The End of Feng Shui
Feng shui is a human art and it will end when humanity goes extinct, and in the broad sweep of time we are at the doorstep of that happening. The one thing that could possibly prevent our extinction is the one thing that no politician is willing to discuss (or even utter)—population control. It wasn’t always that way. During the 1960s when environmental issues began to come to the forefront many people (but not enough) made the personal decision not to contribute to overpopulation.
The concept of “karma” boils down to something pretty simple: action/reaction. If humanity causes enough species to go extinct, then we too will go extinct. I’m not saying this to be pessimistic, I’m saying it to be realistic. A pessimist might think that when we go, we’ll take all of life with us, but a realist knows that’s not true—especially a realist who has read the recent book A Natural History of the Future by Rob Dunn. When humanity is gone there’ll be lots of life left—it just probably won’t be warm and fuzzy and most of it won’t be multicellular. Dunn offers this, “The more we change the world, the more we increase the disconnect between the conditions we need to thrive and the world we live in.” He also has a few helpful suggestions, “Get rid of your lawn and plant and favor native species…” He also recommends not using hand sanitizers (and this is a book written and published during COVID—2021) to help preserve the beneficial species with which resistant species and strains compete.
During the height of the AIDS epidemic there was a slogan (on t-shirts and posters) “Silence = Death”. Well, the truth is (and always has been) “Ignorance = Death” or “Stupidity = Death”.
To end this on a more positive note, I’ll recommend another recent book, Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction by Michelle Nijhuis. It’s about the people who originally started the environment movement—people like Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold. I never knew much about the lives of these people; I mostly just knew of them because of the important books they’d written. Nijhuis also includes some recent people I’d never heard of who are currently doing very important work to save species such as elephants. It’s a very well written and researched book and I wholeheartedly recommend it.
