a tangled web we weave

[freckles_and_doubt]

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Trophic cascade, people. Wolves in Yellowstone Park. A striking example of the incredible interconnectedness of everything in our environment, and why our thoughtless, damaging lives as humans have consequences on the ecosystem we have not bothered to predict and, in many cases, cannot at this late stage reverse as simply as they have done in Yellowstone's closed environment. This video made me cry. It's an amazing and positive story, but it's in an artificially tiny corner of the world. All I can think about is how exponentially many more examples exist in the other direction, where we have casually destroyed links in a chain whose consequences we haven't thought about at all. Things we are about to lose: bees, bananas, the Arctic sea ice. How can this not have unimaginably huge impact on our human civilisation, our food chains, our habitat?

I've believed for years that I'm going to see large-scale global starvation and economic breakdown in my lifetime as a result of human overpopulation, global warming and ecological destruction. I am seeing more and more evidence to support this as time goes by. It makes the day-to-day business of my life feel curiously provisional.