The Fall To Grace page 4
Nature's beauty of form is rivaled by her genius of function, an amazingly complex and diverse system that is held in perfect balance.
Unfortunately our capacity to disconnect from instinctual behavior also disconnects us from the encoded checks and compensations that would naturally maintain that balance by preventing excessive consumption of resources.
Historically every previous complex society has played out the same inner division. We are just the latest of a series following a familiar pattern. The story ends when the survival instinct re-asserts itself to prevent the civilization from bringing about its own destruction through unsustainable practices. We lose the ground gained through our evolved adaptation and end up falling back into the "law of the jungle".
The fall of the Roman Empire followed by the dark ages is a poster child for illustrating the cycle that has repeated itself over and over throughout the course of human history. Where we are on that road is debatable, but that we are is not. If history repeats itself, as it's always done in the past, our current civilization has long since met the criteria of excessive consumption. We are setting ourselves up for the fall.