I guess you could start by saying; climate change and you will get two opinions. Then again some will say the onset of creeping socialism, others the rise of Communistic China, a global power flexing its muscles.
Some would say that the imminent fall of Donald Trump, is the biggest threat and the decline of the United States as a power to protect what we in the West call democracy.
Others still watch the decline in human behaviour with violence breaking out across the globe particularly with the young to mid life age group that have abandoned law and order, that gave rise to a single incident that became the Black Lives Matter movement.
During the outbreak of a virus that has created millions of deaths we find all sport following like a flock of sheep and kneeling, ...not to God, but to a hoon, that went looking for trouble and aided by those click happy iPhone marauders, fed the media and lit a fire that is greater than the pandemic virus.
A virus , that that spreads and keeps on spreading or perhaps one could suggest human reproduction is killing us. Rubbish, you might say, but is it?
For a moment let me take you out into the barren waste of a desert. All you see and hear and feel is it vastness, its heat or cold and its association with its natural environment.
Now move to a an idyllic landscape that is untouched by human hand, maybe a wide green view of distant mountains, or a lake or river, once again at peace untouched by man.
Then dramatically sit in any city, township and ponder what you see, the old, the new, the grandiose, the derelict and think for a moment.
Put that aside as I have now and as I tap away at my computer keyboard, I look around me . A room in a home, a sort of office, that used to house the car. I sit on a chair, at a desk, surrounded by a television, a printer a phone, all connected by cables and plugs. Curtains at the windows, light on the ceiling that supplies light. We take it all for granted and spare not a thought of ‘where did it all come from’.
It all came from Mother Earth and she keeps on giving, giving and giving.
...and the reasons are basically two fold. Man and greed .
If we agree that nothing is infinite, then we must come to the conclusion that we cannot keep on raping the planet and breeding ourselves into oblivion.
You go to a place like Sydney or Melbourne and try to imagine the great hole in the earth that the surface infrastructure would make. Yet every item of what you see had it origins in the ground. Have you ever thought of that before?
Perhaps not. Recently I watch a programme on the amount of plastic water bottles that were lying in the reeds and growth along Melbourne’s Yarra River. Volunteers were cleaning up and the plastic was absolutely mind boggling to see that was recovered along a stretch of its banks. This is not peculiar to Melbourne but occurs across the globe.
Apart from the collateral damage done to creatures, great and small as well as those who home is the water, it all points to a virus that is spreading that is homo sapiens who are selfish, greedy and too damned lazy to dispose of plastic bottles and that of the industry of packaging.
What happened to the days when you bought bread unwrapped, meat carved as you waited, biscuits in tins handled by grocers with out gloves and all wrapped in brown paper or brown bags. That generation are living into their nineties.
Well at the time of Jesus the virus homo sapien, numbered around 300 million. About 1800, that had touch one billion and in the last 200 years that has risen exponentially to close on seven billion people. It is projected that in the next 14 years that number will increase to nine billion.
The planet will go on giving until the balance tips. The biggest threat is the virus homo sapien, because in time he will perish from his own inability to live with the environment. Mother Earth will give but man will take, and take and take.
Maybe I am an old man with a random thought, maybe people will laugh, scoff and ridicule, but if we pause for a moment to think maybe, just maybe I have a point.