Your articles are always brilliant, and depressing as hell. My only refuge is what Gregory Bateson aptly observed: "If we look at the world through a big enough macroscope, nothing much matters." So I take refuge in the Macroscope--the vast universe on one hand, and geological history on the other. Our industrial cancer of the Earth is reaching its inevitable fate--systemic collapse, accompanied by mass starvation and die-off and ecological catastrophe, resulting in vastly simplified ecosystems on a hotter planet--but that is just one more mass extinction event in the long, 6 billion year history of Gaia. Life itself is resilient, however, and will regenerate (with or without big-brained apes like ourselves) over the next millions of years in entirely new forms--until the sun finally burns out some billions of years hence and fries us all...