The world is ending. Long live the world.

 

Congratulate the news for attempting to inform us. They try. They partly succeed. They can't succeed completely. The world is infinite. The media is not.

 

Headlines shout about ecological calamity and economic collapse. They are right - as far as they go.

 

The world as we know it will end. It always has. Every generation has witnessed threats to civilization. It is with the global reach enabled by technology that we can witness each other's lives, but technology has also created a greater likelihood of global degradation.

 

I won't argue global warming because it is more complex than a few paragraphs. A news article captures enough to fill the space between the headline and byline, and the advertisements. They are constrained. So am I. One human and one conversation can not encompass the innumerable elements of the biology, climatology, agriculture, economy and philosophy.

 

I can, however, review history. At the passing of the king the crowd would cheer, "The king is dead. Long live the king." In one shout they acknowledged the recently departed and the newly crowned. The transition could be radical, and that radical shift could be positive, negative, or incomprehensible.

 

Our world is passing through a a radical phase. Chances are that our species initiated or expedited the transition. The change will be far more significant than a kingdom's power shift. Millions of people will suffer, and tragically, most of them are already in troublesome situations.

 

The world that is passing, the world that will see the greatest trauma is ours; not the planet, but the world of our species. Terrible extinctions may occur. We may be one of them, but what is more likely is that most species will survive, and will be required to adapt. The familiar world of our expectations and standard of living has a poorer probability of survival.

 

Industries and activities based on non-renewable resources will not be renewed. Plastics, inefficient energy sinks, biologically destructive practices will fade either because their source materials will fail, or because we won't allow the wasteful practices to continue.

 

A friend told a story that I'll paraphrase and possibly expand. While she was ranting about some mis-step in the day, some failure of technology, some extra bit of work she would have to do; her grandmother stopped her. A hundred years ago, most of what she was complaining about did not, and could not exist. Many homes did not have electricity, few had their own phones, indoor plumbing was a welcome luxury. There was no possibility of complaining about a lost cell phone signal, a delayed flight, a crashed computer, a broken dishwasher. Even a overflowing toilet may have been impossible to imagine.

 

Her grandmother then turned the point around. As a child, she couldn't imagine the world as it is today. Why would we think that we can take today's situation and guess about where the world will be after another hundred years?

 

I disappoint some people by being an optimist. They want to hear about the negative, the dire situation of today's world. I accept where we are, and tend to think that the situation is understated, not overstated. Yet I am an optimist. As a species, we have demonstrated that we are inefficient, immature, and impatient. We have also demonstrated that we are adaptable, and adaptable enough to be able to exist in almost any environment on this planet, and possibly on others. We have the skills, and even without government direction, we will be working to adapt as the world changes. We made mistakes, and while we should reflect on the consequences, we should spend more time on searching for solutions.

 

Luckily, the search is in progress and some of the solutions are underway. I look to the innovators and radical creators to find, implement, and benefit from solutions.

 

As an investor, I have the opportunity to cheer them on, profit from their success in multiple ways, and witness encouragement and hope. That's one criterion I have for investing and why I own stocks in companies that are pursuing renewable energy, alternative lifestyles, and more efficient and planet friendly practices.

 

Whether we live or not, the world will survive. The planet will continue to spin, the season will change. A few million years may erase most of our traces. And species will survive that were resilient, adaptable, and lucky. I hope we are one of them.

 

Our world is ending. Long live our world.