Prediction and Literature

Today's early morning headlines report: Oil From Spill Is Reported to Have Reached the Coast. New York Times

From Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, pg 197.

“Please join me now in a Meditation on our Fish brethren: … We hold in our minds the Great Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico; and the Great Dead Zone in Lake Erie; and the Great Dead Zone in the Black Sea; and the desolate Grand Banks of Newfoundland, where the Cod once abounded; and the Great Barrier Reef, now dying and bleaching white and breaking apart.”

How can we, the human species, be so pathetically stupid, and greedy and shortsighted?