I only really started thinking about this after I retired in 2014. I started reading-in particular Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari- If you have not read it I would strongly recommend. This got me thinking about where we are in human development and I started looking at climate change. The things I found came as quite a shock and I started wandering why I wasn’t aware of these things before. Sure pollution air quality cropped up now and then and of course recycling but the real cause? So I started reading more about climate change and also found some really strong books on denial so I read them too- not knowing who was right or more importantly why there was such a conflict of views. Then I slowly began to see the science and the vested interests in keeping things very much as they are.

I have to confess here that something started to make sense. I had always wondered in school about compound interest- Not the theory which is sound (I am an engineer) – but the blind belief that it would always work without question- That is without considering that at some stage infinite growth would occur and we all only have finite resources and of course the planet is a fixed size. I also remember much later in life when doing my business studies – a similar debate with my lecturer about growth and the insatiable appetite for market/business/sales growth at virtually any cost- which clearly cannot go on forever so is anybody looking beyond their own personal short term gain?

So now I understand a great deal more that I didn’t really have time or inclination to dwell on when I was trying to pay a mortgage, keep a wife and children fed and happy and have some future until they could fend for themselves.

Now as I come to the end I realise that however unwittingly the last few generations, including my own have presided over a period of history that well prove to be our downfall. I will explore some of these issues in this blog.