Lovelock's Latest Prediction is Terrifying
Final wake-up from one of Earth's wisest citizens
SOS #121 J. Morris Hicks (8-31-21)
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Last week, I started writing this SOS Memo a few days before Dr. James Lovelock's new book, We Belong to GAIA, became available on Amazon as an e-book and paper-back.
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This powerful little book convinced me that I should begin today with a few compelling paragraphs from this wise, 102-year old scientist -- who may have a better grasp on our chances for survival as a species than any other person in the world.
His terrifying prediction is summarized below. Hopefully, the world will finally start listening to this truly remarkable scientist.
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Text from the final chapter of We Belong to Gaia
I am not a pessimist and have always imagined that good in the end would prevail. When our Astronomer Royal, Lord Martin Rees, former President of the Royal Society, published in 2004 his book, Our Final Century, he dared to think and write about the end of civilization and the human race. I enjoyed it as a good read, full of wisdom, but took it as no more than a speculation among friends and nothing to lose sleep over.
I was so wrong; it was prescient. For now, the evidence coming in from the watchers around the world brings news of an imminent shift in our climate towards one that could easily be described as Hell: so hot, and so deadly that only a handful of the teeming billions now alive will survive.
We have made this appalling mess of the planet and mostly with rampant liberal good intentions. Even now, when the bell has started tolling to mark our ending, we still talk of sustainable development and renewable energy as if these feeble offerings would be accepted by Gaia as an appropriate and affordable sacrifice.
We are like a careless and thoughtless family member whose presence is destructive and who seems to think that an apology is enough. We are part of the Gaian family, and valued as such, but until we stop acting as if human welfare was all that mattered, and was the excuse for our bad behaviour, all talk of further development of any kind is unacceptable.
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Before reading his new book, I had begun writing about:
THE SINGLE MOST POWERFUL STEP WE CAN
TAKE TOWARD SUSTAINABLE LIVING
We must immediately eliminate the practice of eating animal-based foods -- whether they be land animals or aquatic animals. Two reasons:
- It is the only significant contributor to climate change that all individuals can address immediately on their own.
- There is overwhelming evidence that our grossly unsustainable habit of eating animals contributes more to climate change than all other drivers combined.
Want to check out that proof? Three scientific papers have been published implicating animal agriculture as, by far, the leading cause of climate change (in 2006 by the UN, in 2009 by two World Bank researchers, and in2021 by Dr. Sailesh Rao).
This image is from the 2009 Goodland/Anhang paper.
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Now, after hearing Lovelock's terrifying prediction, I am more certain than ever that our best chance for jump-starting the process of saving our civilization and our grandchildren is as simple as what we are putting on our forks.
That "urgent" action does not mean just cutting back on your consumption of those foods. It means two things:
- Totally stop eating those foods immediately!
- Appeal to everyone you know to do the same!
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This is NOT a drill. This is a freaking EMERGENCY!
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Okay, I know what you're thinking. If what I am saying about food choices is true, why are we not hearing this world-saving message from our physicians, the UN, our government, world leaders and the ten million scientists?
It's complicated. I have written three books on the topic to help explain why we simply must end the practice of eating animals. At the end of the day, our reluctance to take that action is guided by a deadly combination of ignorance, greed, power, control and money.
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The good news is that we don't need all of the above to come together to make this happen.
We just need to educate ourselves and take action as quickly as possible. The market will respond to our demands.
Food IS Climate and this 2021 powerful documentary will help get you started.
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Foreword to new book by Glen Merzer |
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The incomparable Philip Wollen of Australia sets the tone for the entire book. Take a look at three highly revealing paragraphs in this powerful foreword.
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Glen Merzer has written powerfully -- with courage, compassion, and wit. A gentle smile crept over my face as he surgically eviscerated the self-serving lies of lazy minds. This slender volume is a necessary antiseptic, an antidote, a welcome disinfectant against nonsense.
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- The Animal Industrial Complex is expert at getting others to pick up the tab for their crimes. But its rap sheet is gradually being exposed: horrendous animal cruelty, massive greenhouse gas emissions, zoonotic pandemic diseases, deforestation, ocean acidification, profligate water wastage, damage to human health, busted economies, irreparable healthcare deficits, and, dare I say it, concrete evidence that these violent unpunished crimes contradict every belief espoused by every member of every single religious faith, including those who follow no religious faith at all.
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Human beings comprise 30% of the biomass of land animals. Slaughterhouse animals comprise 66%, while wild animals in nature are decimated down to a mere 4%. And 70% of all birds on the planet, descendants of the dinosaurs, are imprisoned in ghastly cages, awaiting slaughter. My generation was the first generation to see the carnage humans have wreaked on the planet. The generation coming of age now is the last generation that can do anything to stop it.
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Philip Wollen first appeared on my radar in 2012 when he delivered this fiery, compassionate address at the Wheeler Centre in Australia, where he is as famous as Bill Gates is here.
This 10-minute video has been seen millions of times around the world. I've watched it dozens of times myself. For video, just click on the image below.
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Moving on to the 2021 documentary, Seaspiracy
In Food IS Climate, Merzer delivers a ton of information about the ecological horrors of the global fishing industry. This new film strongly resonates with everything he wrote in his book.
Without a doubt, the ecological damage inflicted by land-based, animal agriculture -- gets far more attention than the nightmare that is taking place in the world's oceans.
Those oceans may be out of sight and out of mind for most of us, but the simple facts are terrifying -- when one considers how those facts affect the future of our species.
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To put it succinctly, if oceans die, we die! |
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Click on the above image for a two-minute trailer of this 90-minute, 2021 documentary on Netflix.
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Here's a snippet of info from the film. Maybe it will be enough to convince you to watch the full documentary.
Around the world on average, sharks kill about ten people per year. Comparatively speaking, we humans kill 11,000 to 30,000 sharks per hour.
The crazy thing is -- almost half of those sharks killed are killed as bycatch by commercial fishing fleets and are discarded as waste back into the ocean. Every year, at least 50 million sharks were killed this way as collateral damage associated with the harvesting of our favorite seafood. (Click image below for 4-minute summary)
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Studies have shown that up to 40% of all marine life caught get thrown back into the ocean and most them die before they even hit the water. |
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More from the film: Sharks are the apex predators of the sea. They sit at the very top of the food chain, alongside killer whales. If the shark population dwindles, then the marine ecosystem can become dangerously unbalanced.
Once again, the main message today is the same message almost every week in these SOS Memos.
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The elephant in the room
is clearly our food choices.
To have any chance of avoiding the premature deaths of billions of humans before the end of this century, we simply must get serious about “taking the animal out of the equation” as I stated in the above slide.
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The Bottom Line. Although the esteemed James Lovelock has essentially predicted our demise before the end of this century, that does not mean that we should give up hope. Let me explain.
In our 2020 book, Outcry, we featured nine big-picture scientists in Chapter Four. The apparent consensus among the nine appeared to be that chances are not very good that we will survive much longer as a species.
Even so, I still have a reason for not giving up hope. I explain that near the end of Chapter 4.
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The consensus opinion of the scientists in this chapter seems to be that we’re not likely to make it long-term as a species. While they may be right, I choose to believe that they may be wrong—based on four variables with which many of them may not be familiar.
If all of these variables listed below end up working in favor of our survival, then I believe that we still have a decent chance.
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The awesome power of our food choices. It seems that most of the scientists, including Lovelock, in this chapter still believe the protein myth about our ill-perceived need to consume animal-based foods in order to be healthy
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Systemic Change. The concept of widespread systemic change in the way we live and the tremendous positive impact it could have on our long-term survival.
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AI. The potential of well-leveraged artificial intelligence to assist us in developing sustainability solutions that far exceed our collective imaginations in 2020.
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Superior Leadership. Perhaps the most powerful variable of all. As a former corporate executive, process improvement consultant and founder of an executive search firm, I applaud Dr. W. Edward Deming's conclusions about the three keys to solving our most daunting problems. As he told my former colleague Bill Conway long ago: “We must have three things, Bill: #1 Leadership. #2 Leadership. #3 Leadership!”
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Dr. Lovelock wrote a book about AI a few years ago, Novacene, concluding that the miracles of artificial intelligence may be coming along at just the right time.
Given our somewhat dim prospects for survival, I have concluded that we may very well need all the help we can get from those robotic cyborgs as Lovelock calls them.
And I wrote about all of the above in Outcry. Click on the image below to visit the book's Amazon page.
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What can you do? You can help spark the global conversation about crucial topics that affect our future as a species. Here's one way you can do that:
Invite me to conduct a free Zoom session (from 30 minutes to one hour) with your group.
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The image above is a clue regarding the essence of my "family game plan" that is revealed only in my talks. I do not put that in writing.
Finally, please do everything you can to help spark the global "conversation" about our need to urgently transform our way of living into one that has a much better chance of keeping us alive indefinitely.
The billions of innocent children
of the world deserve no less!
I am confident that if a few million people carefully read and digested OUTCRY, that there might at least be a more robust conversation taking place about our grossly unsustainable way of living in the developed world -- and what it will take to get us focused on maximizing our chances of survival as a species.
To be sure, we must do a lot more than change what we eat -- and OUTCRY helps explain the "why" and the "how" of that proposition.
To my knowledge, OUTCRY remains the only book ever published that features an envisioned, totally-green, ultra-sustainable, super-desirable, future way of living for humans -- along with ideas for how we might get there as quickly as possible.
J. Morris (Jim) Hicks
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PS: Regarding the free Zoom conferences with your group, Send me an email and let's get started.
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Our book, for a host of environmental reasons, is only available as an e-book on Amazon. As such, it contains hyperlinks to hundreds of references and videos, is less expensive, does not kill any trees and does not have to be manufactured and delivered.
The links below to earlier SOS Memos will help you understand how these ideas unfolded since 2018.
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As always, I am just trying to help spark the all-important "conversation" about what is needed. By sharing a vision of what I believe is possible, I hope to influence others to think bigger, faster, better and bolder.
You will find that there aren't many books that cover both the health of your body and the health of your planet. This is one of them. It was published in 2011.
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What else can you do to help? Two things:
1. Live as greenly as possible while doing all that you can to raise the awareness of "big picture" solutions that are crucially necessary for saving our civilization.
2. Share this BSB and my "Mama Ain't Happy" BSB with prominent journalists, thought leaders and/or elected officials whom you respect. They need to learn a lot more about the many reasons why Mama ain't happy.
Promoting health, hope and harmony on planet Earth
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