{"id":278,"date":"2005-05-17T23:52:44","date_gmt":"2005-05-18T03:52:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/dbnews\/2005\/05\/17\/getting-over-the-end-of-the-world\/"},"modified":"2005-05-17T23:52:44","modified_gmt":"2005-05-18T03:52:44","slug":"getting-over-the-end-of-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/2005\/05\/17\/getting-over-the-end-of-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting Over the End of the World"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n
\n

A fascinating conversation between Canadian archeologist Dave Pollard,
\n and himself…<\/p>\n

\n

RS:Dave, you say you don’t have the patience to do knowledge
\n consulting work anymore.
\n Why
\n is that?<\/p>\n

Me: Well, I’ve recently been doing a lot of research and reading on the
\n state of the world and on human nature, and I’ve come to the conclusion
\n that
\n we are living in the last century of human civilization. So I’ve become
\n a little impatient with projects I don’t think are that important in the
\n larger scheme of things.<\/p>\n

RS:(strange look) Wow, that’s a depressing thought. It must be tough to
\n do anything with that negative a perspective on life and the future.<\/p>\n

Me: Actually, it’s very liberating, and I’m more at peace than I have
\n been at any time in my life. Because I’ve come to believe that the end
\n of civilization
\n is something we can’t do anything about, nor is it anybody’s ‘fault’,
\n or even necessarily a bad thing. As Canadian archaeologist Ronald Wright
\n says,
\n if we destroy the ecosystem that sustains us "nature will merely shrug
\n and conclude that letting apes run the laboratory was fun for a while but
\n in the end a bad idea".<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Here, here.  The Dowbrigade has been a believer in the essentially
\n doomed nature of human civilization all his life.  We even started
\n a religion, The Doomed, based on that basic tenet. We also agree with
\n Pollard’s conclusion, expressed later in his little auto-interview, that
\n we should all just relax and enjoy the show, because there is nothing
\n we can do about our fate. "We are nothing more or less than six billion
\n creatures individually doing what we are driven to do moment by moment.
\n We have been driven to overpopulate and despoil the planet and exhaust
\n its resources by our DNA, and in so doing we are merely following Darwin’s
\n law."<\/p>\n

from How to Save the World<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A fascinating conversation between Canadian archeologist Dave Pollard, and himself… RS:Dave, you say you don’t have the patience to do knowledge consulting work anymore. Why is that? Me: Well, I’ve recently been doing a lot of research and reading on … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":299,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogging"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/299"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=278"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}