Many of us took time to celebrate laughingly the recent “end of the world solstice.” Such quirky predictions add a note of levity to our lives and an excuse to exercise our repressed dramatic flare.

I found myself chatting with a klatch of the cheerfully doomed near midnight, Dec. 20, holding forth on the question: What would you do if you won a million-dollar lottery today?

The morning after dawned, however, and it was time for me to face up to some more sobering realities (since I’m still here, I have a responsibility to deal with them). We are polluting the planet at an unsustainable rate; carbon-loading is driving us toward the inevitable consequences of climate change; hunger and disease afflict billions.

The Maya calamity may have proved a bit of a lark, nor is any scenario predicting a sudden end to humanity at all likely, but a degraded future on a depleted planet is not only possible, it’s likely. It’s not sudden death we need to focus on; it’s death by prolonged strangulation of the world as we know it.

Let’s celebrate our survival of Dec. 21, 2012, by committing to positive action for a sustainable, humanitarian world.

Craig Spence

Victoria

© Copyright 2013