Book Review: Half-Earth: Our Planet's Fight for Life

Half-Earth: Our Planet's Fight for Life. Edward O. Wilson. Published 2016.

as reviewed at;
Whole Earth: Edward O. Wilson's Proposal to Save the Biosphere. Mark Jarman, The Hudson Review. 2017.

The great and essential biologist and naturalist Edward O. Wilson has published his latest warning about life on earth. Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life[1] completes a trilogy that includes The Social Conquest of Earth (2012) and The Meaning of Human Existence (2014). Of this trilogy Wilson writes, “[it] describes how our species became the architects and rulers of the Anthropocene epoch, bringing consequences that will affect all of life, both ours and that of the natural world, far into the geological future.” It may be hard to conceive of the “geological future,” when the geological past itself stretches back four billion years, but the new term Anthropocene identifies our current age as one in which humanity has affected not only global biology but geology as well. Half-Earth recounts what we ourselves, i.e., humanity, are doing to our very realm of living. It unfolds precisely and specifically with detailed examples of just how human activity has interrupted the course of evolution on the planet. Human enterprise, as Wilson describes it, looks like a deliberate, ongoing, and increasingly rapid Extinction Level Event. He has a proposal to avert catastrophe by setting aside half the planet as wild land for non-human nature. It is a pretty gloomy prospect to imagine the global cooperation needed for this proposal, but Wilson himself seems optimistic. After all, he believes, to do otherwise will inevitably result in our own annihilation, along with the flora and fauna we are leading and have led to extinction. And when he reminds us that what is wild and non-human includes the human body itself, a symbiotic zoo of microorganisms, most of them bacteria, one can understand the premise of his argument. What he calls the biosphere—everything on the planet that is living and makes life possible—cannot exist without the existence of wild nature, and humanity, vitally connected to that sphere, cannot exist, at least not as we now conceive ourselves to be. Travel to another planet is not the answer. Technological innovation is not the answer. The answer is simple, elegant, proactive and hopeful, and, Wilson reveals, already underway in many parts of the globe. 

The book is divided into three sections: The Problem, The Real Living World, and The Solution. The second part, “The Real Living World,” includes the book’s most moving and encouraging chapter, “The Best Places in the Biosphere.” Wilson asked scientists he knew around the world to name and describe those places where the wild remains more or less intact. We hear about the redwood forests of California, the Amazon River Basin, Russia’s Lake Baikal, Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park, the Western Ghats of India, the scrubland of Southwestern Australia, the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica, and the Hawaiian archipelago. Some of these places are known to us (Who has not been encouraged to worry about the loss of the Amazon rain forests?), but each remains an example of a place that human beings themselves have agreed not to affect further or at least have found a way to co-exist with. Coexistence, that ambivalent term from the Cold War, may be an idea worth reviving. One of the most moving paragraphs in this moving chapter comes at the end:

Our fragmented circle of life ends in the eastern slopes and foothills of the Andes, where we find both the final continental region to be reached by human beings and largest number of wild species of plants and animals that grace a single place. 

Who knew? But this is the kind of thing we all need to know. 

Wilson has written elsewhere about growing up in Alabama, influenced by the fundamentalist Christianity of the Bible Belt. As do most scientists, he sees religious belief as an impediment to knowledge and in particular to preservation of the earth as it is. And though he argues reasonably from a premise of empirical facts, he can quote Biblical chapter and verse when he chooses. Early in Half-Earth he recalls God’s admonishment to Job: “Has thou perceived the breadth of the earth? declare if thou knowest it all.” The answer, he admits, is that we have, “more or less,” while remaining as “vulnerable as when we evolved millions of years ago.” God may have given us dominion over the earth and all the living creatures thereon, but Wilson reminds us we are still “organisms absolutely dependent on other organisms.” Wilson argues for humanity as a steward of the natural world. He can sound like Jeremiah, but he can also sound like St. Paul, and like them both he has an urgent and prophetic message: “The only hope for the species still living is a human effort commensurate with the magnitude of the problem. The ongoing mass extinction of species, and with it the extinction of genes and ecosystems, ranks with pandemics, world war, and climate change as among the deadliest threats that humanity has imposed on itself.” And when Wilson speaks of climate change, he strikes a Miltonic note: “Having risen above all the biosphere, set to alter everything everywhere, the wrathful demon of climate change is our child that we left unrestrained for too long.” 

One of the direst warnings, related to Wilson’s warnings about climate change, is the effect of invasive species. Since there are numerous ways for species to move from continent to continent or region to region, for example, via bird migration and air and ocean currents, it may be hard to see just how human activity abets the problem. But of course, human beings, once they left Africa, became an invasive species everywhere. It is human activity that allows for the global warming that makes it possible for the bark beetle currently devastating the coniferous forests of North America to migrate farther northward because the weather no longer grows cold enough to kill it. As for the extinction of species and their replacement by others, Wilson can point to “the damming of rivers and streams, the draining of ponds and lakes, the filling in of springheads, and pollution.” These acts of human ingenuity, control, and collateral damage, he points out, are responsible for the extinction of nearly 60 kinds of freshwater fish in North America alone. About this, too, Wilson is ready to quote the appropriate scripture, Genesis 1:20: “Let the waters teem with countless living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of heaven.” 

Though Wilson must appreciate having Biblical scripture at his command, as a scientist making an argument for the preservation of all of earth’s life, he believes that “traditional religions are pivoted on the salvation of human beings, here and in the afterlife, above all other purposes that can be conceived.” One might be inclined to split hairs here about what denotes a traditional religion, but Wilson makes an exhortation that is as spiritual as it is ethical: “Only a major shift in moral reasoning, with greater commitment given to the rest of life, can meet this greatest challenge.” He concludes, “History without the wildlands is no history at all.” 

So, we are asked, “Are we as Gods?” It may be simplistic to contrast, as Wilson does, “the bloodthirsty warrior god” that Joshua worshipped, with the merciful god revealed to St. Paul. But he quotes 1 Corinthians 2:9 in which St. Paul suggests that things beyond our knowledge and power have been “prepared by God for those who love him.” Seeking those things through introspection, Wilson reasons, will better answer to those who believe in God, than those who demand that God serve them as gods themselves. It is notable how often Wilson appeals to the spiritual or metaphysical dimension of humanity, recognizing at the very least the necessity of acknowledging it as part of human psychology. 

Wilson’s writing is in itself an effective argument for the human species and its capacity for empathy. In one chapter dedicated to the preservation of the rhinoceros, “An Elegy for the Rhinos,” he describes the ironic climb of the value of rhino horn in those parts of the world that prize it, particularly in Asia, for medical purposes. “The price per gram has soared to that of gold. The result is a bitter irony: rhinos are being driven to extinction even though their horn has no more medicinal value than a human fingernail.” One reads that and, as a Westerner, can see the absurdity. But Wilson also acknowledges that those who illegally hunt and kill the rhinos of Southeast Asia do so at the risk of their own lives, since the penalties have climbed along with the price. Despite the penalties and the enforced protection and conservation of the paltry number of rhinos still alive in the wild, he writes, “There are always the sleepless poachers, each willing to put his life on the line for one horn and the lifetime income it will bring.” As we think of those poachers and consider our moral superiority to them, he also reminds us that, for example, “Sumatran rhinos have been exposed to both primitive and modern hunters in Asia for more than sixty thousand years.” That length of time, the tens of thousands of years of human predatory activity, brings a chill. By describing the aspiration to a better life among those rhino-horn poachers, Wilson draws a direct line to the entire human web of desire. We are all implicated. The problem has our attention now, but there is no way to make up for the time already past, nor will there be when there is no time left for the Sumatran rhino or the other animals cornered in their conservancies and dying out. 

There is an ongoing quarrel in the book with some scientists of the environmental movement, whom Wilson calls the new conservationists. They believe that if the ecology of the wild has been more or less compromised and ceased to exist, then human ingenuity must be employed, for example, to adapt to climate change and incorporate what remains of the natural world into human society. To draw a contrast with the new conservationists, Wilson calls himself an existential conservative, willing to reduce the activities that are undermining life on earth, rather than employing technology only on behalf of our species while “letting the rest of life slip away.” 

Finally, Wilson’s argument is with those, either of a religious or scientific bent or both, who are unable to see or refuse to see our real place in the creation. It is as if Wilson were urging us all to take the first step in a twelve-step program. Admit we have a problem. What should follow from this first step, Wilson describes complexly and movingly. In the future, he imagines, “The collective human mind, hyperconnected and digitized, will flow through the entirety of the life we have inherited far more quickly than was possible before. We will then understand the full meaning of extinction, and we will come to regret deeply every species humanity will have carelessly thrown away.” 

One day we will understand what we have done. In the meantime the problem must be dealt with, and that means, in this country at least, finding the political will to do so. Though we are living currently in a period of unreason, Wilson always appeals to reason: “To those who feel content to let the Anthropocene evolve toward whatever destiny it mindlessly drifts, I say please take time to reconsider. To those who are steering the growth of reserves world wide, let me make an earnest request: don’t stop, just aim a lot higher.” Here the operative words for America’s politics are “mindlessly drifts.” There is a sizable segment of American society with sizable political power that would claim that there is a mind behind this apparent drifting, and it can be considered either God or Market Forces or both. The more enlightened members of this group do think that human ingenuity will rescue us. Wilson seems attuned in particular to the American psyche when he offers a messianic and utopian vision of the world once this danger is successfully averted: “People will have closer access to a world that is complex and beautiful beyond our present imagining. We will have more time to put our own house in order for future generations. Living Earth, all of it, can continue to breathe.” 

The wilderness, which in the Bible is a place of rootlessness and renewal, a place for wandering and coming home from, must be restored. Wilson, echoing both Descartes and the Book of Common Prayer, declares, “Like it or not, and prepared or not, we are the mind and stewards of the living world.” In this Cartesian catechism, however, it is we and not God who are the mind. And it is up to us, given this mind, to “adopt a transcendent moral precept concerning the rest of life.” That precept, Wilson tells us is: “Do no further harm to the biosphere.” For a writer who has a gift for the evocative phrase (those “sleepless poachers” and the admonishment “to see Earth as it is and not as we wish it to be”), to choose the term “biosphere” for what might have simply been “the living world” or “the wild” or just “the earth,” sounds off to my ear. I have no doubt that for Wilson it is the most accurate term. But simply put, “biosphere” doesn’t resonate, not as much even as the term “wild lands” does. And yet the biosphere, as Wilson uses the term, includes all that is living and makes life possible, all that was formerly called the creation, of which humanity is very much a part. It just seems to me that the word puts the concept further out of reach, making it exotic in a science fiction sort of way, like the old Buckminster Fuller metaphor, “Spaceship Earth.” This is a semantic quibble, I know, but even the book’s subtitle, “Our Planet’s Fight for Life,” conveys more and does so more urgently than “Do no further harm to the biosphere.” 

Nevertheless, we shouldn’t need to be told that the planet is in trouble. It may sound encouraging to learn that the wildernesses still existing on earth “simply need to be left alone.” It is extremely discouraging to hear of “landscapes so degraded that their original life must be restored from the ground up, by inserting soil, microorganisms, and eukaryotic species (algae, fungi, plants, animals) in certain combinations and in particular sequences.” This is a task for scientists equipped with the practical means to restore life itself, much less wildlife, to the wasteland and the dead zone. Wilson is reasoning with us at a time when we have deliberately limited our comprehension. God help us, then, if reason will not.

Topic: Climate Refugees

The Ominous Story of Syria's Climate Refugees. Scientific American. December 2015.

Dealing with climate migration: 'what matters are our actions'. Arthur Wyns, the ecologist.org. Aug. 21, 2017.

Human induced climate change will have many effects on people’s homes, livelihoods and current way of living. But what happens with the millions that will be displaced? ARTHUR WYNS takes a look at Bangladesh, a low-lying country of delta’s marshes and Sundarbans that is at the forefront of dealing with climate migration.

Topic: Positive Feedbacks

What are positive feedbacks? NOAA.

Topic: Albedo and Melt

Ice-Albedo Feedback: How Melting Ice Causes More Ice to Melt.

Snow, water, ice and permafrost; summary for policymakers. Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme.


Rising seas: 'Florida is about to be wiped off the map'. Elizabeth Rush, Guardian. June 26, 2018.

Harold Wanless, or Hal, chair of the geology department, speak about sea level rise. “Only 7% of the heat being trapped by greenhouse gases is stored in the atmosphere,” Hal begins. “Do you know where the other 93% lives?” 

“In the ocean,” Hal continues. “That heat is expanding the ocean, which is contributing to sea level rise, and it is also, more importantly, creating the setting for something we really don’t want to have happen: rapid melt of ice.” 

... 

On the screen above his head clips from a documentary on climate change show glacial tongues of ice the size of Manhattan tumbling into the sea. “The big story in Greenland and Antarctica is that the warming ocean is working its way in, deep under the ice sheets, causing the ice to collapse faster than anyone predicted, which in turn will cause sea levels to rise faster than anyone predicted.”

... 

The clip begins again and I watch in awe as a section of the Jakobshavn Glacier half the size of all Miami falls into the sea.

“Greenland is currently calving chunks of ice so massive they produce earthquakes up to six and seven on the Richter scale,” Hal says as the city of ice breaks apart. “There was not much noticeable ice melt before the nineties. But now it accelerates every year, exceeding all predictions. It will likely cause a pulse of meltwater into the oceans.”

Topic: Paleoclimate

Study shows three abrupt pulses of CO2 during last deglaciation. Oct. 29, 2014. The Keeling Curve. Scripps Institute of Oceanography, UCSD.

"the natural carbon cycle can change a lot faster than was previously thought – and we don’t know all of the mechanisms that caused that rapid change"

Temperature. John Baez. Oct. 2006.


Scientific articles:

A heated mirror for future climate. Richard Alley, Science. April 8, 2016.
Richard B. Alley, Department of Geosciences and Earth and Environmental Systems Institute, Pennsylvania State University

Summary: Climate has always changed naturally, and this is not good news when contemplating a human-forced future. The natural responses have been as large as, or larger than, those simulated by leading models for shorter time scales, with major biological and physical impacts. The possible effects of rapid carbon dioxide (CO2) release may be clearest from the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) about 55.9 million years ago, when a large, natural CO2 release drove strong warming that caused amplifying feedbacks, dwarfing of large animals, ecosystem disruptions, soil degradation, water-cycle shifts, and other major changes (see the figure). The climatic changes during the PETM occurred over longer time scales than those of anthropogenic climate change. The impacts of the latter may thus be even more severe.

Topic: Climate Change Economics

Stanford researchers' calculations reveal higher-than-expected global economic cost of climate change. Oct 21, 2015. Stanford News.

Taking property rights seriously: the case of climate change. Jonathan Adler. Scholarly Commons. 2009.

Topic: Oil

Report Shows The Oil Industry Benefits From $5.3 Trillion in Subsidies Annually. PoliticusUSA. Jun 9, 2015.


The implications of the declining energy return on investment of oil production. David Murphy, Royal Society. Dec 2013.

Topic: China

China’s Communist-Capitalist ecological apocalypse. Richard Smith. real-world economics review.

Abstract
This article seeks to explain why China’s evironmental crisis is so horrific, so much worse that “normal” capitalism most everywhere else, and why the government is incapable of suppressing pollution even from its own industries. I begin with an overview of the current state of China’s environment: its polluted air, waters, farmland, and the proximate causes: overproduction, overdevelopment, profligate resource consumption, uncontrolled dumping and venting of pollutants. I then discuss the political-economic drivers and enablers of this destruction, the dynamics and contradictions of China’s hybrid economy, noting how market reforms have compouned the irrationalities of the old bureaucratic collectivist system with the irrationalities of capitalism resulting in a diabolically ruinous “miracle” economy. I conclude with a précis of the emergency steps the country will have to take to take to brake the drive to socio-ecological collapse, with dire implications for us all.

Topic: Clean Energy

first published April 2017; updated 2020

Morneau budget is down payment on clean energy “dream home”. Clare Demerse, Clean Energy Canada. March 22, 2016.

Is Vaclav Smil a Pessimist or Voice of Uncomfortable Truths? Tracy Durning, Huffington Post. Jun 1, 2015.

EPA: Building solar panels makes global warming worse:
Solar panels increased emissions of a gas 17,200 times more potent than CO2. Andrew Follett, The Daily Caller. Mar, 1, 2017.


The dark side of renewable energy. Liu Hongqiao, earth journalism network. Aug. 25, 2016.

Rare earth metals, hard-to-find materials, with unfamiliar names such as lanthanum, neodymium and europium, are used in wind and solar energy projects, but dwindling supplies could hinder a roll-out of low carbon technologies and slow China's shift away from coal power. 

These compounds, which are highly toxic when mined and processed, also take a heavy environmental toll on soil and water, posing a conundrum for policymakers in China, the world’s biggest producer and consumer of rare earths. 

Confidence in 100% RE plans is poorly justified and may be dangerous. J. M. Korhonen. Jun. 21, 2017.

The recent publication of an unprecedented critique against the so-called “WWS” 100% renewable energy (RE) scenario has re-ignited the debate about the feasibility of renewable only energy scenarios in the United States and abroad. This is a long-overdue debate the world sorely needs, and everyone who has the slightest interest in climate change mitigation should pay careful attention. At stake is nothing less than whether or not our climate policy measures are based on sound science or pie-in-the-sky optimism. 

As many of the critics of 100% RE plans – myself included – have repeatedly pointed out, the problem here is not that 100% RE plans are being developed. We definitively need research that tries to solve the issues related to large-scale deployment of renewable energy sources, and it is a very good thing that such plans are made. Even if the plans themselves never come to fruition, their existence serves to increase the ambition level of other plans and policy proposals; and if it turns out that we can power the planet with nothing else but renewable energy yet limit the environmental and social damages to an acceptable level, I believe we should do so. 

But the burden of proof lies with those who assert that we definitely do not need certain solutions, usually nuclear energy and carbon capture and storage. At this moment, no country on Earth has managed to decarbonize its economy even close to the extent required by climate science. Despite encouraging progress of renewable energy sources, the “new” renewables that would have to shoulder most of the burden in renewable-only decarbonization plans are still a minor fraction of the world’s total energy supply.

A globalised solar-powered future is wholly unrealistic – and our economy is the reason why. Alf Hornborg, The Conversation. Sept. 6, 2019.


Huge Global Study Just Smashed One of The Last Major Arguments Against Renewables. David Nield, Science Alert. March 31, 2019.

Pumped-hydro is one of the best technologies we have for storing intermittent renewable energy, such as solar power, which means these sites could act as giant batteries, helping to support cheap, fully renewable power grids.

The Limits of Clean Energy. Jason Hickel. Foreign Policy. Sept. 6, 2019.

If the world isn’t careful, renewable energy could become as destructive as fossil fuels.

Topic: Biofuels

New Study Warns Biofuels May Be Worse for Climate Than Gas. Nadia Prupis, Common Dreams. Aug. 26, 2016.

When taking farmland and crop growth into account, the plant-based energy may not be all that carbon-neutral, study says.

Topic: Fossil Fuels

Externalities of and subsidies for coal. Zachary Shahan, CleanTechnica. Feb. 7, 2013.
(with links to other sources of info on coal subsidies)

Oil subsidies and natural gas subsidies - subsidies for the big boys. Zachary Shahan, CleanTechnica. Feb. 7, 2013.

UK has biggest fossil fuel subsidies in the EU, finds commission. Damian Carrington, Guardian. Jan. 23, 2019.

Subsidies for coal, oil and gas are not falling despite EU pledges to tackle climate change

The myth of clean natural gas. Ryan Cooper, The Week. July 18, 2018.

The rise of fracking has transformed America's fossil fuels sector. With fracked oil and natural gas, the United States has once again become one of the world's top energy producers, nearly matching Saudi Arabia and Russia. 

Natural gas in particular has gotten wide attention, in part because it is much more carbon-efficient than coal when burned to produce electricity. The slogan was that it could serve as a "bridge fuel" between dirty coal and clean renewables — and thus fight climate change, at least relative to continuing reliance on coal. 

It's increasingly clear, however, that natural gas is already nearly past its point of maximum usefulness. It should simply be phased out as soon as possible — as soon as coal is gone, it should be next on the chopping block, if not right beside.

Feature Reference Articles #6

Uncivilization. The Dark Mountain Manifesto.

Walking on Lava 

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilisation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Those who witness extreme social collapse at first hand seldom describe any deep revelation about the truths of human existence. What they do mention, if asked, is their surprise at how easy it is to die. 

The pattern of ordinary life, in which so much stays the same from one day to the next, disguises the fragility of its fabric. How many of our activities are made possible by the impression of stability that pattern gives? So long as it repeats, or varies steadily enough, we are able to plan for tomorrow as if all the things we rely on and don’t think about too carefully will still be there. When the pattern is broken, by civil war or natural disaster or the smaller-scale tragedies that tear at its fabric, many of those activities become impossible or meaningless, while simply meeting needs we once took for granted may occupy much of our lives. 

What war correspondents and relief workers report is not only the fragility of the fabric, but the speed with which it can unravel. As we write this, no one can say with certainty where the unravelling of the financial and commercial fabric of our economies will end. Meanwhile, beyond the cities, unchecked industrial exploitation frays the material basis of life in many parts of the world, and pulls at the ecological systems which sustain it. 

Precarious as this moment may be, however, an awareness of the fragility of what we call civilisation is nothing new. ‘Few men realise,’ wrote Joseph Conrad in 1896, ‘that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings.’ Conrad’s writings exposed the civilisation exported by European imperialists to be little more than a comforting illusion, not only in the dark, unconquerable heart of Africa, but in the whited sepulchres of their capital cities. The inhabitants of that civilisation believed ‘blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion,’ but their confidence could be maintained only by the seeming solidity of the crowd of like-minded believers surrounding them. Outside the walls, the wild remained as close to the surface as blood under skin, though the city-dweller was no longer equipped to face it directly. 

Bertrand Russell caught this vein in Conrad’s worldview, suggesting that the novelist ‘thought of civilised and morally tolerable human life as a dangerous walk on a thin crust of barely cooled lava which at any moment might break and let the unwary sink into fiery depths.’ What both Russell and Conrad were getting at was a simple fact which any historian could confirm: human civilisation is an intensely fragile construction. It is built on little more than belief: belief in the rightness of its values; belief in the strength of its system of law and order; belief in its currency; above all, perhaps, belief in its future. 

Once that belief begins to crumble, the collapse of a civilisation may become unstoppable. That civilisations fall, sooner or later, is as much a law of history as gravity is a law of physics. What remains after the fall is a wild mixture of cultural debris, confused and angry people whose certainties have betrayed them, and those forces which were always there, deeper than the foundations of the city walls: the desire to survive and the desire for meaning.

It is, it seems, our civilisation’s turn to experience the inrush of the savage and the unseen; our turn to be brought up short by contact with untamed reality. There is a fall coming. We live in an age in which familiar restraints are being kicked away, and foundations snatched from under us. After a quarter century of complacency, in which we were invited to believe in bubbles that would never burst, prices that would never fall, the end of history, the crude repackaging of the triumphalism of Conrad’s Victorian twilight — Hubris has been introduced to Nemesis. Now a familiar human story is being played out. It is the story of an empire corroding from within. It is the story of a people who believed, for a long time, that their actions did not have consequences. It is the story of how that people will cope with the crumbling of their own myth. It is our story. 

This time, the crumbling empire is the unassailable global economy, and the brave new world of consumer democracy being forged worldwide in its name. Upon the indestructibility of this edifice we have pinned the hopes of this latest phase of our civilisation. Now, its failure and fallibility exposed, the world’s elites are scrabbling frantically to buoy up an economic machine which, for decades, they told us needed little restraint, for restraint would be its undoing. Uncountable sums of money are being funnelled upwards in order to prevent an uncontrolled explosion. The machine is stuttering and the engineers are in panic. They are wondering if perhaps they do not understand it as well as they imagined. They are wondering whether they are controlling it at all or whether, perhaps, it is controlling them. 

Increasingly, people are restless. The engineers group themselves into competing teams, but neither side seems to know what to do, and neither seems much different from the other. Around the world, discontent can be heard. The extremists are grinding their knives and moving in as the machine’s coughing and stuttering exposes the inadequacies of the political oligarchies who claimed to have everything in hand. Old gods are rearing their heads, and old answers: revolution, war, ethnic strife. Politics as we have known it totters, like the machine it was built to sustain. In its place could easily arise something more elemental, with a dark heart. 

As the financial wizards lose their powers of levitation, as the politicians and economists struggle to conjure new explanations, it starts to dawn on us that behind the curtain, at the heart of the Emerald City, sits not the benign and omnipotent invisible hand we had been promised, but something else entirely. Something responsible for what Marx, writing not so long before Conrad, cast as the ‘everlasting uncertainty and anguish’ of the ‘bourgeois epoch’; a time in which ‘all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.’ Draw back the curtain, follow the tireless motion of cogs and wheels back to its source, and you will find the engine driving our civilisation: the myth of progress. 

The myth of progress is to us what the myth of god-given warrior prowess was to the Romans, or the myth of eternal salvation was to the conquistadors: without it, our efforts cannot be sustained. Onto the root stock of Western Christianity, the Enlightenment at its most optimistic grafted a vision of an Earthly paradise, towards which human effort guided by calculative reason could take us. Following this guidance, each generation will live a better life than the life of those that went before it. History becomes an escalator, and the only way is up. On the top floor is human perfection. It is important that this should remain just out of reach in order to sustain the sensation of motion. 

Recent history, however, has given this mechanism something of a battering. The past century too often threatened a descent into hell, rather than the promised heaven on Earth. Even within the prosperous and liberal societies of the West progress has, in many ways, failed to deliver the goods. Today’s generation are demonstrably less content, and consequently less optimistic, than those that went before. They work longer hours, with less security, and less chance of leaving behind the social background into which they were born. They fear crime, social breakdown, overdevelopment, environmental collapse. They do not believe that the future will be better than the past. Individually, they are less constrained by class and convention than their parents or grandparents, but more constrained by law, surveillance, state proscription and personal debt. Their physical health is better, their mental health more fragile. Nobody knows what is coming. Nobody wants to look. 

Most significantly of all, there is an underlying darkness at the root of everything we have built. Outside the cities, beyond the blurring edges of our civilisation, at the mercy of the machine but not under its control, lies something that neither Marx nor Conrad, Caesar nor Hume, Thatcher nor Lenin ever really understood. Something that Western civilisation — which has set the terms for global civilisation—was never capable of understanding, because to understand it would be to undermine, fatally, the myth of that civilisation. Something upon which that thin crust of lava is balanced; which feeds the machine and all the people who run it, and which they have all trained themselves not to see.

The myth of progress is founded on the myth of nature. The first tells us that we are destined for greatness; the second tells us that greatness is cost-free. Each is intimately bound up with the other. Both tell us that we are apart from the world; that we began grunting in the primeval swamps, as a humble part of something called ‘nature’, which we have now triumphantly subdued. The very fact that we have a word for ‘nature’ is evidence that we do not regard ourselves as part of it. Indeed, our separation from it is a myth integral to the triumph of our civilisation. We are, we tell ourselves, the only species ever to have attacked nature and won. In this, our unique glory is contained. 

Outside the citadels of self-congratulation, lone voices have cried out against this infantile version of the human story for centuries, but it is only in the last few decades that its inaccuracy has become laughably apparent. We are the first generations to grow up surrounded by evidence that our attempt to separate ourselves from ‘nature’ has been a grim failure, proof not of our genius but our hubris. The attempt to sever the hand from the body has endangered the ‘progress’ we hold so dear, and it has endangered much of ‘nature’ too. The resulting upheaval underlies the crisis we now face. 

We imagined ourselves isolated from the source of our existence. The fallout from this imaginative error is all around us: a quarter of the world’s mammals are threatened with imminent extinction; an acre and a half of rainforest is felled every second; 75% of the world’s fish stocks are on the verge of collapse; humanity consumes 25% more of the world’s natural ‘products’ than the Earth can replace — a figure predicted to rise to 80% by mid-century. Even through the deadening lens of statistics, we can glimpse the violence to which our myths have driven us. 

And over it all looms runaway climate change. Climate change, which threatens to render all human projects irrelevant; which presents us with detailed evidence of our lack of understanding of the world we inhabit while, at the same time, demonstrating that we are still entirely reliant upon it. Climate change, which highlights in painful colour the head-on crash between civilisation and ‘nature’; which makes plain, more effectively than any carefully constructed argument or optimistically defiant protest, how the machine’s need for permanent growth will require us to destroy ourselves in its name. Climate change, which brings home at last our ultimate powerlessness. 

These are the facts, or some of them. Yet facts never tell the whole story. (‘Facts’, Conrad wrote, in Lord Jim, ‘as if facts could prove anything.’) The facts of environmental crisis we hear so much about often conceal as much as they expose. We hear daily about the impacts of our activities on ‘the environment’ (like ‘nature’, this is an expression which distances us from the reality of our situation). Daily we hear, too, of the many ‘solutions’ to these problems: solutions which usually involve the necessity of urgent political agreement and a judicious application of human technological genius. 

Things may be changing, runs the narrative, but there is nothing we cannot deal with here, folks. We perhaps need to move faster, more urgently. Certainly we need to accelerate the pace of research and development. We accept that we must become more ‘sustainable’. But everything will be fine. There will still be growth, there will still be progress: these things will continue, because they have to continue, so they cannot do anything but continue. There is nothing to see here. Everything will be fine. 

* 

We do not believe that everything will be fine. We are not even sure, based on current definitions of progress and improvement, that we want it to be. Of all humanity’s delusions of difference, of its separation from and superiority to the living world which surrounds it, one distinction holds up better than most: we may well be the first species capable of effectively eliminating life on Earth. This is a hypothesis we seem intent on putting to the test. We are already responsible for denuding the world of much of its richness, magnificence, beauty, colour and magic, and we show no sign of slowing down.  

For a very long time, we imagined that ‘nature’ was something that happened elsewhere. The damage we did to it might be regrettable, but needed to be weighed against the benefits here and now. And in the worst case scenario, there would always be some kind of Plan B. Perhaps we would make for the moon, where we could survive in lunar colonies under giant bubbles as we planned our expansion across the galaxy. 

But there is no Plan B and the bubble, it turns out, is where we have been living all the while. The bubble is that delusion of isolation under which we have laboured for so long. The bubble has cut us off from life on the only planet we have, or are ever likely to have. The bubble is civilisation. 

Consider the structures on which that bubble has been built. Its foundations are geological: coal, oil, gas — millions upon millions of years of ancient sunlight, dragged from the depths of the planet and burned with abandon. On this base, the structure stands. Move upwards, and you pass through a jumble of supporting horrors: battery chicken sheds; industrial abattoirs; burning forests; beam-trawled ocean floors; dynamited reefs; hollowed-out mountains; wasted soil. Finally, on top of all these unseen layers, you reach the well-tended surface where you and I stand: unaware, or uninterested, in what goes on beneath us; demanding that the authorities keep us in the manner to which we have been accustomed; occasionally feeling twinges of guilt that lead us to buy organic chickens or locally-produced lettuces; yet for the most part glutted, but not sated, on the fruits of the horrors on which our lifestyles depend. 

We are the first generations born into a new and unprecedented age — the age of ecocide. To name it thus is not to presume the outcome, but simply to describe a process which is underway. The ground, the sea, the air, the elemental backdrops to our existence — all these our economics has taken for granted, to be used as a bottomless pit, endlessly able to dilute and disperse the tailings of our extraction, production, consumption. The sheer scale of the sky or the weight of a swollen river makes it hard to imagine that creatures as flimsy as you and I could do that much damage. Philip Larkin gave voice to this attitude, and the creeping, worrying end of it in his poem Going, Going:

Things are tougher than we are, just
As earth will always respond
However we mess it about;
Chuck filth in the sea, if you must:
The tides will be clean beyond.
– But what do I feel now? Doubt? 

Nearly forty years on from Larkin’s words, doubt is what all of us seem to feel, all of the time. Too much filth has been chucked in the sea and into the soil and into the atmosphere to make any other feeling sensible. The doubt, and the facts, have paved the way for a worldwide movement of environmental politics, which aimed, at least in its early, raw form, to challenge the myths of development and progress head-on. But time has not been kind to the greens. Today’s environmentalists are more likely to be found at corporate conferences hymning the virtues of ‘sustainability’ and ‘ethical consumption’ than doing anything as naive as questioning the intrinsic values of civilisation. 

Capitalism has absorbed the greens, as it absorbs so many challenges to its ascendancy. A radical challenge to the human machine has been transformed into yet another opportunity for shopping. 

‘Denial’ is a hot word, heavy with connotations. When it is used to brand the remaining rump of climate change sceptics, they object noisily to the association with those who would rewrite the history of the Holocaust. Yet the focus on this dwindling group may serve as a distraction from a far larger form of denial, in its psychoanalytic sense. Freud wrote of the inability of people to hear things which did not fit with the way they saw themselves and the world. We put ourselves through all kinds of inner contortions, rather than look plainly at those things which challenge our fundamental understanding of the world. 

Today, humanity is up to its neck in denial about what it has built, what it has become — and what it is in for. Ecological and economic collapse unfold before us and, if we acknowledge them at all, we act as if this were a temporary problem, a technical glitch. 

Centuries of hubris block our ears like wax plugs; we cannot hear the message which reality is screaming at us. For all our doubts and discontents, we are still wired to an idea of history in which the future will be an upgraded version of the present. The assumption remains that things must continue in their current direction: the sense of crisis only smudges the meaning of that ‘must’. No longer a natural inevitability, it becomes an urgent necessity: we must find a way to go on having supermarkets and superhighways. We cannot contemplate the alternative. 

And so we find ourselves, all of us together, poised trembling on the edge of a change so massive that we have no way of gauging it. None of us knows where to look, but all of us know not to look down. Secretly, we all think we are doomed: even the politicians think this; even the environmentalists. Some of us deal with it by going shopping. Some deal with it by hoping it is true. Some give up in despair. Some work frantically to try and fend off the coming storm. 

Our question is: what would happen if we looked down? Would it be as bad as we imagine? What might we see? Could it even be good for us? 

We believe it is time to look down.

State of the Species. Charles C. Mann, Orion Magazine. 2012.
excerpt:

By 2050, demographers predict, as many as 10 billion human beings will walk the earth, 3 billion more than today. Not only will more people exist than ever before, they will be richer than ever before. In the last three decades hundreds of millions in China, India, and other formerly poor places have lifted themselves from destitution—arguably the most important, and certainly the most heartening, accomplishment of our time. Yet, like all human enterprises, this great success will pose great difficulties.

In the past, rising incomes have invariably prompted rising demand for goods and services. Billions more jobs, homes, cars, fancy electronics—these are things the newly prosperous will want. (Why shouldn’t they?) But the greatest challenge may be the most basic of all: feeding these extra mouths. To agronomists, the prospect is sobering. The newly affluent will not want their ancestors’ gruel. Instead they will ask for pork and beef and lamb. Salmon will sizzle on their outdoor grills. In winter, they will want strawberries, like people in New York and London, and clean bibb lettuce from hydroponic gardens.

All of these, each and every one, require vastly more resources to produce than simple peasant agriculture. Already 35 percent of the world’s grain harvest is used to feed livestock. The process is terribly inefficient: between seven and ten kilograms of grain are required to produce one kilogram of beef. Not only will the world’s farmers have to produce enough wheat and maize to feed 3 billion more people, they will have to produce enough to give them all hamburgers and steaks. Given present patterns of food consumption, economists believe, we will need to produce about 40 percent more grain in 2050 than we do today.

How can we provide these things for all these new people? That is only part of the question. The full question is: How can we provide them without wrecking the natural systems on which all depend?

Scientists, activists, and politicians have proposed many solutions, each from a different ideological and moral perspective. Some argue that we must drastically throttle industrial civilization. (Stop energy-intensive, chemical-based farming today! Eliminate fossil fuels to halt climate change!) Others claim that only intense exploitation of scientific knowledge can save us. (Plant super-productive, genetically modified crops now! Switch to nuclear power to halt climate change!) No matter which course is chosen, though, it will require radical, large-scale transformations in the human enterprise—a daunting, hideously expensive task. 

Worse, the ship is too large to turn quickly. The world’s food supply cannot be decoupled rapidly from industrial agriculture, if that is seen as the answer. Aquifers cannot be recharged with a snap of the fingers. If the high-tech route is chosen, genetically modified crops cannot be bred and tested overnight. Similarly, carbon-sequestration techniques and nuclear power plants cannot be deployed instantly. Changes must be planned and executed decades in advance of the usual signals of crisis, but that’s like asking healthy, happy sixteen-year-olds to write living wills. 

Not only is the task daunting, it’s strange. In the name of nature, we are asking human beings to do something deeply unnatural, something no other species has ever done or could ever do: constrain its own growth (at least in some ways). Zebra mussels in the Great Lakes, brown tree snakes in Guam, water hyacinth in African rivers, gypsy moths in the northeastern U.S., rabbits in Australia, Burmese pythons in Florida—all these successful species have overrun their environments, heedlessly wiping out other creatures. Like Gause’s protozoans, they are racing to find the edges of their petri dish. Not one has voluntarily turned back. Now we are asking Homo sapiensto fence itself in.

What a peculiar thing to ask! Economists like to talk about the “discount rate,” which is their term for preferring a bird in hand today over two in the bush tomorrow. The term sums up part of our human nature as well. Evolving in small, constantly moving bands, we are as hard-wired to focus on the immediate and local over the long-term and faraway as we are to prefer parklike savannas to deep dark forests. Thus, we care more about the broken stoplight up the street today than conditions next year in Croatia, Cambodia, or the Congo. Rightly so, evolutionists point out: Americans are far more likely to be killed at that stoplight today than in the Congo next year. Yet here we are asking governments to focus on potential planetary boundaries that may not be reached for decades. Given the discount rate, nothing could be more understandable than the U.S. Congress’s failure to grapple with, say, climate change. From this perspective, is there any reason to imagine that Homo sapiens, unlike mussels, snakes, and moths, can exempt itself from the natural fate of all successful species?

To biologists like Margulis, who spend their careers arguing that humans are simply part of the natural order, the answer should be clear. All life is similar at base. All species seek without pause to make more of themselves—that is their goal. By multiplying till we reach our maximum possible numbers, even as we take out much of the planet, we are fulfilling our destiny. 

From this vantage, the answer to the question whether we are doomed to destroy ourselves is yes. It should be obvious.

...

from comments:

STEVE BREMNER:

Excellent piece. I don’t have much faith in our collective ability to adjust in time to the impending collapse of civilization. Individually and in pockets there are those who see the need to adjust, but unfortunately we’re not all on board and the Sarah Palins and the James Inhofes seem to hold sway over policy in this world. 

MARTIN:

A great and masterful essay, brilliant and needing to be read – but then it falls off the rails, as is typical of even the best of our social critics. 

Mann is dead-on and eloquent in his depiction of our state of inter-locking crises, but then he goes all hope and change and look at how far we have come. Sure, there are identity politics achievements, and nice safer lives for the boomers and the Prius-drivers, but there are so many real, freely available, undeniable markers of a immovable and fully corrupt supersystem. 

Look at the graph of CO2 in the atmosphere – notice a trend? Look at the Gini coefficient for the US- see the direction? Has Mann seen the official, growing, shameful wealth disparity between white and black Americans, let alone the global disparities? Can he appreciate the graph of the ruined lives of the global poor, even before the states of our interdependent ecosystems start really to seize? 

Where is there a single indication that any of the insitutions governing human lives have even the capacity to shift course from the extraction of resources anywhere in the globe to feed the energy needs of the well-to-do? 

Why be so top-notch in drawing the outlines our common predicament, and then proffer some pie-in-the-sky endpiece that flies in the face of all that we can observe? 

Still, Mann’s essay is a treasure, a lasting way to look at our lives with new artistic metaphors, and it deserves a medal or two – but only the bravest can really see where the data lie. 

RON HOFBAUER:

This is fine and interesting read that but I think the scientific objectivity of the piece is slowly lost as the story gets closer to the present era. ... It seems to me that Mr. Mann tries to put an optimistic spin on homo sapiens society at the end of the piece that I don’t believe is justified. 

ROBERT:

I have to agree with Martin’s comment. However clear-thinking when it comes to the past, Mr Mann is still unable to stop outside the dominant narrative which says that our society is the best and most moral ever and things are only getting better. 

“Since the Second World War, however, rates of violent death have fallen to the lowest levels in known history. Today, the average person is far less likely to be slain by another member of the species than ever before”an extraordinary transformation that has occurred, almost unheralded, in the lifetime of many of the people reading this article.” 

I’ve heard this claim before. Does that include deaths in car accidents? Deaths due to industrial pollution? Deaths due to political despotism? All are forms of violent death caused by human beings, albeit not in war. 

Still, it is nice to think that the human race is flexible enough to snatch survival from the jaws of extinction. I guess some of us alive today will find out the answer. 

TOMMACG:

A very good, engaging piece. I was all with him, particularly on the changes wrought by symbolic culture and agriculture, until the end, when he makes entirely dubious assertions. ... 

Also, his liberal championing of Progress is somewhat nauseating. The figures on declining violence are dubious at best, relying on relative rather than absolute statistics (Does Mann not count human lives as having equal worth? Lets not forget how bloody the 20th century was), and completely externalising violence on the natural world.

Extinction is the end-game. Collapse of Industrial Civilization. Dec. 10, 2016.

Civilizations are living organisms striving to survive and develop through predictable stages of birth, growth, maturation, decline and death. An often overlooked factor in the success or failure of civilizations are cultural memes—the knowledge, beliefs, and behaviors passed down from generation to generation. Cultural memes are a much more significant driver of human evolution than genetic evolution. Entire civilizations have been weeded out when their belief system proved maladaptive to a changing environment. One such cultural meme holding sway over today’s governments, institutions, and society is our economic system of capitalism. The pillars of capitalism represent a belief system so ingrained in today’s culture that they form a sort of cargo cult amongst its adherents. ...

The tenets of capitalism are ritually followed in the proclaimed belief that “a rising tide lifts all boats”, i.e. so-called improvements in the general economy will benefit all participants in that economy. Centuries of unbridled capitalism have demonstrated beyond any doubt that it does not lift all boats. A new study finds that half of Americans are “shut off from economic growth”. The rules of the game are so stacked against the masses that this week a professor said“only all-out thermonuclear war might fundamentally reset the existing distribution of resources.” Capitalism’s imperative for expansion, growing profit levels, and efficiency has ultimately dehumanized our culture. Not even when our basic life support systems are being torn asunder do the vast majority question the path we are on. We are all a captive audience to the system and those few dissident voices are snuffed out under the wheels of “progress”. 

... 

Capitalism’s constant impetus to shift costs, risks, and burdens off industry and onto the environment and society carries on under the guise of “being more competitive”. It’s a way of externalizing costs to maximize profit and if these costs were truly taken into account, none of the world’s top industries would be profitable (Interestingly, the link to this study has been scrubbed from the internet). It’s the height of magical thinking to put so much faith in some mystical “invisible hand of the free market” to solve existential threats such as an ever-widening wealth gap and the wholesale destruction of planetary life-support systems. There is no benevolent “invisible hand” turning individual self-interest into the common good. The primary mandate of capitalism is to protect and grow capital. The “invisible hand” is just a bunch of people scrambling to make as much money as possible, not caring or oblivious to those they hurt in the process. Fuck the invisible hand of the market. The invisible hand of mother nature will punish those who squander Earth’s rich but finite resources. 

It’s been clear for some time that we have past the point of no return, triggering multiple tipping points in Earth’s living systems. New findings are continually confirming scientists’ worst nightmares. 

... 

The current 6th mass extinction is happening orders of magnitude faster due to a multitude of factors including deforestation, habitat fragmentation, chemical pollution, poaching, etc., making this current disaster very unique in Earth’s history:
The team of geologists and biologists say that our current extinction crisis is unique in Earth’s history due to four characteristics: the spread of non-native species around the world; a single species (us) taking over a significant percentage of the world’s primary production; human actions increasingly directing evolution; and the rise of something called the technosphere. 

Perhaps the fate of humans was written in stone once we stood upright and developed tools. To a large degree, modern technology has been an expression of the energy-dense hydrocarbon fuels we discovered and are not willingly giving up anytime soon. Once fossil fuels ignited the Industrial Revolution and the Haber–Bosch process unleashed the human population bomb, nothing could stop the deadly carbon consumption feedback loop, not even decades of scientific warnings.... 

We evolved to react to imminent dangers, not slow-rolling and seemingly invisible catastrophes as an unintended consequence of our cushy lifestyle. From lofty corporate boardrooms to the filthy streets of skid row, the mass of humanity is following the same biological script of overshoot and collapse seen in every organism from bacteria to reindeer herds. Fossil fuels only enabled the destruction to multiply a million-fold, culminating in one final and spectacular explosion of human activity that will leave the planet nearly barren for eons. 

Open-ended growth appears to be inherent in nature, all the way from the DNA to the arthropods to mammals, including humans. Open-ended growth is the psychology of a cancer cell. I am not sure I know of a species which has learnt how to limit its own growth. Unfortunately species which transcend their environmental resources can hardly survive – the final arbiter of the climate impasse will be nature itself. ~ Andrew Glikson, Earth and paleo-climate scientist, Australian National University 

The beauty and wonder of this planet is being trashed by a naked ape whose cleverness in tool-building has far outstripped his ability to handle it in any restrained or judicious manner.

... 

Climate change is simply a symptom of humans overshooting the planet’s carrying capacity. Free market ideologues are nearly always climate ‘skeptics’ because acknowledging the reality of human-induced climate change would be an admission that industry must be curtailed or controlled. Left-leaning people nearly always accept the science because it goes along with their criticisms of capitalism which externalizes social and environmental costs for the benefit of just a few at the top of the economic hierarchy. Thus we see parasitic Trump surrounding himself with right-wing, climate denying, fossil fuel corporatists and insiders who will be doing everything in their power to dismantle health and environmental regulations including privatizing social services which are barriers to capitalist expansion. 

To be blunt, our chance of developing a sustainable culture passed us by a long time ago. People will try to adapt until they cannot, and myths will be created to explain away harsh realities. A dystopic future in all its horrific glory has arrived: baked-in biospheric collapse, the inherent and irreconcilable contradictions of techno-capitalism, a dysfunctional political system unable to come to terms with root causes, and the cognitive dissonance of the masses blind to the bigger picture. Our numbers are not a safeguard from extinction.

Some thoughts on the winter solstice 2016. George Mobus, Question Everything.

A big part of the problem, however, is the difference between what they believe their interests are or should be, versus reality. Americans in particular have been sold on the concept of the “American Dream.” But so have so many other people around the world, pursuing material wealth in the belief that it brings happiness. It has simply never occurred to most people that wealth comes from converting natural resources into goods and services and that those come in limited supply. Thus, now that we have reached the limits imposed by reality, they simply cannot understand why they are denied the American dream. Worse yet in places like Syria and the whole MENA region, they cannot understand why they can't even try to attain something like the American dream. Not even their governments can tell them the truth. Mostly they themselves don't understand the situation. It has taken something like global warming to start physically changing the climate and weather patterns to finally get some leaders to recognize a little piece of the puzzle. 

Democracy in any form suffers from this one fundamental flaw. It depends entirely on the mentality of the populace — the whole populace. It depends on people being sufficiently smart that they can use critical thinking and logical reasoning along with possessing adequate knowledge about how reality works to be able to make informed decisions. There are likely to always be differences of opinion because of emotional attachments to world views that vary from culture to culture and ideology to ideology. As long as there is a forum (the political process) for working out differences amenably, and an intent on all parties' parts to do so in a peaceful manner, then democratic process has a chance to work. But as you think about it, when has that description of people ever been true?

I strongly believe that systems science can provide guidance toward creating a form of governance that would succeed in terms of providing for an acceptable level of welfare for the citizens. That welfare would be considerably less oriented toward physical wealth as we understand it today. But every citizen would have an opportunity to participate in meaningful work, helping to secure the social milieu against disturbing forces from outside, and being supported by the society in terms of assurance of physical needs and comfort.

Problem one is that this is only feasible for a significantly smaller population, one that is not depleting natural resources faster than the renewable ones can be renewed and the non-renewable ones can be recycled. The current population of 7+ billion people on the planet is not just non-sustainable, it alone (never mind continued growth) will kill the planet's ability to supply resources to humans and to most other members of the biosphere. How we get down to a sustainable population is the continuing problem being discussed in population overload circles. To date, no clear consensus has emerged, except that the likelihood of supporting 7-10 billion people is understood to be irrational.  The most likely scenario for humanity in the near term is a planet-wide population crash and an evolutionary bottleneck event. This would be a self-correcting aspect of the population problem. But obviously a very brutal solution. 

Problem number two is that even if we could get the population down to a supportable number, the physical environment, in particular the availability of more natural resources and the dramatic changes in climate, are going to provide significant hurdles to get over. Future human beings are going to face incredible obstacles in forming any kind of reasonable civilization, even at a tribal level. They will not have the resources, especially high power energy, to do the work needed to build and sustain civilized living conditions. 

Problem number three involves preserving all or most of the hard-won knowledge about the world that science has accumulated to date. Not all of this knowledge would be immediately useful to future humans but it would serve as a reminder of the mistakes our current species have made (I imagine preserving the parable of the iPhone as a cautionary tale warning of overzealous technology advances). It might also serve as inspiration for eventually building a reasonable civilization. My own thoughts along these lines is that what will be needed is a way to encode knowledge into a preservable medium, but essentially compressing the expanded knowledge in all fields into a form (message) that could be transmitted through the ages and used to recover all of the detailed knowledge when it becomes possible (and I have to believe it will in some distant future time). I believe that knowledge of systems science is exactly that compressed form of knowledge for everything. If systemness is the fundamental organizing principle of the Universe, then it should be possible to rebuild the specific sciences by applying systems thinking to the phenomena that future humans will certainly witness.

Problem number four, then, is simply providing strategies, tactics, and logistics to people who grasp reality well enough to follow through so they can survive in the future drastically different world they will occupy.

The end of the beginning of the end. Question Everything. Mar 20, 2017.

The elections are over. The new president is installed and has already brought chaos to the world, not just the US. History may not repeat itself exactly, but it does prove we humans have gotten into cycles of the same stupid mistakes and for all of history since the first civilizations of Mesopotamia, and, indeed, all other parts of the world where civilizations arose, humans have been repeating the same pattern of expansion, complexification, and resource depletion to the point of exhausting their source of wealth. And the rulers invariably respond to the unrest in the ways we are seeing today. 

Some, like Assad, who were already in power when the s**t hit the fan, respond with brutal crackdowns on rebelling populations. Others like Trump are put in power by promises to fix what is wrong with the status quo, but turn very quickly to trying (and most often succeeding) to subdue the potential unruly crowds by continuing promises to fix their lives, all the while undercutting their meager sources of income or wealth. Look at the repeal of Obamacare and replacement with a plan that is widely recognized as greatly inferior - except for the already rich. 

The old saying goes, "the people get the government they deserve." And I think there is a great deal of truth to this. We have become a nation of profoundly ignorant people - ignorant, tending toward stupid, and incredibly selfish, narcissistic. When somebody pops up and promises to make the world the way it was when they were "happy", well this is what we get. 

As the days get longer the pressure will be building toward an all out breakdown in civil society. As millions lose their healthcare, or unemployment (the real unemployment) rises when good jobs were supposed to be increasing, somebody is going to wise up and call bulls**t on the current government. I expect the same to happen when Brexit produces more hardships or when the far right parties in Europe gain control and proceed to screw up royally. 

The problem is that even if some of, say for example, Trump's prescriptions were correct with respect to the intended, and promised outcomes, he would still fail because his predecessors (and at all levels of government and business) have left an unfixable system. The sheer complexity of the modern state, along with the sheer lack of consciousness and knowledge of the general governor, ensures massive failures as have happened so many times throughout history. Nothing fundamental has changed in this pattern since the days of old. Only now the collapse of civilization is global. And there is no sanctuary for those who seek to flee. Look at the plight of the Syrian refugees as they struggle to find places in countries that are on the brink of collapse themselves (hint: Greece). 

Several thoughtful people I know who have been concerned about the future are now voicing a kind of despair for the future. The evidence for the build up to collapse is now so evident that anyone with half a brain and a bit of knowledge about the history of civilizations can see the end in sight. 

On the other hand, and to leave you on a high note, the collapse of the current cultural system (neoliberal capitalism, profit maximization, revolving debt financing, the impacts on the education system, etc.) is a good thing. When I say unfixable, I mean just that. Some systems are fixable, or adjustable so that they work better in time. This one we live in is neither. It is so full of positive feedback loops that reinforce destructive behaviors that there is very little that can be done to break out without that very act destroying the interlocking processes and thus, itself bringing about collapse. What we need to do is see the bright side of this. For one, it will significantly slow down the human-caused forcing of the climate (other natural feedbacks aside this will be a very positive development.) 

Once the rotten old system is debris it will be possible to reset human values (many of which are learned) and start fresh. We won't have the high tech gadgets to help us back to the kind of life many of us live now. But, so what. We will get a chance to start over, and hopefully do it better next time. At least that is my hope on this day of turning.

Reality 101: Some notes on tracking humanity's predicament. Karl Norrh. Sep. 10, 2016.

Our species faces a predicament: the inevitable decline of industrial civilization as we know it, and possible extinction. Decades ago, a small but growing group became aware of the situation and began to create ways to communicate it to the general public. An ‘energy descent’ literature appeared that has described it using terms like overshoot (Catton), the limits to growth (Meadows et al), a long emergency (Kunstler), catabolic collapse (Greer), die-off (Hanson) and peak everything (Heinberg), just to name a few. They faced a mass media which did not consider the news fit to print, and a public who so far has denied it outright.

Gradually most of the group recognized their effective quarantine as The Cassandra Complex. Cassandra was the legendary daughter of the king of Troy who warned her father not to allow the Trojan horse into the besieged city. She was under a double curse: that she always had to tell the truth, and that no one would ever believe her.

Still, some of the group who understand the situation continue trying to find ways to break through the denial and provide enough explanation of how the world really works so that those who can handle the information might begin to adapt their lives.

The Limits to Green Growth. Project Syndicate. 2016.

In recent years, the push to build a “green economy” that can deliver the world from continual environmental and economic crisis and usher in a new era of sustainable growth has been gathering force. But the push has been a source of unexpected controversy, with many predicting little more than business as usual with a coat of green paint. Will reconciling environmental and economic imperatives be harder than we think? 

In a word, yes. The mainstream perception is that the green economy will enable us to break free from our dependence on fossil fuels, without sacrificing growth. Many argue that the shift to a green economy can even spur new growth. But, as appealing as this idea is, it is not realistic, as we show in our new book Inside the Green Economy. 

To be sure, it is possible for a genuinely “green” economy to be prosperous. But the model that prevails today focuses on quick and easy solutions. Moreover, it reasserts the primacy of economics, thereby failing to recognize the depth of the transformation that is required. 

Instead of rethinking our economies with a view to adapting their functioning to environmental limits and imperatives, today’s green economy seeks to redefine nature, in order to adapt it to existing economic systems. We now attach a monetary value to nature and add it to our balance sheets, with the protection of “natural capital,” such as ecosystem services, offsetting environmental degradation, gauged by the global abstract currency of carbon metrics. New market-based mechanisms, such as the trading of biodiversity credits, exemplify this approach. None of this prevents the destruction of nature; it simply reorganizes that destruction along market lines. 

As a result of this narrow approach, current conceptions of the green economy have so many blind spots that the entire enterprise should be regarded as largely a matter of faith. The most powerful talisman is technological innovation, which justifies simply waiting for a cure-all invention to come along. But, though new ideas and innovations are obviously vital to address complex challenges, environmental or otherwise, they are neither automatic nor inevitable. 

Innovation, particularly technological innovation, is always shaped by its protagonists’ interests and activities, so it must be judged in its social, cultural, and environmental context. If the relevant actors are not working to champion transformative technologies, the results of innovation can reinforce the status quo, often by extending the life of products and systems that are not fit to address society’s needs. 

Consider the automotive industry. Though it produces increasingly fuel-efficient engines, it puts them in larger, more powerful, and heavier vehicles than ever before, eating up efficiency gains through the so-called “rebound effect.” And it faces the temptation to spend more energy learning to manipulate emissions readings, as Volkswagen did, than on developing genuinely “green” vehicles. 

Biofuels are not the answer, either. In fact, the use of biomass wreaks ecological and social havoc in developing economies, while de facto extending the lifetime of an obsolete combustion technology. 

Clearly, the automotive industry cannot be blindly trusted to spearhead the radical reorganization, away from private vehicles, that is needed in the transport sector. And that is exactly the point. If we are to decouple economic growth from energy consumption and achieve real resource efficiency in a world of nine billion, much less ensure justice for all, we cannot let the economy lead the way. 

Instead, we must view the green transformation as a political task. 

...

Can't stop, won't stop: 500 days of Trudeau's broken promises. James Wilt, DeSmog Canada. Feb. 10, 2017.

Reconcile with Indigenous peoples. Make elections fairer. Invest many more billions in public transit and green infrastructure. Take climate change seriously. 

Those are just a few of the things that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberal Party committed to in the lead-up to the 2015 election, offering up a fairly stark contrast to the decade of reign by Stephen Harper’s Conservatives. And on Oct. 19, 2015, almost seven million Canadians voted for that Liberal platform. In his victory speech, Trudeau spoke of “real change” and “sunny ways” and “positive politics.” 

Fast forward almost 500 days. 

Many major promises have been broken, and sentiments seemingly abandoned. Frankly, it’s getting rather difficult to keep up with the amount of backtracking and shapeshifting happening in Ottawa.

The Trumpocene: Darkness Gathers. Collapse of Industrial Civilization. Feb. 22, 2017.

With each passing day, the mental stability of our narcissistic, megalomaniacal president is increasingly being called into question by those unnerved from his erratic behavior. The unhinged press conferences, comically embarrassing meetings with world leaders, and uncensored tweets reveal just how illiterate, delusional, and divisive America’s first reality TV president truly is, and the consequences won’t be confined to the imaginary world of a television screen. The irony is that the very news media networks whom the president disparages on a daily basis were instrumental in getting him elected, allowing Trump’s circus to hog the headlines in an ‘issues free’ campaign. Trump received $1.9 billion in free media coverage, 190 times as much as he paid for while the major networks made tons of revenue off Trump’s theatrics. Driving this symbiotic relationship is the fierce competition for ratings determining the advertising revenue and bottom line of these corporate-owned news networks. The media exploited Trump’s sensationalist behavior for profit, helping to drive his campaign to the top of this money-grubbing pyramid scheme. We are, as Neil Postman mused, amusing ourselves to death. Most of these networks are now busy trying to contain the monster they helped create. The other great irony is that America is getting a taste of its own medicine after having meddled in other country’s elections for decades; the CIA was one of the early developers of cyber warfare and is one of the world’s most ruthless practitioners of it. 

Of the many Trump lies glossed over by corporate media, the most dangerous one is that anthropogenic climate change is a hoax. The Trump administration is riddled with like-minded Flat-Earthers bent on dismantling the EPA and stoking fossil fuel consumption. In Trumpland, alternative facts are as valid as any empirical evidence. Scientists are being muzzled and the masses are being gaslighted. Conspiracy theories, hearsay, and pure fantasy have replaced meaningful public discourse. We have a demagogue working to blind everyone to what scientists are telling us and our own eyes can see. A civilization which cannot discern the truth cannot make rational decisions for the future, let alone the present. Trump’s kleptocracy will flourish in such an environment while repeating the mantra, “It’s all about the American people.” 

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance” ~ Carl Sagan

...

What kind of world is going to support all this labor-saving, hi-tech gadgetry when its creators are too short-sighted to maintain the habitability of the planet for their own descendants? There is no deus ex machina to prevent catastrophic collapse of the oceans nor is there one to stop catastrophic climate change. Industrial civilization is a one-hit wonder for which there are no solutions that scale up to the mountain of problems it has created. Dealing with the environmental costs of fossil fuels is the classic “prisoner’s dilemma” whereby the incentive to cheat for short-term economic gain prevents the cooperation needed by everyone. The economic, legal, and moral framework to tackle climate change simply does not exist. The invisible hand of the “free market” has turned into the boot of environmental catastrophe.

...

A time is coming when what we do to Earth is completely overshadowed by what Earth does to us. We have already condemned the planet to an ice-free Arctic and no amount of techno-fixes will return it to its former state. Were humans to disappear today from the Earth, the after-effects of our massive fossil fuel binge would reverberate for aeons. The last time there was an ice-free Arctic was during the Eemian period 125,000 years ago at the height of the last major interglacial period, but the CO2 levels of today are much higher now and causing the climate to change at a rate that is 170 times that of natural forces with much more warming to come. According to a new study, manmade global warming is replicating conditions that triggered an abrupt sea level rise of several meters in the ocean around Antarctica some 15,000 years ago. The damage done is irreversible not only on a human timescale or a civilizational time scale, but a species timescale. The total global carbon dioxide emissions load from the onset of the industrial revolution is enough to push the next ice age back by 100,000 years and only deep geologic time will significantly remediate the chemistry of a CO2-spiked atmosphere. The same is true for ocean acidification. The natural process of continental rock weathering to neutralize all of the CO2 from human activity that is entering the oceans would take hundreds of thousands of years. Plankton blooms, a key part of the entire marine food web and the biological carbon pump, are being disrupted by warming, acidifying oceans. The Great Barrier Reef is expected to be completely dead within the next two decades and 98% of all reefs around the world gone by mid century. The latest research indicates ocean acidification is much worse for corals that previously thought. 

Manmade persistent organic pollutants (POPs) such as PCBs and flame retardants can be found in the most remote places on Earth such as the 36,000-foot-deep Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean where researchers tested crustaceans and found them to contain 50 times more POPs than crabs living in one of China’s most polluted rivers. Once these endocrine-disrupting compounds settle into the sediments, they can remain there for thousands of years before being disturbed and recirculated into the environment once again as a contaminant. Microplastics less than 5mm in size are ubiquitous in the environment, having been documented in the waters of both the Arctic and Antarctic and recently found on 73% of Britain’s beaches. 

The irrational ramblings of a demagogue won’t change a shifting earth laying waste to a once-rich ecosphere and grinding to dust the landmarks of modern man. Delusions and protestations have no bearing on the laws of chemistry and thermodynamics.

Predicaments lack solutions. Guy McPherson. Apr. 16, 2017.

One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.

~ Aldo Leopold

As “the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise,” I’m fed up with ridiculous “solutions.” Climate change is a predicament, not a problem. If there were a solution, I believe the people pulling the levers of industry would know about it. I don’t believe they enjoy the prospect of human extinction. 

Civilization is responsible for life-destroying, abrupt climate change. Turning off civilization kills us all faster. If this seems like a Catch-22, you’ve got it figured out.
I’m not suggesting that correctly identifying the predicament leads to a solution. It doesn’t. Predicaments don’t have solutions. 

As I’ve pointed out previously in this space, the exceedingly unlikely chance of there being a human on Earth in nine years will have that person being hungry, thirsty, lonely, and bathing in ionizing radiation. Every day will be more tenuous than the day before, as is already the case for most organisms on this planet. Habitat for human animals might return in a few million years, although this outcome seems very unlikely. Humans will not. 

... Civilization will kill us all, and it has already destroyed the ethical character of most people I’ve known. As a result, people generally believe what they want to believe, evidence notwithstanding.

... 

Politics remains my favorite brand of lunacy. The supporter of any politician remains my favorite brand of lunatic. Reliance on politics to solve an insoluble predicament created by the omnicidal heat engine of civilization is bizarre. Politicians transfer money, typically from people who have little money to people who have a lot of it, while blaming others. Believing your favorite politician will address any of your concerns is naively cute. As I’ve pointed out previously, the system is not broken, it is fixed. And it’s not fixed for you or me.

 ....