What you describe is the terminal phase of a global cancer that started with the Agricultural Revolution — the fatal symbiosis that arose between humans and annual grasses, leading to a runaway feedback loop, transforming ecosystems into monocultures, depleting topsoil, growing human populations explosively, creating empires and global commerce, and leading to the Industrial Revolution which accelerated all these runaway feedback loops, until it exceeded the carrying capacity of the entire planet. Cancer has only two possible outcomes: systemic collapse (death) or spontaneous remission. The first is most likely by far, but the second occasionally happens — though we have no idea how or why. So rather than collapsing into despair, the best we can do — all of us — is to find our own best way to become agents of spontaneous remission of the Cancer of the Earth — by growing gardens, growing community, and growing awareness. It probably won’t save us, but as Gandhi reminded us, the essence of wisdom lies in doing what we are best at for the right reasons, and renouncing the fruits of action — through meditation, nonviolence, and Permaculture.