Almost three billion searches have been done on Google. This month.
Where did all those questions come from? How were they answered before Google happened?
Did You Know 2.0 presents an amazing perspective on how fast things are changing around the world.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMcfrLYDm2U]
Some people find this stuff pretty scary, and the exponential growth of human population alone is enough to justify that worry. We’ve all seen what happens when people overburden their resources – not just human poverty and starvation but also habitat destruction, extinction, ruined soils, resource wars…
Some people say human overpopulation is like cancer, where cells multiply exponentially and can end up killing the host. Others say there’s no hope, we’ve gone too far, the damage is too great.
Could be, but I hope not.
There’s another way to look at it. Call it the rose-colored perspective.
We are looking at environmental problems from a limited perspective, that being our current place in a world that has added 5 billion of the 6 billion people now living on Earth in just the past 100 years.
Fifty years ago hardly anyone realized we had a problem (there were only about 2 billion people then). Then 37 years ago (about 3 billion) the first Earth Day was celebrated, and a few hippies joined a few scientists and politicians to push for the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and many other laws that have really made a difference in our country over the years.
Seventeen years ago (5.5 billion), I read Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance and began publishing a newspaper called Earth Journal. At the time our local daily newspaper didn’t talk about the environment, but with us providing the fringe element, they began to report on the issues. Today the environment is a regular feature – no longer fringe, but interwoven throughout the news and lives of every reader.
Two years ago (6 billion and rising fast), Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth came out and then hurricane Katrina came down. Suddenly, people got it. Extreme weather patterns happening all over the world started to make sense to people, because it was happening to them. Hottest summer on record. Worst fire season. Unusually heavy rains and massive floods. These events pushed us past the tipping point, and there’s no turning back. We must change, or we will suffer the consequences. Not just the poor, but everybody.
I’d rather hope that the amazing changes previewed in Did You Know 2.0 are more like the amazing changes that children experience in their early years. The neural connections in their brains grow at a staggering pace. They’re learning so much so quickly – language, movement, awareness of others, self-determination… truth and consequences.
Humans are a relatively young species, and it’s possible that all of these changes precede an evolutionary change in consciousness. Consider that cannibalism and slavery were widespread around the world only two centuries ago. These things are illegal everywhere now, and instances of these behaviors are rare today. I think this means that our consciousness has evolved, as a species. I hope war falls into the same category, and soon. That’s the hope, and that’s the possibility I see when I watch this video.