Disease

"I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague and we are the cure." - Agent Smith (The Matrix)


In his book "Radical Simplicity: Small Footprints on a Finite Earth" 'Merkel starkly outlines the unsustainability of our current path. Were the productive acreage of the Earth divided evenly among its human inhabitants, each would get 4.7 acres. If all humans used their full 4.7 acres, nothing would remain for the other species. The average American consumes the productive capacity of nearly 25 acres. Put another way, America’s 300 million people consume the share of more than 1.5 billion people (or more than 5 times their fair share).' Doug Pibel on Jim Merkel.

I sat there for a minute, then I said, "I'm trying to figure out what this has to do with saving the world."

Ishmael thought for a moment. "Among the people of your culture, which want to destroy the world?"

"Which want to destroy it? As far as I know, no one specifically wants to destroy the world."

"And yet you do destroy it, each of you. Each of you contributes daily to the destruction of the world."

"Yes, that's so."

"Why don't you stop?"

I shrugged. "Frankly, we don't know how."

"You're captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live."

"Yes, that's the way it seems."

"So. You are captives - and you have made a captive of the world itself. That's what's at stake, isn't it? - your captivity and the captivity of the world."
-Daniel Quinn (Ishmael)

"Ishmael is a critic of human civilization, but not of the human species itself. Humans existed for about three million years without "civilization," and only became globally destructive after 10,000 years of it. Ishmael, then, sees ecological damage as a result of modern society, not human nature." - Miles Morgan Shuman on Ishmael.

We are a species intellegent enough to know that we are killing ourselves, but at the same time we are not willing to do anything about it.