Flawed, to a depth unlike any other beast in the animal kingdom, human beings rapaciously despoil their own environment and continue to conduct activities that appear to threaten the very existence of the biosphere – our home, planet Earth.
Through the latter half of the 20th century an insatiable technological race to develop weapons of mass annihilation resulted in nuclear standoff among a handful of belligerent nations and an incongruous co-operative policy of Mutually Assured Destruction (M.A.D.). That dire policy still stands today, a shadow cast unthinkingly over all human endeavour and indeed life itself.
The very idea that humanity willingly chose to pursue a scientific course that delivered the capacity to destroy the world many times over should be breathtakingly troubling, yet inspires relatively little comment. From the very same tumultuous technological crucible that produced the enduring madness of nuclear weaponry came a more recent development – the Internet. The online world promises an ‘abundance of riches’ (as its techno-evangelists constantly assure) but it also has a profound (and profoundly under acknowledged) dark side....read more>>>>...