, or our probably very fed-up descendants, live out their pitiful existences. “Most life will move up to the Arctic basin because only it and a few islands will remain habitable,” says Lovelock, who is most famous for coming up with the so-called Gaia hypothesis – the idea that the Earth functions as some kind of living super-organism.

Lovelock is now seriously concerned about said super-organism. Humanity’s vast output of carbon dioxide over the past two centuries has prompted the deserts to spread towards the poles at an alarming rate, he says. “The Sahara is heading north. So where’s the food going to come from? Not from the European mainland. Even here things are changing: there are in Britain now scorpions and snails hitherto only seen in the Mediterranean. Recently I saw hawk moths. Something terrible is happening.” On the plus side, hawk moths are very pretty, I suggest. “That’s not really the point,” says Lovelock.

“I think people forget that the whole world is going to be affected,” he goes on. “Climate change will affect China and the US.” Indeed, Lovelock envisages that the Chinese people will press to live in a newly lush Siberia before the century is out. “No wonder Putin is arming like mad. In fact, Putin is one of the more far-sighted of global leaders.” In the US, even now, distinguished academics are contemplating moving north, Lovelock says. “I gave a talk at Stanford [the Californian Ivy League university] a few months ago. Professors, including Nobel prize winners, were coming up to me asking where in Canada they should buy real estate because they believed me when I said much of the US will be uninhabitable.”

Are they right to think that way? “Absolutely … we should be scared stiff. If you speak to any senior climatologists, the summer of 2003 [in which thousands of Europeans, many of them elderly, perished in the heat] will be the norm by 2050. Old people might have air conditioning, but that won’t help the plants which we need to regulate temperatures. It will become a desert climate.”

But what of Britain? Is this green and sometimes pleasant land doomed to become desert too? Lovelock thinks not. “We’ll be a bloody lifeboat for Europe. It will be their right to come here too.” Why? “Because we’re all members of the European community.” Good point, but one tends to forget such footling matters as the rights that go with EU membership when one is staring global catastrophe in the face.

Lovelock reckons that the British Isles will be among the few island oases in a world given over to desert, scrub and oceans devoid of life: “Everybody in Europe will be wanting to come here.” Even people who live in currently delightful spots such as Cap d’Antibes and Siena. They aren’t going to like Milton Keynes or Cumbernauld one bit.

But then Lovelock reckons we need some radical rethinking in the way we organise Britain. Only with greater population density in urban areas can it be divided up in the way he believes to be sustainable: one third for cities, industries, ports, airports and roads; the second third for intensive farming, though only enough for the population’s needs; and the final third left entirely to the natural world.

Lovelock may sound extreme to some, but although he is regarded as a sort of dotty uncle figure by some scientists, and his Gaia hypothesis has been criticised by the likes of Richard Dawkins, others hold him in high regard. His fans include biologist Lewis Wolpert, green thinker Jonathan Porrit, geo-grapher Jared Diamond, and philosopher John Gray. The environmentalist Fred Pearce once said Lovelock was to science what Gandhi was to politics; Prospect magazine included him in its list of the world’s top 100 intellectuals.

Why, you might well ask, will the British Isles be spared the desert fate predicted for much of continental Europe? Because global warming will be, in our blissful case, cancelled out by a fall in temperature caused by the failure of the Gulf Stream. The suggestion comes from Lovelock’s latest book The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth Is Fighting Back and How We Can Still Save Humanity.

If, as Lovelock forecasts, the Arctic ice melts as a consequence of global warming, the Gulf Stream – the flow that moves warm water towards northern Europe from the Caribbean – will cease. This possibility has long been the subject of science fiction, with writers imagining the return of an ice age to the British Isles and the east coast of North America. Lovelock now thinks that possibility is less likely because any such cooling effect will be cancelled out by global warming.

I walk out with Lovelock into the unseasonably mild air, for a turn around Kensington Gardens in west London, where crocuses press their charms weeks too soon.

As we stroll, the 87-year-old scientist says: “Not only is the world turning and fearfully, but everything is happening very quickly.” He points out that carbon dioxide emissions warm the planet and in so doing destroy some of the regulatory systems – such as the reflective powers of the poles’ icy wastes – that have kept the earth cool despite the increasing heat of the sun.

“Things are changing all the time, but because we live in towns we don’t see it. We modulate the temperature. We don’t want to notice the big disturbing picture, we want to see the next episode of the soap opera. There are children,” he says ruefully, shaking his head, “who live in cities and have never seen the Milky Way.”

Where did we go wrong? “If we were hunter-gatherers and this was a bigger planet we would be all right. But we’re not: we’re farmers and that’s what’s screwed us up. There are just too many of us living the way we do. Our wrongdoing has been to take energy hundreds of times faster than it is made naturally available.”

How can we reduce human population to more sustainable levels? “We can’t solve the problem. There’s no human way of cutting numbers. You can empower women and persuade them to have fewer children butwe don’t have the time for that.”

His diagnosis may be grim, but Lovelock’s prognosis is much more bleak. He suggests that the current population of six billion humans will be cut to a more ecologically sustainable half-to-one billion people. “How will this mass cull happen? “It’ll be worse than Hitler – Gaia’s going to do it,” says Lovelock. He writes about this chillingly at the outset of the Revenge of Gaia, where he considers the December 2004 tsunami. “That awful event starkly revealed the power of the earth to kill. The planet we live on has merely to shrug to take some fraction of a million people to their deaths. But that is nothing compared with what may soon may happen; we are now so abusing the Earth that it may rise and move back to the hot state it was in 55 million years ago, and if it does, most of us, and our descendants, will die.”

Lovelock first came up with the idea of Gaia 40 years ago to try to account for his view that the planet’s chemistry, climate and veneer of life worked together as a self-sustaining organism. It was widely ridiculed by scientists. “One even called it an evil religion,” he says with a giggle, “but they later admitted not having read my books.”

He maintains that no academic scientist would have been able to come up with such a radical idea as Gaia. “I hate academia. Most of the scientists who work there are not free men any more and they can’t speak out. That’s no way to do science.” He believes the increasing specialisation of university science departments has made academic scientists unlikely to have the overview necessary to envisage the Earth as a self-regulating organic system.

As we walk, Lovelock talks about Gaia. “She’s an old lady who has lived for three and a half billion years but she only has half a billion to one billion to go,” he says. “She’s a bit like me – near the end of her life. I’m pretty unlikely to live beyond 100. She will die the same way as me.” How? “Your ability to resist perturbations gets less as you get older.”

Looking at the dead red landscape of Mars, as he did during his years as an independent scientist, gave him a premonition of what Earth might become like if global warming continues. “Vast tracts of it will become like Mars – uninhabitable for humans.” His suggestion is that all we can do is minimise humanity’s impact on Gaia. “We have got into this mess by burning carbon. We shouldn’t have burned things in the atmosphere to get energy. We shouldn’t have burned forests to drive out animals as a cheap way of hunting, because Gaia demands that the forests are kept in order to regulate her temperature and health.”

I suggest to Lovelock there are many sceptics about global warming. For instance, Michael Crichton, in his novel State of Fear, suggested that global warming was a fiction, while Mother Theresa said in 1988 that the fate of the planet was not humanity’s concern, adding: “God will take care of the Earth.” Recently Newsweek columnist George F Will wrote that the central tenets of the global warming thesis are all unproven, and that the benefits of trying to reverse it will far exceed the costs. “Maybe they’re right,” says Lovelock, sarcastically.

He goes on: “There are several things we can and should do to make the situation better, but they will only be like dialysis machines are for a kidney patient. It’s not going to cure you.” His suggestions for ameliorating global warming are intriguing. Among them are massive terrestrial or space-mounted sun shades to cool ourselves back to pre-industrial temperatures. He also supports the idea of the artificial production of clouds across large areas of the sky in order to reduce the input of solar radiation. His book also calls for sailing ships and even giant sailing airships for sustainable long-distance travel.

Lovelock, who is pro nuclear power, derides renewable energy, such as wind power. “It’s gesture stuff. I’m not anti-wind turbines. You need 5-10-megawatt ones on oil platforms in the sea because the wind is more reliable at sea. Planting thousands of them in the country-side is not going to solve the problem.” Nor does he like biofuels. Indeed, he is suspicious of any policy that results in more land being used in cultivation. “Gaia needs at least a third of the land for self-regulation.”

Before we part, I ask Lovelock, who lives in Cornwall, if he is utterly gloomy about the future. “No! Humans have gone through seven major climactic changes in the million years we’ve been around. Even those changes – ice ages – were ones we adjusted to. Admittedly, those adjustments usually took place over thousands of years, and ours will involve an adjustment in little more than two centuries, but we are flexible as a species.” He draws a parallel with his wartime experiences in London: “I was here for much of the war and when it happened it wasn’t as bad as we had thought it would be. If people are honest, they rather enjoyed it. It could well be similar in the next few decades. Life will become a little more interesting than it was before.”

A ten-word headline in the paper — “Nasa space probes may have killed alien microbes on Mars“ — was one such reflection. Scientists now believe that when the Viking Space Probes landed on Mars thirty years ago, they may have killed Martian microbes by exposing them to water. At the time, people thought that alien life would be based on water, but scientists now think that Martian microbes might be based on hydrogen peroxide. When the Voyager probes conducted their chemical analyses by mixing samples with water, this may have prompted a powerful chemical reaction in any microbe full of hydrogen peroxide, killing it and releasing the peroxide.

The authors of the study concluded, “If the hypothesis is true, it would mean we killed the Martian microbes during our first extraterrestrial contact.”

A few simple-life organisms may not be very spectacular, but this is more than just a tiny microbe: this is life outside the Earth. To have altered life on another planet in such a reckless manner is to literally have played God with the universe.

There is a troubling historical repetition taking place now in our adventures in outer space that mirrors prior instances of human exploration. This is not the first time that humans have traversed great distances only to kill what they encountered. Five hundred years ago, this was the exact behavior of European settlers who set foot on the New World, coming for a variety of reasons but mostly for gold and for their God. They saw that the people they encountered would catch diseases and become horribly ill, and yet they did not quarantine themselves off; on the contrary, they killed off the rest and took their land. An act of contact that might have produced a great diffusion of cultural learning across two very different civilizations instead resulted in the extermination of millions of people.

There is an extremely dangerous virus that permeates the Western mind, a mental thought pattern that has caused centuries of misery. This virus makes people think that it is permissible to take things from others without their consent — and if the other people resist too much, this virus says that it is OK to kill the resistors.

This is the virus that guided European settlement of America 500 years ago. It told the Spanish conquistadors that it was OK to take Aztec gold back to Spain and to subdue the native population. It told English settlers that it was permissible to travel to Africa and remove millions of people without their consent and shackle them and their descendants into an egregious form of slavery that has yet to be fully rectified. It told those with greater technological prowess that it was acceptable to use their technology for conquest, greed, and exploitation, and to ignore the suffering which inevitably results whenever greed and power join forces over the weak.

And after the New World had been conquered, this virus directed the infected to continue taking things from others in far off places all over the world. The British went to India, the French went to Africa, and now the Americans are in Iraq. Each time, the virus has been able to explain away the contemptible bloodbath of conquest as necessary for the conquered — that it was in the best interests of the exterminated to be exterminated. The White Man’s Burden carried the British as easily as the desire to Spread Freedom commands the current President in his folly.

The Voyager probes, and the lunacy guiding the next space race to the Moon and beyond, are the technological children of this virus. The Earth has been fully settled, so now it is time to conquer the remaining planets in the solar system and kill of their life just as we are killing off life on Earth with our pollutants and industrial lifestyles. Only when iPods, dollar bills, and the scourge of human greed have besmirched the quiet sanctity of these outer temples will we know how wonderful we are. I can think of nothing sadder then envisioning the landfills we have created on this Earth relocated to the dark red dust of Mars, so that one day I might look into a telescope and see a Tide label or Coke bottle lying next to the remains of our first interplanetary garbage, the defunct Voyager probes and various Martian rovers that followed.

This is the sum total of our civilization: we take the lives of things that stand in our way. If we want cheap protein, we take the lives of factory-grown animals so that we can buy 18 types of meat in convenient plastic packages. If we want to feel safe in our violent society, we will kill off the worst-products of that society by gassing them or electrocuting them. If we want oil to use as energy, we kill hundreds of thousands of people in a foreign country so that we can sit in traffic. If we want a boundless supply of electronics, we will consume said oil and release a gas into the atmosphere that will one day change the conditions of the planet so drastically that there is no telling how many species — or humans — will survive into the next 100 years. And if we want to test the limits of our technology, we will litter the galaxy with our probes even if by doing so we kill the very things we think we’re looking for.

We are a spoiled child that has gotten away with murder for a long time. But there is no parent who will discipline us or make us see the error of our ways. We must collectively recognize what we are doing and mature by ourselves. There is no other alternative, because the only other potential alternative to growing up is pointless slaughter, either at the hand of nature or at the hands of each other.

I would challenge anybody who thinks about a better world to look no farther than themselves. Make yourself a better person and you will change the world by doing so. Educate yourself. Make peace with your family. Find out who are your friends and who are not your friends (hint: the friends are the ones who stay with you when you are in rough times), and treat your friends with dignity so that they will dignify you when you need their assistance. Be kind to the elderly, children, and those who have lost loved ones, for you will be each of those people at some point in your life.

People expect the world to change but don’t expect themselves to be part of that process. They condemn the sickness of others but refuse to confront the virus within them.

Maybe one day the resources that are devoted towards killing off life on distant planets will be better spent in preserving life on this one. Such a world is possible, but it cannot happen without a truly radical change in perspective. Perhaps, if I am lucky, I will live to see this change; but at the end of the day, I will consider myself fortunate to have cured myself of the collective illness now laying waste to society in so many different forms. That is the most that is expected of me, and should be expected of me, or of anyone for that matter. The rest must fell where it may.

• An emergency plan for global warming
• Possibility of storing carbon dioxide in the oceans
• More disasters in a warmer world
• 10 years to point of no return
• Biggest rise of C02 in 800,000 years

(see also)

• Concern of self-perpetuating climate bomb
• Humans are causing stronger storms
• NASA expert gives humanity 10 years before climate tipping point
• Examples from around the world of the effects of climate change
• Cracks in the Arctic icesheet
• Earth’s temperature potentially highest level in a million years
• One more degree of warming will make Earth “a different planet”
• Greenland ice sheet melting
• Perpetual drought by 2050
• Climate change will spark refugee crisis
• Former World Bank head says cut emissions now or face economic crisis
• Arctic sea ice gone by 2040
• Warm winter wrecks havoc
• Global warming will be jarring
• 2007 will be hottest on record

Both of these problems are ones that cannot go ignored forever, because eventually they will spiral out of control. At what point do people begin to consciously focus on these problems as ones that require direct attention? This is the critical question.

Ultimately, what will solve both is an awareness that we cannot continue to live our lives the way we do. The model of Western consumerism that has led to the mightiest empire in history is now set to destroy itself.

If one looks close enough, there are always mirrors found in the world. The cracking of the Arctic ice echoes the ignored cracking of the Iraq state, both now set for complete disintegration in a short time. The same ignorance of the dangers of climate change — and the speed at which we will face its full fury — matches the same ignorance of the perilous occupation of Mesopotamia.

At some point the common consciousness of humanity becomes saturated enough where that one critical spark excites people into action. I can only hope that 2007 is that year wherein the reality of what lies ahead breaks through the delusions of everyday life. When families and neighbors become less than strangers, when local communities reemerge, when people begin to cultivate brotherhood — these will be the signs of a revitalized American democracy.