Don't You Ever Read Anything But Serious Books?

This collection is a personal record of writers observations that aroused my curiosity, mainly in the 1970s and early 1980s. This was a period of about a decade, when I was a young man, forty to fifty years ago.
There are some contemporary allusions, in my role as editor. For, the problems then, inequality, tyranny, secrecy, the lack of liberty, and so forth are problems still. indeed, they help drive climate instability, which is another extinction danger, besides nuclear weapons and their fission energy off-shoot "nuclear power."
Of the dangerous places, in which humanity has put itself, many scientists believe that the biggest threat to human survival is not nuclear-weapons but pandemics.
Humanity is actually doing its worst to breed pandemics, by the atrocious conditions of factory farming, in which it keeps its helpless fellow creatures. Humanity is not humane. (‘Gigantic’ power of meat industry blocking green alternatives, study finds.html) Hence the intolerable pressures on domesticated animals. It would, of course be better not to have to run survival races between good and evil human behavior (such as, the fallible researchers into anti-pandemic vaccines, to offset the ill consequences of doped factory-farmed meat).
The issue is complicated by the fact that mass meat-eating diverts the feeding of humanity to the feeding of slaughtered cattle and fowls. The production of methane is also highly productive of greenhouse gases, on top of its potential release from the melting tundra, which would be a potent contributor to the greenhouse effect, and a subsequent extinction of human, indeed mammalian and other life on earth.
Climate instability is obvious for all to see, in the floods and fires and droughts which were already, in 2023, ravaging this planet. While those in power seem to think that the climate was God-given for their own personal benefit.
The climate is more complicated than scientists know or pretend to know.
The climate consequences could be worse than the usual disaster movie. There is one feature about that modern classic, “The Day After Tomorrow” which should concern especially Europeans and the United States eastern sea-board, however. That is the ending of the flow of the warm Gulf Stream into northern Europe. A report, with which all scientists are not agreed, says Europe could lose the Gulf Stream by as early as 2025.
The projected increase in population, already consuming resources at a greater rate than the earth can sustain, is the familiar prelude in ecology, to a population crash. The resulting striving to survive will automatically intensify human strife and destructive aggression. Wars are accompanied by an intransigent spirit of reckless fanaticism; brinkmanship, which defeat our human ingenuity in problem-solving. This takes time to think and design, that the human species may not have. Mankind is parasite and host, the consciousless and conscientious locked in a suicidal struggle.
Unheeded early warnings were already being raised half a century ago. Indeed waste of resources, pollution, extinction of wild animals, renewable energy beginnings were discussed by HG Wells, from the 1920s to 1930s, as well as democratic reform, an old cause, also discussed in this anthology.
By the end of the 1960s an influential group calling itself the Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth, arguing that natural resources, at the current rates of exploitation, would fairly soon run-out, leaving only pollution. In the 1950s, The Outer Limits science fiction tv series, did a tale on a resource-exhausted Earth, over 30 years after Wells warned of the prospect.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in his Letter to Soviet Leaders, advocated free speech, along with the saving Club of Rome message of conservation.
The message could not be faulted but it missed the extinction danger of the Greenhouse effect, known since the 1950s (Kornbluth and Pohl mention it in their SF satire The Space Merchants).