How do you get people to look at the big picture when everyone is staring obsessively into a small one in their hand?

"Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere now are at 329 parts per million and climbing"

obviously a typo - should read "392 parts per million"

The republicans who need to hear this are too busy hauling their gold off to their vaults.

Once again, Mr. Hedges, you've told it like it is. We all admire your work, your mind, your writing, your diligence profoundly. Please don't stop,
THANK YOU!!!

Mr. Hedges wrote: "...this moment appears be the denouement to the whole sad show of settled, civilized life that began some 5,000 years ago."

No. Civilization began more than 8,500 years ago, but, contrary to Mr. Hedges's musings," not in Mesopotamia, The West, the land of "Caucasians." It began on the northwest coast of India about 3500 years before it began in the West, and the people were dark-skinned and did not speak an "Indo-European" or Semitic language.

Those "foreign" brown-skinned Indian people had advanced agriculture and engineered irrigation and a written language and stone buildings and a city of paved streets and plumbing and jewelry and pottery and metal tools --- when the West was still populated by illiterate hunter-gatherer primitives.

In China, too, agrarian, permanent-village civilization began (and had pottery, hoes, polished axes, and weights for digging sticks) 1500 to 2000 years before it began in Mesopotamia.

How pathetic. Even Western political progressives cannot bear the truth that Asia's brown-skinned and yellow-skinned ushered humanity into civilization.

Descartes, Pascal, Gutenberg, Galileo, Pasteur...... stole the myriad mathematical and scientific inventions and insights of India and China and treated the East as if wastes of little better than savages.

the bumperstick comes true "Earth First we will stripmine the other planets later"

"they have ears, but cannot hear; they have eyes, but cannot see..."
and they have religous nutters and zealots who refuse or choose not to teach rational thought and what such lines REALLY mean and imply...
now its more like: "you hear our conservative dribble but do not evaluate...you see our hateful acts but choose to be blind ..."

Donella Meadows, et al authored The Club of Rome report entitled iirc, The Limits to Growth, the simple conclusion of which was: You can not have infinite growth on a finite planet. These days are those days...and we need more than Zero Population Growth to remedy the situation. The Laws of Life, which govern all species, will not exempt h.sapiens from the consequences of its actions. TANSTAFL... (epecially in physics)
Good Luck to us all...say 'Good Night, Gracie'.

There was a time, in the '70s and early '80s, when humanity was still lovable. The Human Potential movement was in full sway, whispering of greatness to come. How could we have known, then, that we had already peaked … that from Reagan on, the degenerative disease of Doris Lessing's prophetic Shikasta novel would bore into the species and pull us down to mindless brutality, all within a couple of generations?

Today I would be content to see our species go extinct. Better that than taking the planet down with us, as Chris Hedges has aptly declared the possibility for this evolutionary round.

Earth is not a Kindergarden of Eden.

It takes a mature consciousness to run the planet, not this infantile selfishness that's taken over the Republican party and is trying to take over the world. It’s clear: humans aren't ready to handle real power, not by a long shot. I would rather see the planet take a long spa day, maybe 10,000 years, and heal herself of human destruction than see her suffer one more decade at our hands. If we’re about to repeat the Easter Island lesson, then let that climax come soon, while there's still enough ecosphere to regenerate a paradise and perhaps brew some desirable human DNA changes, like more skin color varieties, mosquito immunity, extra civility and NO, repeat, ZERO neo-con genes on the chain.

Unfortunately, the article mentioned nothing about the extinction of all that is beautiful and wondrous in this world- the animals and green things that make living a joy. The factory farms, the gmos that have invaded our food, all are obscenities that have tainted our natural world. And WE let it happen. I never dreamed that I would live inside a Philip K. Dick story, and I never thought tigers would become extinct in my lifetime. I have tried so hard to do what I could to save this awe-inspiring planet and as my days are coming to a close, I despair over the loss of so much.

There are still pathfinders in our modern wilderness.I too despair at this cycle of self destructive behavior, but one must look beyond our earth for a larger context, for comprehension, and peace. Our foundling understanding of the nature of our universe leaves us in awe of what we don't know yet. The next evolution is at hand and it comes out of us-see Ray Kurzwil's " Singularity"-
There is truth in degrees in all said here....but we must get beyond cynical,jaded,h opeless, naive, nihilistic. God doesn't exist in any anthropomorphic sense, but (as said before) Love is God and God is Love... I have experienced this without seeing Jesus in a tortilla chip etc.We must keep trying for the sake of that...for the sake of building a new paradigm/reality...for the sake of our children...and even the sake of whatever it is that is coming to replace us.