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Page 8
Chapter Four: She
 Everything I'd ever read, studied, or heard suddenly flashed through my mind in that moment.
It was so painfully clear to me now that your peaceful yard is actually a dinosaur world in which every living thing must survive, must protect itself and its young, while hunting to kill other species. That includes humans, who possess the enzymes to be omnivorous (everything-eaters) as both carnivores (meat eaters) and herbivores (plant eaters).
We humans blossomed, like both flowers covering a meadow, and pond scum thickly choking water. For eons, our numbers remained low, in the few thousands, desperately running from every predator around every corner (including each other). In the Holocene Epoch (the past ten thousand years or so, after the end of the so-called Stone Ages and the last glaciations to date) our numbers rose by a few hundred million in Roman times to about one billion around 1800 and two billion a little after 1925 and three billion (ballooning ever more rapidly, every few years now) after 1950, and then another billion every decade or so, to approach eight billion by 2019 (Blade Runner Year). Not to mention, as we health workers and science types tend to be aware, a million aircraft in the air every minute, and a billion vehicles on the world's roads every hour of every day, are creating a Greenhouse Effect that is sending global temperatures ever more rapidly upward. Since more than half of us live in towns and cities on the shores of lakes, rivers, and oceans, that means flooding and storm surges… and those who try to run will be overwhelmed by disease, starvation, and violence.
Climate change has been around since the beginning of our world (billions of years). Climate factors (warming, cooling, etc) move in changes that are sometimes predictable and sometimes not. The rise of human overpopulation, and the destruction of most large species in what is called the Sixth (and Final?) Great Extinction, combine with carbon emissions and other overwhelming factors to bring us to the end of our world.
There was a great natural warming, for example, from roughly about 850 to around 1350 CE (or A.D.) depending on where you looked, that warmed the European Medieval period, allowing England to be a net wine exporter.
This was followed by a natural great cooling (the Little Ice Age) from (again rough numbers) about 1350 to about 1850, when the Thames in London regularly froze over, and in Charles Dickens' time people could often ice skate on the Thames and have sit-down picnics in the middle of the river.
Around 1750, the human population began reaching new heights, even as our growing science and technology started to kick off the Industrial Revolution. So, even as a few more cold snaps kicked in (the last around 1850) by 1800 or so, the newly bloated cities surrounded by choking smoke and smog started to help a new global warming period kick in. There are lots of factors that I couldn't even think of in my hallucinogenic state as I stood silently screaming for those few minutes on the patio, but I also knew this. If humans had not been blowing smoke, cutting down vast forests, and poisoning rivers and oceans, the new warming period would have naturally passed. But the wealthy oligarchs making huge fortunes vested in coal, oil, and the like are not interested in saving the world. They know they will die, like everyone does, and they are not thinking of future generations, but only about having as much wealth in their pathetic little lives, now and in the short term, and to hell with everything and everyone who comes after them. As King Louis XIV of France said of his lavish lifestyle leading to disaster under his successors (Number 15 and 16, who was beheaded along with his wife Marie Antoinette): "After me, the deluge." He might just as well have said: "After I'm gone, what do I care? Bring on the end of the world for all that I care."
All of those ideas and figures flashed through my head, even as I prayed to return to my normal state of being. I longed to escape from this nightmare of lucid vision that was in the same moment so dark and foreboding, so Gothic and merciless. I longed to spend the last hours or days or years of our time on this dying planet in blissful oblivion. Maybe if we all flew in dirigibles and used gravitational force to move us most of the way rather than burning fossil fuels (deadly coal, deadly oil), and if we stopped using all that plastic, we could slow down the pace of global destruction. It's probably too late already, unless every living man, woman, and child does their utmost to pitch in (and votes the polluters, the liars, and killers out of office, and stops the oligarchs who pay zillions of bribes and corruption to the liars in positions of influence.
All of that flashed through my head in seconds.
That's what the drug does to you: hallucinogenic dramas and movies of whatever is in your mind already, and in my case it's a mosaic of Emergency Room experiences plus History reading plus what really goes on in that sunny, peaceful yard outside where the bees drone and the flowers smell so sweet.
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