The 11th Hour (5 of 49)

The 11th Hour

We got here 15 minutes before midnight on December 31 st...
and all of recorded history has blinked by in the last 60 seconds.
Perhaps the best description of what we are is, as Jared Diamond puts it: The third chimpanzee.
There are two kinds of chimpanzees and there's us.
But in some ways, we are extraordinarily special.
And the most obvious one is our extraordinary ability to make tools...
our extraordinary ability to communicate.
T o have very detailed discussions with each other.
So we are fundamentally groups of animals...
randomly scattered throughout the planet...
slowly coalescing in groups...
that are more powerful, larger.

And very much conditioned by two essential characters: One is opportunism and the other one is greed.
All the animals and vegetables are opportunistic creatures.
They do what's necessary for them to do in order to survive.
I think it was the human mind basically...
that threw us out of balance with the rest of nature.
The tragedy is that it was the human mind...
that was the key to our very survival.
Now, when you think that we evolved in Africa about 150,000 years ago...
and compared to other animals on the plains then, we weren't very impressive.