The Tenth Millennium

TENTHMIL has a cool timeline showing human impact on the planet for the last 10,000 years. We have been awesome in bringing the planet into our servitude. We've given up our roaming ways, looking for food, and are now producing more food than we can eat, but still manage to starve millions. We're fat cats with every whim and desire easily sated. We eat whales because we can. We hunt sharks for their fins and dump the rest of the body to rot on the ocean floor. We've made gardens in deserts and deserts of our gardens. We rule the world. Our dominance is unquestioned and unparalleled. No other species has accomplished what we have. We are wonderful, fellow humans.

As the TENTHMIL points out though, it's all coming at a cost. The price to be paid is not what the TENTHMIL will have you think however. It's not the planet that will pay the price -- or the other species that are still around. Those costs have already been paid and continue to be paid. What we humans forget is that we're are not separate from our island floating in space. We are very much a part of it. And ever decision we collectively make, is one that impacts us.

The planet won't die. That's naive thinking. The planet will get along just fine after we've finished killing everything and ourselves. Case in point: Chernobyl, Korea's DMZ and the sea off Somalia's coast. Without humans, nature has returned with force. Sometimes, all it takes is for people to disappear, as the Economist points out.