No Where To Go

I’m just back from a visit to the dry, smokey southwest USA. And I’m not very confident about our future.

Archeologists’ consensus is that while humans had roamed these parts for a couple thousand years, the “pueblo people” began to settle in the part of North America which is now Mesa Verde National Park about 550 CE. Their communities grew slowly over several centuries, and their dwellings became increasingly complex and crowded. But then in the late 1200s, within the span of two generations, these communities were entirely abandoned, leaving scholars the fascinating pit houses, kivas and cliff dwellings which attract millions of tourists each year.

Among popular explanations for humans’ historically quick exit from this region is that the people of these increasingly dense communities were forced out by drought, depletion of other resources, and social discord. The people took several different migratory paths to the south and southwest in attempts to start over again.

I’ll not belabor the point here, which I’m guessing the reader has already grasped…..the parallel with disintegrating 21st Century society. As populations become increasingly dense, resources become increasingly scarce, followed by disharmony, growing disunity and increasingly wide, bitter and irreconcilable divisions.

The difference here is that the 13^th Century occupants of the USA’s “Four Corners” had somewhere to go.…somewhere to start over. That option is not available to us in the 21^st Century, notwithstanding a couple of billionaires’ dalliances with sixty-second space travel.

We have to make it work here…on this polluted, over-populated, over-heated, over politicized and hyper-polarized planet.

JER