World Views

Short Sand Beach, a trail in Oregon’s Oswald West State Park, wends through a forest of old growth trees. Wild and alive for years, some say centuries, the trees do not know when the time will come—to give up life as they have known it.

Eco-suicide is far easier to do and more predictable than we had once thought.  Indeed, our entire history as a species provides a cautionary tale.  The archeological record is littered with examples of ancient human societies that have vanished – many of them as victims of ecological disasters – from the very first city, Ur, to the Sumerians, Babylonians, Akkadians, Old Kingdom Egypt, the Hittites, Minoans, Mayans, Incas, Aztecs, Olmecs, Teotihuacan, the Anasazi, the Carthaginians, the Khmer Empire, and others.