It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.

Thank you, Michael Stipe, for that timeless lyric. It always seems to be the end of the world as we know it in one sense or another. Whether the stock market is imploding like too many plutonium atoms or too many plutonium atoms are imploding themselves, we just can't seem to escape the reality of one world-crushing catastrophe after another. Who needs Survivor? Just turn on the six o'clock news! And that isn't even the half of it!!!

So here's an interesting new (but not really) catastrophe for you all to examine. One could argue it's been happening since before the industrial revolution, but only recently have some people become more fully aware of the implications. Why do we never seem to learn our lessons until it's much too late to staunch the bleeding? Some philosophers propose that nothing ever stays the same, that human beings are all children of the era in which they are self-actualized, but certainly in some meta-cultural sense we must always carry with us a blinding amount of blithe optimism that "don't worry, everything will be okay." Otherwise, shouldn't our history reflect a chronicle of carefully averted disasters instead of cataclysmic shatterings of the economic, social, and biological status quo every time we get too comfortable?

Enough introduction. Here is the one scientific article which, should you read nothing else of this nature for the entire year, deserves your undivided attention. Stephen Meyer has accurately and realistically assessed the state in which we find our planet and ourselves at this exact moment in history. It's not pretty, but it's very much a reality and I have never seen it expressed so skillfully.

End of the Wild by Stephen Meyer