Pay Attention. This is What Happens.

Ecological degradation. It happens all around us. Every second of every day. It never stops.

Here is one tiny case to illustrate what we are going to reap for the storms we have sown.

We can't keep consuming the Earth. There are already about ten times as many of us on the planet as can be comfortably accommodated here. The planet was just not made to serve as a home to almost eight billion enormous naked apes. And, yes, we are enormous creatures. As animals go, human beings are pretty damned big and qualify as megafauna.

But as we go along gobbling up everything in sight, squatting and shitting where we were not meant to live, and carving up the crust of the very planet, we are causing the systems that have sustained us to begin shutting down, one by one.

Just look around to see what's going on. In Beijing they had to build oxygen domes where college athletes could exercise without fear of choking on the polluted air in that overcrowded, vile monstrosity of a city. In Singapore, as I write these words, people are suffering because of the the hideous air pollution that has settled over that place. Everywhere you look we are killing off our wild companions and sending them straight to oblivion because we are stealing their homes and eating their bodies.

This cannot go on. At some point not only will we kill the creatures with whom we have lived for all of these centuries, but we will also destroy ourselves.

It's coming. Unless we put a halt to this unimpeded industrialization and the unending urge to fuck and overpopulate, then we're headed down the same path as the creatures whose existences we have snuffed out.

To get back to the issue at hand, here is the case in point.

When I was a kid living in Middle Georgia, there was a privately owned fresh water spring where people could go to swim. At Mock Spring, crystal clear water welled up in vast amounts, flowing out of the karst topography and into the nearby creek. The family upon whose land this spring welled had graciously allowed the public to experience this amazing place for a modest fee. Many, many, many thousands of gallons of water gushed out of the earth here every hour, as it had done for THOUSANDS OF YEARS.

 
And now? Now Mock Springs is gone. It's a dry hole. Why?

Because of the pressures of more and more water being tapped from the aquifer to be used in factory farms and for the burgeoning population of that part of Georgia. The water that once gushed from the ground in crystal purity can no longer reach the surface. That water is grabbed by vast farms, is stolen by cities and towns, is used by nameless industries.

Mock Springs is gone.

This is just one tiny example of what billions of humans are doing to our planet. This is our home. This is where we have to live. We are going nowhere else, so if we don't learn to stop what we have been doing, then it's all going to be ruined. And if you think that we are going to survive, then you are indeed an idiot.

Here is a brief view of what the people of Georgia, of Pulaski County, of Hawkinsville have lost. (As have we all.)