Noam speaks/writes, we should stop and listen

Noam Chomsky is one of our great thinkers and when he talks, or writes, we should all step back from the rush that is life and consider.

Noam Chomsky - we should reflect.

Writing in In These Times, the American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, logician, political commentator and activist, has discussed the likely end of the era of civilization.

He writes foreshadowing a new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in a story headed: “The End of History?”

Chomsky say: “The era of civilization coincides closely with the geological epoch of the Holocene, beginning over 11,000 years ago. The previous Pleistocene epoch lasted 2.5 million years.

“Scientists now suggest that a new epoch began about 250 years ago, the Anthropocene, the period when human activity has had a dramatic impact on the physical world. The rate of change of geological epochs is hard to ignore”.

He said: “One index of human impact is the extinction of species, now estimated to be at about the same rate as it was 65 million years ago when an asteroid hit the Earth.

“That is the presumed cause for the ending of the age of the dinosaurs, which opened the way for small mammals to proliferate, and ultimately modern humans. Today, it is humans who are the asteroid, condemning much of life to extinction”.