In an article by paleontologist Niles Eldredge of the American Museum of Natural History, published on ActionBioscience.org, the author begins by stating: "There is little doubt left in the minds of professional biologists that Earth is currently faced with a mounting loss of species that threatens to rival the five great mass extinctions of the geological past." Then, referring to comments by Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson, Eldredge continues, "Some biologists have begun to feel that this biodiversity crisis—this 'Sixth Extinction'—is even more severe, and more imminent, than Wilson had supposed."
While the causes of this predicted extinction are still being disputed by some, the fact of extinction seems indisputable (see Moises Velasquez-Manoff, "Today's unsettling comparison to 'the great dying,' " The Christian Science Monitor, November 19, 2008), and few would question the need for solutions. But real and permanent solutions require discerning and confronting the underlying problem: the universal belief in material life.
The fundamental need of the hour is to debunk the world view of a planet and its inhabitants formed from material elements, existing in time and finite space, dependent for survival on material conditions, competing for limited resources, and governed by mindless material laws. That simply—and provably—isn't reality, but is its suppositional inversion.
