State of the World Report 2024

My fellow Earthlings, I write this to give an accounting of where we are at as humanity, not as citizens of our various imperfect nations, but as inhabitants of our beloved perfect planet, Earth.

In all of our doings, the Earth remains blameless and perfect. She is a majestic and beautiful planet, an oasis of life in the vast void of space. Nothing we can do will change that fact. Planets don’t play by the same rules as their lucky inhabitants. First, they live in a totally different time frame that spans billions of years, not the pitiful 80 years most humans enjoy. So if some arrogant species comes along and even destroys the whole Biosphere or wrecks the web of life or the balance of Nature, she will shrug and will hardly notice. After all it was she who filled the world with volcanoes and molten fire for tens of millions of years. It was she who made the rain pour for a million years. It was she who nourished the first algae and evolved every imaginable plant and then animal over eons. It was she who oversaw nearly EVERY of these go extinct to be replaced with what’s next. Next for her can take a million years, ten million, a hundred million. She has nothing but time. We don’t. Never forget this simple fact.

I give you this as the fundamental, immutable backdrop of all that humanity does, the ultimate limiter of our activities. So this report is not about the…