Truth 
in politics. 
What a concept!

Meet Energy/Environment Challenges 

By Kevin Barrett 

Congratulations! If you are reading this, you are a member of the most successful large animal species ever to exist on this planet.  

Think of it this way: there are more than six billion human beings on earth, averaging perhaps one hundred pounds each. That means that more than six hundred billion pounds of the earth’s biological resources have been converted to human flesh. How? By the cleverness, tenacity, love, lust, and sheer cussedness of the human creature.  

But that’s not all. Along with brute bulk, the human species brings something new to this planet: The possibility of reproduction.  

I’m not talking about anything so mundane as human reproduction, which happens more than 200 million times a year. I’m talking about the whole planet giving birth. 

If we human beings can make it through a few tough decades, and not destroy our civilization and its technological achievements, we may carry whole biospheres into space. Each biosphere would be like a tiny fertilized egg of Gaia (mother earth) and some of them could find well-resourced homes on other planets. We may even be able to terraform lifeless planets and turn them to beautiful, teeming children of mother earth.  

Jesus’s parables of the mustard seed and the sower may have referred to planetary reproduction, as well as to the many individual spiritual decisions that will determine whether it happens, or whether we will destroy ourselves first.   

The Qur’an teaches us that there are many worlds—we are not alone in the universe. If we can peacefully self-submit to the Source (God in theistic language) we will not only be destined for paradise in the hereafter, but we can help this planet, and perhaps others, become approximations of paradise—the Garden. (For my radio discussion of Islam’s view of ETs and other worlds, click here.) 

According to the “planetary reproduction hypothesis” eloquently propounded by Dorion Sagan, the stakes could not be higher. During the next few decades, we will determine whether the 3.6 billion years of life on earth will or will not be fruitful.  

I don’t know whether Dorion’s right, whether the stakes are that high. But I do know that we, as a very successful species, will soon be facing some serious environmental/energy challenges. 

Ecologists know that every species tends to reproduce until it devours the available resources and pollutes the environment with its own waste. Then it experiences a die-off. 

Some analysts think we are due for a massive human die-off. The most commonly cited cause is peak oil. Another is global warming. The pessimists think that a combination of factors, mostly involving declines in resource and especially energy availability, are endangering humanity’s future. 

I am not sure that the peak oil and global warming pessimists are right. But I am certain that we, all six hundred billion pounds of us, will soon be facing environmental and energy challenges much greater than those we have experienced in the recent past.  

That means that we had better stop wasting our resources on the military-industrial complex, the prison-industrial complex, and the medical-industrial complex. We need to use our resources more intelligently. All that money we’re wasting on mass murder, prisons, and misallocated medical care could rebuild railroads, develop alternative energy, shift to more sensible land use patterns (America’s suburban-based patterns are doomed) and otherwise help us roll with whatever punches mother nature has in store for us. 

The bottom line is: Do we want to waste the last of our resources blowing each other up?  

If we do, we will quickly move from being a successful species to a failed species.