Adapt Or Die

No story this week, just some barely coherent blather.

All empires fall, and all empires fall for the same reason…… Arrogant Complacency.

They rise through hunger and innovation. The Egyptians invented the war chariot, and conquered North Africa and the Middle East. Then the Mesopotamians built a better chariot, and that was it for the Pharaohs, after them came the Persians, and after them the Romans, and so on and so on; each building newer and better machines of war.

If it is true that necessity is the mother of invention, then it must be doubly true that war is its father, after all nothing says necessity quite like your neighbours attempting to part your head from your body.

“What has that got to do with climate change?” I hear you ask (I have truly excellent hearing)
Well everything. Empires grow fat the more successful they become, the people no longer hungry become lazy, delegating work to slaves, or immigrant labour, their sense of inherent supremacy over their enemies leads to complacency, and then one morning you find the Visigoths at the gates, and they aint no tourists neither.

Even when they recognise the danger, it`s either too late or they`re so inured from reality by their belief in their supremacy, (We`re number one, HoooWahh; sound familiar?) that they simply refuse to believe they can lose. Ask Louis XVI, or the Romanovs, they could tell you a thing or two about it; and the British still cannot believe the Empire is gone.

You`re still wondering what all this has to do with Global warming; Jeez calm down, I`m getting to it.

It`s a commonly held belief that man`s interference in the workings of nature leading to his ultimate demise, is unique to our time, not so. Eleven hundred years ago an entire Peruvian civilisation disappeared because of irrigation. Yes, you read that right, irrigation proved to be their undoing.
What they didn’t realise was that every time they irrigated the land, the absorbed water, as it was drawn back up through the soil brought nutrients and minerals with it; and one of those minerals was salt.
Over the course of two hundred years they salinated the land so thoroughly that they rendered it incapable of growing anything.
And how do we know this? Because it`s happening all over again, only this time in California.

We may be unique in the history of mankind, in the history of any species that has littered this planet for that matter; we can see our own demise heaving very slowly into focus, one degree at a time. But we suffer from the same paralysing sense of entitlement that bedevilled all the Empires long gone.

We complain that it`s too hard, that wind farms are ugly, that we can`t make the sacrifices. We`re too pampered, too fat, too full of ourselves; we live in a society that claims that not only is broadband a necessity, it`s a human right; y`know, like clean water, only more important.

Are we capable of learning the lessons of all those fallen civilisations? Possibly.
The most heartening sign is that China and India, the fastest growing economies in the world are ditching coal faster than you can say “Fake News” and switching to solar.
So there may be hope for us yet, though I won`t hold my breath; lucky for me I`m a good swimmer.