"All life forms have one essential purpose: survival.
This is even more important than reproduction...
To be alive is more than passing genes along.
To be alive is to want to remain alive."
- Marcelo Gleiser,
Does Life Have A Purpose? (npr.org)
If you’re just joining us, start with the prologue.
If we set aside the musings of philosophers and the claims of the religious, the purpose of life boils down to some very simple, very practical principles.
Living creatures are born with a biological imperative to survive. The living want to stay alive.
The next most important instinct for the living, is the instinct to reproduce, perpetuate life and save ourselves from extinction.
However, as (relatively) evolved beings, perhaps it's safe for us to expand these biological, existential necessities to include some social and moral imperatives. As humans, we feel a desire to learn and to grow. If we didn't, we might still be living in caves and wearing animal skins. Instead, we mastered the mysteries of fire, we invented the wheel, we learned to fly, we went to the Moon. We have seen two Industrial Revolutions.
Most of us want our own children to have a better quality of life than we did. Some of us even want other people's children to have a better quality of life.
Over time, we have begun to learn to respect and care about "the other." We have (mostly) eliminated outright slavery. We have grudgingly admitted that women and people with a different skin tone or sexual orientation than our own, are actually real human beings who are entitled to basic human rights. Some of us are still struggling with these concepts, but most of us understand that institutions like slavery are wrong, always have been, and always will be.
Most of us understand that we have a responsibility to those who come after us. That we have an obligation to leave the world a little better than we found it, and to leave our children, and their children an inheritance. We're not talking about a sack full of cash or empty platitudes or a good luck high-five on the way out Death's Door. We're talking about a world that is cleaner, safer, more peaceful, more equitable and more fair.
Just as we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us, it is our job to give a boost to future generations.
You and I owe our ability to stay warm in the winter to whoever figured out fire. We owe our ability to sleep under a roof, to drink clean water, to eat safe and clean food, to wear warm clothing, to travel thousands of miles in a day, to cross oceans and to understand the movement of the planets and the stars. We owe all of these things to the people who came before us.
Yet, if we are really honest, and we take a good look at the direction this country is headed... we have to admit that we have abdicated our duty to future generations.
We have collectively decided that we are perfectly content to enjoy all the benefits that our forebears worked so hard to provide for us, without any of the responsibility to pay it forward to the next generation. We already got ours. Everyone else is on their own.
We have made a huge mess, and we have no plan or intention to clean up. Collectively speaking, we aren't even trying. If you don't believe this, go back and read Ch.2 The Problem With the Status Quo. Those graphs and charts tell a story of a culture that has no interest in the well-being of any future generations.
Yes, our biological imperative is to survive.
But don't we have an ethical and moral obligation to our children as well?
And as much as we might cling to our notion of human greatness and immortality, none of this is assured. None of it is guaranteed.
There have been five mass extinction level events in the Earth's history, all but one caused by climate change. One of these mass extinctions eliminated 96% of all species on Earth, and it took millions of years for life to recover. And there is some compelling evidence that says we are headed towards the 6th.
Let's be clear. Even if we don't have a mass extinction, the next few generations are going to experience a decrease in their quality of life and an increase in their level of suffering. Not because they did anything to deserve it. But because we didn't want to be inconvenienced.
If we fail to address the existential threat of global warming, we might as well forget about everything else we have talked about in this book because it is rendered irrelevant. Anything else we might do, any action we might take, is going to be the equivalent of rearranging the deck furniture on the Titanic.
It’s still going to sink and we’ll have done nothing but waste our time.
Global warming is without a doubt the biggest threat to the survival of life on Earth, and the only way to build a better world is to combat and reverse its effects.
"Unless someone like you
cares a whole awful lot.
Nothing is going
to get better
it's not."
- Dr. Seuss, The Lorax
Excellent insights. Thank you for the great reminder about getting beyond our own selfish survival instincts. Super important to acknowledge the generations of sacrifice that paved the way for our comfortable lifestyle, and to recognize our own obligation to sacrifice for future generations. Spot on.
nice! Smooth read, excellent content. Well done!