I wrote Unrealistic Hope about people who had just experienced Hurricane Irma who are hoping a similar storm would not happen again.  About the continued refusal of so many to accept the changes to the climate that are occurring now, and the more devastating changes rapidly approaching.

After rereading Realistic Hope, I wonder whether most of those few who read that believe I’m either naïve or delusional.  The more accepted view is we will be facing increasing lawlessness and violence as people fight over diminishing resources resulting from increasing environmental damage.  Dwindling clean water, food and productive land.  The global responses to refugees, many of them climate refugees, is not encouraging.  Nor is the assessment of the military that climate change is a threat multiplier and will be the likely cause of future international conflicts.

What we all want to, and do, avoid facing is just how badly our environment has been damaged, and what the future holds.

There is ever increasing evidence, and conclusion by many scientists and others, that we have damaged our environment beyond repair, and the extinction of the human race (as so many species already have) is unavoidable now.  I believe that is true.

As a person of faith, I can’t help but hope maybe God will somehow save us.  But that assumes it is God’s will we survive.  Defying God’s will, as we have by what we have done to the environment, has consequences.  And we seem to think that those of us on planet Earth are the center of God’s universe, so to speak.

If you are a person who has, what I believe is, unrealistic hope you won’t change how you are living.

If you believe that humans are causing at least some environmental damage, you may, or may not, modify how you are living to try to mitigate that.

If you believe we are on a path to human extinction, as I do, what do you do?  Do you say we might as well not even try to stop doing things we know damage the environment since there is no hope now?

Or do you try to live with more respect for the environment, and your fellow man?  Continue to search for and follow God’s will, if you are a person of faith?

Extinction, if it does occur (other than from nuclear or biological war) is at least a few decades away.  What I was trying to express in the blog post realistic hope was a vision of a best case scenario for how we can try to live until then.

“Out of a mountain of despair, a stone of hope”  Martin Luther King Memorial