OPEN YOUR MIND!
Humans have had a tenuous relationship with nature since the dawn of the species. At first the natural defenses of the plants and animals kept the new species from progressing beyond simple hunting and gathering. But as people evolved to use tools and language they began to dominate their habitat. As societies and agricultural techniques advanced mankind became more mobile and spread throughout the world. Within a very small amount of time one species had spread worldwide and dominated many ecosystems to the point of modifying some and destroying others.
It is Humanature to improve our environment in an attempt to gain security and comfort. But in our need to progress we have been dissembling the unimaginably complex natural systems which sustain life itself. As man learned in their noble pursuit to explore beyond the Earth, a person can live separately from nature. On the other hand if the space program of the twentieth and twenty-first century taught us anything it's that it's extremely difficult to recreate the security and comfort of nature.
Many large powerful societies have grown since the first great society in Mesopotamia. One of these grew so large and advanced so much technologically that they modified vast landscapes on several continents. Due to their network of roads and ability to transport natural resources from great distances for thousands of miles around the capital city much of the land was changed forever. But despite it's greatness the Roman empire fell like all the empires before it and every empire after it. Lead pollution, the fall of the democratic republic and deforestation were only a few of the reasons for the empires fall. In the end empires are just too large and complex systems for mankind to maintain.
Cities are a natural progression of mankind’s need to design, organize, create, and build. Since the first organized societies cities have played an important role, but like mankind itself cities are monuments in defiance of nature. Constructed shelters are natural and built by many species, and cities are not limited to humans either. Human cities however exist on such a large scale that they affect the landscape well beyond their borders and by Roman times a single city was affecting many continents. Despite their attempt to mimic nature, cities are in fact concentrated chemical cocktails which spread death and destruction through urban sprawl. It is a fact that no city in human history has ever existed in harmony with nature!
Transportation has been an extremely important tool to mankind. Camels, carts, canoes, ships, steam engines, cars, airplanes, diesel locomotives, rockets and nuclear subs have all advanced the tool using species well beyond their natural physical limitations. But mostly it was both beasts of burden like horse and oxen and later technological engines like combustion and electric that gave the individual liberating power and freedom. Before the industrial revolution the effects of transportation were limited, mainly to the inhuman treatment of animals and the loss of trees to shipbuilding. It was the invention of the automobile that turned the tide on transportation. After the conception of the car and the vast network of roads that followed mans absolute power over the environment grew exponentially with human populations. As man well knew with great power comes great responsibility, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. In the later third of the twentieth century, even after mankind learned the large cost of cars, they continued to show absolutely no responsibility.
In the beginning of the twenty-first century species extinction was one thousand times that before the existence of Homo-sapiens, that works out to about three extinctions per hour. Twenty-five percent of the birds species and twenty percent of the fish species were already extinct by the end of the twentieth century. Beyond individual species extinction whole ecosystems were being destroyed at dangerous levels by the end of the second millennium. Only forty-five percent of the rainforests remained and were being destroyed by a football field sized area per second at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Due to increasing carbon dioxide emissions since the industrial revolution the ambient temperature of the Earth rose one degree in the twentieth century. Scientist were unable to statistically prove global warming existed, even though they suspected the coming cataclysm. When the ice caps began to melt in the beginning of the twenty-first century everyone had their proof, but still nothing significant was done.
Due to increasing global warming in the twenty-first century the coastal areas of the world became primarily uninhabitable due to constant storms and periodic flooding. While the interior landlocked areas dried out and eventually desertified as the water was sucked into the super-storms over the oceans and beaches. The increased temperatures melted most of the worlds ice over the twenty-first century raising the sea level by dozens of feet. The rising ocean raged against the coasts turning barrier islands and bays into open sea, rivers into bays and lakes, wetlands into lakes, and creeks and roads into rivers.
In some areas caverns and aquifers eventually collapsed, slowly giving way to the advancing coastline until vast land masses were reduced to open ocean sometimes scattered with small islands. Within a few hundred years the Earths geography had changed drastically from the land which had remained relatively unchanged since the last ice age, the dawn of man's existence.
Earth’s biosphere slowly unraveled as individual ecosystems, already stressed by natural resource depletion, alien species invasion and pollution, failed. Whole systems in which the atmosphere, hydrosphere and soil health were maintained to support life shut down as waves of the destruction rippled through the complex web of life snapping the strands and tearing life's safety net to pieces. Explosive species extinction expanded exponentially quickly crossing the seven continents until the branching destruction became a perverted version of the tree of life itself. By the second half of the twenty-first century there were only half of the species on Earth that there had been at the beginning of the millennium.
Primary predators and other large animals were the first to suffer from the environmental cataclysm. Cougars, Tigers, Bears, Red Wolves, Whales, Gorillas, most primates, Elephants, Hippos, Rhino's, Panda's, otters, seals, foxes, many bats, owls, cranes, woodpeckers, turtles, toads, trout, salmon, sturgeon, and many catfish are only a few of the species lost in the first decades of the Earth’s Environmental Cataclysm. By the end of the Twenty-First century only twenty-five percent of the Earth’s species remained. One species that was nearly decimated but not quite to extinction refers to the last fifty years of the twenty-first century as the decades of death.
Kudzu, Johnson grass, cattails, cockroaches, mosquitoes, mice, flies, gnats, rats, vultures, and giant jellyfish are just a sample of the Earth’s few surviving species, redefining the world's biosphere. As the new homogenous ecosystems took root in the Earth's crippled habitats, rodents, weeds, pests and diseases flourished and soon replaced humans as the rulers of the living planet.
However, some Humans did survive!
