1670: 

What went wrong

I suppose things started to get completely out of hand 70 years ago, during the Second World War. The farmers, politicians and consumers started to lose their moral compass by taking things to a new, demonic level. They exponentially increased a number of horrors - horrible pollution, horrible violence and horrible attitudes.

Having been brought up after ‘the War’, but more particularly after 'The Bomb', I was amongst the first new generation to feel differently afraid - we were in the 'atomic age'. A single hit, and many millions of lives would be lost very quickly. Suddenly there was a chance of total planetary annihilation. And yet it was thought by many that the bomb was the ultimate defence from being attacked. This was a very risky investment in violence, supposedly to ensure safety. 

This marked a great ethical leap backwards. It wasn't just 'the bomb' but the fear of food shortages, which coincided with the arrival of the first factory farm. With the bomb and the cage, each stimulated by war and privation, came what to some appeared to be a new sense of security. The bomb brought safety from war, the factory farmed animal brought safety from hunger. After the war there was food aplenty. And during the ‘cold war’ that followed there were many tests to perfect the atom bomb.

Now, seventy years later, if we have little hope for the future it may be because, then, science was allowed to rage unchecked. Now, we can see that we’ve applied what science has taught us to the point where we simply can no longer imagine a peaceful future. How many people actually focus on the future when doing things? Even more crazily, how many of us are beginning to ask the ugliest, most defeatist question of all: “Do we really deserve a future?”

Here’s where we stray into the absurd, for it’s not actually about what we deserve but what other species deserve, what the planet itself deserves. It concerns ‘bystanders’ suffering because we humans are knocking down the forests, caging animals and causing climate change. If we are intent on continuing being destructive, our life here is over and this place should be left empty of humans for the pleasure of the innocent ones and the well-being of Earth.