Michael Rynn
3 min readJul 27, 2019

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You have well summarised some of our species curly predicaments and entrapments. I find it hard to boil them all down to anything smaller. Here is one such attempt made now.

No future for most
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No special blame is given for our peak civilised days.
We evolved as sufficient for hunter-gatherer ways.
Survival selected us for quick, strong, social and smart.
Only lately we became a species who can take creation apart.

Tribes and groups with skilled hunters explored and spread,
They filled every continent, hunted all larger animals dead,
Then they could fill no more, came to balance nature even.
In the places most bio-diverse, as resident masters of Eden.

In company with favourite plants and animals, domestic lives.
Selected and drafted long stay guests, a family and wives.
Small encampments became villages, later towns with drains,
With fertile soil, and reliable water, pottery and grains.

In this new human ecosystem, all dewilded and domesticated.
Animals bred to be compatible, food and work-mated.
Plant seeds now kept for replanting, and store-rated.
All living together, shared, evolved, progress commuted.

Specialised problem solvers grew, as parts of larger crew.
Hunters became soldiers, gatherers slaved fields for brew.
Towns became cities, walled and fierce, wars broke out anew.
Weapons and horses, chariots and fire, much blood was drew.

By this time the forests were gone, taken for wood and fields.
Metals required fire smelting, ships required fortune deals.
Turned wood , stone and bricks, sails, oars, slaves to wrecks.
City-states rose, but fell with plagues and starved subjects.

Learned nations and empires, more social organised cultures trade.
Gathered wealth, spread languages, writing, and religions were made.
Techniques of large scale organised, improved, rules symbolised,
Grew bigger cities, harnessed lands, roads and sea lane supplies.

All this required more planning and greater bureaucracy.
Still only what is made or resourced with muscle can be.
States could take only what they counted, harvested tax free.
Worked with good climate, with soil, wheel and water, toiled we.

All states use abstract notions, as machines of profit and force.
Make some wealth, produce and trade, balance sheets and laws.
A state cares only that it makes, somewhere else is a loss,
In the biggest human social units, all served whoever was boss.

Subsets of the state, corporations are like organs, with life notions.
Circulation, digestion, waste disposal, structures, control and motions.
Size is related to energy supplied to power all its consumptions.
Like hunger, energy suppliers have full charge of brain presumptions.

Hungry states become predators that must slay others for food.
The biggest become the hungriest, the most deceptive and rude.
There are so many of them, in tribal affiliations most crude.
Some help each other where possible, to feed their growing brood.

For two and half centuries some blossomed empires too monstrous.
Fed by ancient fossil sunlight, powered engines enormous.
Burning electrics down grids spanning continents and nations.
Huge fleet transports shift mined earth, hide waste poisons.

Population doubles every time along with new energy capacity.
Consumption multiplies and widens from new production rapacity.
Last forests to go quickly, maybe gone in our very next blink.
In tiny refuges that remain, humans push remnant species extinct.

Never before have greenhouse gases filled our atmosphere so fast.
Previous mass extinctions, deep strata record climates of earth past,
changed in geological time, longer than all of civilisation could last.

Humans ask for full extinction, by zombie growth exponential,
revenge of a few treeless primates, to handy killer-arsonists serial,
nations war to burn the last fossil fuels of millions of years burial.

Michael Rynn — 27th July 2019.

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Michael Rynn
Michael Rynn

Written by Michael Rynn

Once was educated and worked in Medical Practice, then did software engineering. Now retired. Still doing music, reading and writing, and website tinkering

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