We're doomed, doomed, doomed!

It's my pleasure to present the first guest post of the year. Can anybody help? Lazbot thinks so... 

Has anyone out there got a theory for why an otherwise normal, pushy and rude city motorist takes such pleasure in gratuitously thanking, with a tribal style open palm, another motorist that displays generous or thoughtful behavior towards him/her? I’m only asking because I’m hanging a lot of hope on it, not in a small way you understand but in a way that ensures the survival of the planet.

The human race faces peril and is certain to vanquish as the earth heats to intolerable temperatures, the oceans vapourise and we kiss our variable bottoms farewell. I’m not talking about global warming - well not yet anyway. This scenario isn’t on the planetary timetable for another five billion years when the sun runs out of hydrogen, swells and scorches our planet. Not meaning to sound too species-centric about it all but us humans will have surely skipped the solar system by then and only the dolphins will be left to grace the boiling ocean soup.

Five billion years is a long time to get ourselves sorted. In fact five billion years is more time than our middle aged solar system has been around. It is five times longer than the history of life forms of greater than one cell, 20 times longer than mammals have been around, and 20,000 times longer than the history of anything that looked liked us human folk.

To put this into perspective imagine yourself on the now not so wobbly millennium bridge on the River Thames pointing an outstretched finger at the clock faces of the Big Ben Tower. Imagine a timeline running from the Blackwall Tunnel through your shoulder to the clock face of Big Ben. Our galaxy would have formed someway behind you near the Canary Wharf towers. At your shoulder appear our original homo genus ancestors, with homo-sapiens appearing appropriately enough at your knuckle, Neanderthals disappear at the moon of your finger nail and our entire Abrahamic history fits into a healthy clipping of your peter pointer finger. Our entire industrial history wouldn’t even get stuck in your teeth. We have up until the big hand of Big Ben to leap the planet, before the sun turns nasty and earth frazzles. We obviously have a lot of time left to get it right.

The one problem at the moment that threatens us reaching our Big Ben moment intact is that our planet currently appears to be unwell, got a bit of a temperature you know. Ignoring for a moment the skeptics (though I welcome any to contribute), let’s agree that it is safe to assume that our planet is getting warmer because us humans that inhabit the planet, in the time it took to grow a comparative fraction of a finger nail, have become of sufficient number and industry to alter the composition of atmosphere to a significant degree. This significant degree has altered the environment that hosts life on the planet sufficiently to place many life forms on the planet at risk. Worse still Earth scientists talk of an impending event horizon, a tipping point that could be reached in the next few decades from which recovery will be impossible and the earth’s physiology will be radically changed for a very long time. 

One understanding of the earth proposed by some earth scientists is that our planet, or at least the thin film of life around it, behaves as an organism itself, self regulating its temperature and chemical composition. As such, the increasingly networked human life that exists on the planet can be seen as kind of bacteria (or perhaps a scrotal fungal infection?) happily residing within this organism. For our entire finger bar the clipping of a clipping this has been in symbiosis bar the odd ice age. As we stand on our bridge however it appears that networked humanity will either kill its Giaian host or be killed by it. Earth “tough bitch” that she is will most probably survive but it seems like she might be about to sneeze, and if she does there will be a lot of us lot drenched in its cyclonic snot.

In reality the prospect of humans becoming completely extinguished seems remote. There are too many of us and we’re too clever to be confined to history by a few more metres of sea, desertification and snow in July. However as memorable government literature of the nuclear threatened 80s told us  – ‘society is like a great forest and the aim of a great forest in peril is to preserve the major trees and not the brushwood’. There will undoubtedly be plenty of dead brushwood gracing the warm oceans of our warmer planet.

Fortunately we have recognised the danger. David Cameron proposed to put a wind turbine on the top of his west London house. There is perhaps no better example than this of why we are well and truly stuffed.  Whilst we scrabble about nervously looking at the billions of expectant middle classes in the BRIC nations (China, India, Brazil and Russia), we’re slightly stuck for any ideas outside of the paradigm of our finger nail clipping. Development becomes ‘sustainable development’, the pyramid selling of our future continues, our mantra of GDP growth goes unchallenged,  and they continue to push us towards the brink faster than our technological solutions can hope to pull in the opposite direction.  

I guess the bible got us off to a bum start, putting us at the centre of the universe, then gifting us the protestant work ethic to boot. As we now look back at the golden age of the Garden of Eden, so future generations, a finger nail or two nearer the clock face will look wistfully back at our planet full of Adam and Eves in their rainforestWii Playstations too.

The key to our survival is the the thing that’s about to bruise us, the big slap round the face that we are about to be served by the planet. Too late for eco home salvation. In fact chatting with an eco home designing friend the other day, he confided to me that eco homes aren’t actually the answer. More solar panels, ground source or heat pumps or friendly timber or locally produced clay tiles are not the answer. The answer is a bit more boring in his (esteemed) opinion – warmer clothes, smaller houses and plenty of meditation. Bad news isn’t it.. David Cameron was actually right to abandon his Chiswick wind turbine and concentrate on his Happiness Index instead.

But what has this to do with the benevolent motorist? Well every time I see the raised hand of a motorist acknowledging some good - I feel a slither of hope for the future. It’s like watching my neolithic ancestor’s first prang of consciousness, putting down his club and wondering if there really is a third way. I’ve thought about it and I still don’t understand the evolutionary sense of this motor gesturing but I think that it might be the start of something big. Can anyone help?

Things Can Only Get Better tries to publish a guest post each week. Does anyone think the Coalition is right...about anything? Does anyone want to stand up for Clegg? Is the earth getting cooler? If you would like to contribute a carefully considered and beautifully written essay or just want to post a rant like the rest of us please let me know. All welcome. canthingsonlygetbetter@googlemail.com