I almost never watch MSM news, but the other day a preview of a show with Dan Rather about the die-off of bees caught my attention. People were horrified that their business would be hurt, profits would be eviscerated, livelihoods would be irreparably damaged. It’s all about the humans and their economy, not the ecological balance of the planet or what humans have done to push all these non-human species into extinction, in turn threatening homo sapiens’ existence.

Everybody’s livelihood is at stake here over a little flying bee.

Mother Nature thinks the same thing of us: “The Earth is being forever defiled by these arrogant, self-centered bastards and all they can think about is their profit margin.”

Guess what. The Earth doesn’t care about human wants or needs. A misused and abused Earth does not consider the inconveniences to the human economy posed by climate chaos and environmental collapse. The other creatures inhabiting this planet are being silently driven off the face of the Earth to make way for humankind’s insatiable appetite for domination and control. A creature which sees itself as a force of nature to be reckoned with, separate and superior to the planet that spawned it, will soon be brought down by such conceit. I hope we can handle being the only thing left on the planet. We can pollinate our own crops like the Chinese, and bring back extinct species at will to be placed in zoos for our amusement. We can geoengineer the Earth ‘s atmosphere to fix what we’ve destroyed in a vain effort to maintain this colossal edifice of industrial civilization. We can genetically modify crops so as to try to adapt to the drastically altered environment we’re handing down to future generations, human and non-human. Better yet, we can genetically modify ourselves to survive within this toxic world we’ve created. There is no fucking end to our God Complex.

Connection with the outside world has been replaced by a virtual world of electronic devices – TV’s, computers, video games, iphones, blackberries, and other assorted digital devices – filling every public and private space with the latest infotainment news and gossip of a throwaway pop culture. The masses watch reality TV shows to escape from their own hollow reality of slave wages, deadend jobs, a collapsing environment, and the faux democracy of corporate rule.

Driven into the military as the only avenue out of poverty, many soldiers commit suicide to escape the clutches of an industrial war machine that chews up foreign countries and cultures in order to extract resources onto the chopping block of the global marketplace. Blood for oil; souls for dollars. The last remaining vestiges of a living planet get pulled into the marketplace to be commodified, priced, and privatized. Damaged soldiers come home to a jobless economy while their leaders who sold them these wars travel the country doing book signings and lauding their war crimes as accomplishments.

How can such a system survive when the only thing it knows how to do is treat everything as inanimate objects whose only real value is to serve the desires of a self-absorbed species? Humans are amusing themselves to death in their fabricated world of alsphalt, concrete, and steel while the real world burns under the slow-motion detonation of climate disruption and mass extinction. The scientists think they can save the world with new technology even while prior technology is ripping the world apart. Rather than add yet another layer of unsustainable complexity, perhaps it’s time to escape this technology trap and simplify our way of life before becoming victims of our own perceived success.