What If It’s Already Happening?

A poem written in 2002 asks a question that is becoming harder to dismiss.

“Wicked is man” the pessimistic view. With limited resources who has a clue?

What if the warning is not about the future?

What if it describes the present?

Humanity continues to grow, consume, extract, build and compete on a planet with physical limits. At the same time, some of the conditions described in Knowledge are not predictions anymore. They are occurring simultaneously.

The poem says:

“We plan for the future As if our future won’t last.”

Look around.

Sea level is rising and already affecting coastal communities and low-lying island nations. Saltwater intrusion threatens freshwater and agricultural land; some island communities are already confronting relocation and loss of usable land.

War destroys cities, farmland, infrastructure and water systems. Nuclear weapons add an even darker possibility: humanity possesses weapons capable of making parts of its own limited habitat dangerous or unusable.

Famine has not disappeared either. Current international food-security assessments show millions living in severe acute food insecurity, with populations in Sudan and South Sudan reaching catastrophic famine conditions.

And disease is changing with the environment. Vector-borne diseases have increased substantially in the United States since 2004, while changing climate and land-use conditions can alter the ranges and seasons of ticks, mosquitoes and the pathogens they carry.

That does not mean nature consciously created tickborne disease to punish humans or prevent us from eating mammals. Nature does not need intention for the warning in the poem to work.

That may actually make the warning more frightening.

Nature does not have to be angry.

Nature does not have to judge us.

Nature does not have to care.

The poem says:

“Through death by destruction, from sickness, famine or flooding by sea, Mother Nature shall remain to replant her life birthing seed.”

What if all of those things are already happening at the same time?

The Remaining Deep Pools

Perhaps humanity resembles life trapped in the remaining deep pools of a drying stream.

As the water disappears, predators and prey are pushed together. Competition increases. The deepest pools become precious refuges.

But what if generations before them already filled those pools with sediment?

Now there are fewer refuges.

They are shallower.

And the next drought has not even reached its worst point.

Scale that picture to humanity.

Less usable coastal land. Salt entering agricultural soils and freshwater. Damaged ecosystems. Growing competition for resources. War destroying some of what remains.

More life competing inside fewer safe pools.

And then comes the larger question.

What If Earth Isn’t the End of the Warning?

Suppose humanity reaches the Moon, asteroids and eventually other worlds.

Have we escaped our problem?

Or have we carried it with us?

What happens if nations fight over lunar territory and mineral deposits?

What happens if we treat space the way we have treated parts of Earth?

We have already begun contaminating our first extraterrestrial environment: near-Earth orbit. Orbital debris is a major threat to spacecraft and astronauts, and collision cascades could make heavily contaminated orbital regions increasingly hazardous or potentially unusable.

We haven’t even truly left home, and we have already created a garbage problem outside the front door.

And then there is the threat humanity cannot cause or negotiate with.

An asteroid.

There is no evidence that a known civilization-ending asteroid is presently on an intercept course with Earth. But the larger question remains whether humanity behaves as though time is guaranteed.

It isn’t.

Warning

That brings us back to the beginning of the poem:

“A thought on paper, An idea expressed in words.”

The simplest technologies imaginable.

A thought.

Paper.

Words.

And yet those words allow one human mind to reach another across distance—and across generations.

Perhaps that is why the poem begins with knowledge and ends with extinction.

Knowledge gives us something extraordinary.

Warning.

We can see what is happening.

We can preserve what previous generations learned.

We can recognize finite resources.

We can restore damaged environments.

We can cooperate instead of fight.

We can reach beyond Earth without turning the heavens into another battlefield or dumping ground.

We can leave future generations more knowledge and more options than we inherited.

Or we can continue consuming the remaining pools.

The poem’s central warning is therefore not complicated:

“A balance with nature shall come to be.”

The question was never whether the equation would balance.

The question is whether mankind will balance itself—or Mother Nature will do it for us.

Original Poem and Preamble

A poem by Walter Marvin Hammack — Created on 04/06/02

I think the purpose of the pyramids can best be interpreted as an obligation of scientifically advanced civilizations like man kind and his predecessors to build at least one great monumental archive of knowledge which can be built in any form that stands the trials and test of time. For one day when Fate cuts our thread, and that time comes for which we can never be prepared, our time on earth will end, but life will go on. We need these monuments to inspire the thinking and creativity in those generations that will follow, to regenerate and help minimize those gaps created from lost knowledge that must occur during, and after any global catastrophe or world deluge.