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"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body." Walt Whitman
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People (and politicians) are constantly describing particular events as 'the day the world changed forever'. Plenty of candidates - 9/11, fall of the Berlin Wall, first atomic bomb explosion, Russian Revolution, start of the first world war, invention of the steam engine, French Revolution, American Revolution, execution of Charles 1, invention of printing press, invention of gunpowder, The Anglo Saxon invasion of England, the Roman defeat of Carthage, and so on; those are just a few from the grab bag of my mind, I'm sure everyone will have their own list.
Sometimes those events are obvious at the time, sometimes they are made more significant by cynical politicians, sometimes the effects are slow and long term, sometimes more rapid. They can be technical advances that change both economy and society, or political/cultural events which change the way people see things.
But none of them really change the world, instead they change societies and cultures and politics. Now, for the first time we have a literally Earth-changing event, the effects of CO2 increase on the climate of the whole planet. Hard to put a date on 'it' of course. Perhaps around 1850 when the shape of the temperature graph begins to change as the industrial revolution cranks up, perhaps around the 1970s when the rate of change accelerates. But I reckon about 1990, when it is for the first time absolutely clear what is happening, and when the graph turns exponential. For most of us too the 1990s, with the succession of record hot year after record hot year was the time when we became personally aware, fundamentally, in our bones and psyches, what was happening to the world we live in.
Doesn't matter really, choose your own year, but looking back it will be clear that this was the time when the old world, that had nurtured the development of the Human species, came to an end, and a new one began to come into being. Curiously, instead of claiming this event for for their own political purposes, politicians have pretended not to see it as the most significant Earth-changing event in human history.
The effects are going to be far reaching. To take just one example, many of the rich farming lands of the US, Australia, Africa, South America, areas that produce much of the world's grain and other staple foods, are going to be drought-ridden before too long (Australia is getting a taste of it now with crops failing all over the country, and some suggestion that soon, for the first time ever, the country will not only not be helping feed the rest of the world, but be unable to feed its own people). On the other hand Canada and northern Europe/Russia may be better able to grow crops.
Such a shift in farming resources and water availability is undoubtedly going to lead to wars, throughout Africa and Asia. And what will be American attitudes towards Canada? China's towards Russia? Are there invasion plans being drawn up somewhere I wonder?
And the people of Kansas, god bless 'em. Will they see their newly desert state as a punishment from god for not being holy enough (!), or will they realise, finally, just as in mine disasters or cancer, that prayer and good works mean nothing against the forces of nature, and that humans better have a reality-based system pretty soon to replace a faith-based one, or we are all, godly Kansans and atheists alike, going to be up a dry creek without a paddle.
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