How can you be sure other organisms are not aware of their mortality, when death is so present in most organisms life? Is this assumtion anything more than an anthropocentric delusion, mistaking a gradual difference for a principal one? The epic of Gilgamesh also is a cautionary tale against environmental destruction. People living forever would take better care of their natural life base - unless they'd want to destroy it in a quest for death, to escape the horror of an infinite life;-)

I just checked out the interesting links you provided in your reply, in the light of which your optimism is even more astounding!;-) As long as you keep looking at the problems too, do keep it up!

I much appreciate your thoughts and explanations, but they make me think of the Swiss Federal Councillor Willi Ritschard who said that the meeting of two optimists more often than not is cause for pessimism, as optimists typically tend to overlook the problem. I tend to think that my friend Helmut Lubbers (www.ecoglobe.ch) and Albert Bartlett (www.albartlett.org) share a realistic outlook. Yet we should all do our best to avert collapse. Nature, however, is cataclysmic, catastrophic, and humanity will be hit hard again sooner or later, be it as a consequence of shortsightedness or by events entirely outside our control, or both, most likely. Our ability to ecologically integrate economy and society has to evolve massively and quickly: How do you suggest we do that and what is your "action plan to save the world"?

I'm trying to "help solving the problem" since decades. I keep writing to officials and I was sacked by www.sdc.ch for trying to increase transparency and end mismanagement, and by www.mzsg.ch for pestering the boss with "project proposals to save the world": "Milking problems" often is more profitable than solving them, and helping firms to do the wrong thing right and well pays better than telling them to do the right thing - especially when what is right is not yet known. But often it is, and we don't do it anyway: We know since 60 years that rational land usage is the first principle of building and agriculture, yet we are building more single family hoes than ever and are loosing enormous amounts of soil annually due ti destructive agricultural practices - supported by WWF through its RSPO and RTRS, just to name one of the most appalling examples of greenwash and sustainability illusionism. Whatever our memes are, we are destroying our life base already since tenthousands of years: Within 1'000 years of human appearance of Australia and the Americas 2/3 of these continent's megafauna disappeared (quaternary extinctions). I haven't quiet understood what you imply by "ratchet" but I wonder if it even matters. I don't mean to be an advocate of doom, it just looks as if we are donutting ourselves, taking down a large part of the planet's remaining megafauna with us. There is no substitute to oil in terms of EROEI and ease of handling. Environmental impacts of oil production are massively increasing, and in our efforts to substitute oil we are massively increasing our already massive overconsumption of nature. Hydrogen as power source would require an infrastructure we cannot afford with fossil fuels running out. Unless we find effective harmless ways of wireless electrical power transmission the environmental cost of electric drives, relying on batteries, might outweigh the fossil. That we are destroying our lifebase seems governed by laws of nature: Private short term interests (predatory exploitation) normally prevail over long term common interests (sustainable cultivation), as the profits the former generate can be used to overcome the latter. It doesn't look good. What do you propose to actually concretely make a real and effective impact?

Don't ants and termites have technoculture? Does our being "the/a global brain" imply that we destroy our lifebase and deplete our renewable and nonrenewable ressources? Doesn't our failure to address our most basic problems, like overusage, pollution, urban sprawl and agricultural soil loss, testify to our "brainlessness" and lack of insightful coordination, in spite of our new "global nervous system", the internet? It appears to me that your analogies are spectacularly anthropocentric and ignorant of even the most obvious. Richard Heinberg compares our collective global intelligence with that of a population of bacteria in a petri dish, its population collapsing after its food/energy base is depleted. Our food/energy bases now are soil and oil, and we are rapidly depleting both of them, incurring increasing environmental dammages. www.albartlett.org