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By Root 506 0

to solve this circular problem, and no one else seems to have figured it out either. The time allotted for answering the question has run out. So I’m going to be honest with you. It looks as if we have had it. The world is already experiencing an “extinction event,” as my fellow geologists coldly refer to it, something like the asteroid impact that claimed about two-thirds of the species on the planet sixty-five million years ago. This time we are the asteroid. Our collision with the planet’s ecosystems is going to take us down too, and soon. It may happen in one go, via mushroom cloud and other weaponry, or it may be more gradual, requiring a generation or two of proper Malthusian misery as everything goes haywire. Either way, the complex systems required to feed our huge population will fail, and our numbers will crash. Either way, the future looks grave indeed.

The truth may set one free, but this particular truth is pretty hard to handle. It is so crushingly hopeless. So damned sad. Job number one for any organism is to maintain its own kind, yet here we have the entire human race headed over a cliff, and there is nothing a single person can do to stop it. Or even millions of people acting together. Millions more, ignorant and malevolently led, will resist ferociously. This thing has been building up for ten thousand years, through countless wars, tyrannies, insurrections, counter-revolutions, genocides, famines, and plagues … a long and painful journey from one overpopulation-induced horror to the next. The edge of the precipice looms, our speed is increasing, and the brakes have been disabled by madmen.

How does one deal with that?

I deal with it as most people do when they have to live with wrongs that can’t be put right: I choose to ignore it most of the time. Otherwise I would lose my mind, à la Don Quixote, and go tilting at Walmarts.

Instead, I buy things there. Only as second or third choice, you understand, but there it is: the ability to look the other way and carry on. This comes so naturally to us that it must have survival value. Think of everyone at Auschwitz, prisoners and gas-chamber attendants alike, all doing their chores and counting the days until either the Holocaust was complete or the liberators arrived. At the end of the war, there were surprisingly large numbers of both parties still alive.

Knowing what I do about the impending fate of humanity, sometimes I feel like I’m trapped in an upscale extermination camp. Yet I still do my job and pay my taxes, part of the mass of humanity quietly going about its business, ironic proof that we are basically good-hearted and optimistic beings. I live in faint hope that something unexpected and unifying will occur, such that we all wake up one morning knowing that together we can beat this thing.

And I keep writing stuff like this, hoping faintly that it might help to bring on that unexpected and unifying event. Yet every time I write, it puts me in mind of that old Arab saying, “The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.”

Sigh. After blaming myself and my fellow barking dogs for failing to stop the caravan, I now know that doing so is well nigh impossible.

However, this is strangely relieving. The problem of defeatism (giving up too easily) is no longer an issue. We have tried hard and done our best, but we are defeated, plain and simple. Being defeated simplifies things. Strategic thinking—“If we do thus-and-so, maybe we can win!”—is no longer required. More than ever, I can be directed by my conscience. I can now say and do what I believe to be right, even when it doesn’t appear to advance my cause, because the cause is lost. How odd: in a personal sense, I have won.

What I have won is a surprisingly good life. My wife and I live in the middle of a national park in the Canadian Rockies. As a self-employed professional naturalist and the author of some popular books on the mountains, I am often hired as a guide by park visitors. This is a lot of fun, especially when I take my clients hiking and backpacking. In the winter months I read to classes