Facing Extinction

Facing Extinction. by Catherine Ingram

go to her site for the full beautiful essay

DARK KNOWLEDGE

“The heavens were all on fire; the earth did tremble.”

–William Shakespeare

Henry IV, Part 1

For much of my life, I thought our species would soon go extinct. I assumed we might last another hundred years if we were lucky. Now I suspect we are facing extinction in the near future. Can I speculate as to exactly when that might happen? Of course not. My sense of this is based only on probability. It might be similar to hearing about a diagnosis of late stage pancreatic cancer. Is it definite that the person is going to die soon? No, not definite. Is it highly probable? Yes, one would be wise to face the likelihood and put one’s affairs in order.

First, let’s look at climate data. Over the past couple decades I have been studying climate disruption by reading scientific papers and listening to climate lectures accessible to a layperson. There is no good news to be found there. We have burned so much carbon into the atmosphere that the CO2 levels are higher than they have been for the past twenty three million years. In the last decade our carbon emission levels are the highest in history, and we have not yet experienced their full impact. If we were to stop emitting carbon dioxide tomorrow, we are still on track for much higher heat for at least ten years. And we are certainly not stopping our emissions by tomorrow. Although global carbon emissions were down in 2020 due to the Covid pandemic, there has been negligible effect on global temperatures, which are continuing to rise, with 2020 tied with 2016 as the hottest years on record, despite the cooling effects of the climate cycle known as La Niña in 2020.

The blanket of carbon in the atmosphere has triggered, and will trigger, further runaway warming systems that are not under our control, one of the most deadly of which is the release of methane gases that have been trapped for eons under arctic ice and what is now euphemistically known as permafrost (much of it is no longer permanent frost).

Methane is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon, and much faster acting. In the first twenty years after its release into the atmosphere, it is 86 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Whereas the full effect of heat from a carbon dioxide molecule takes ten years, peak warming from a methane molecule occurs in a matter of months.

Nitrous oxide is another greenhouse gas whose dangers have only recently been reported. Excess nitrogen from fertilizer becomes nitrous oxide when it escapes into soils and groundwater. It is 300 times more powerful than carbon dioxide, molecule for molecule, and now accounts for about 20% of global warming. Due to food shortages, some countries are using more fertilizer than ever to increase crop production. New studies show a clear correlation between increased fertilizer use and increasing levels of nitrous oxide in the atmosphere.

As if these emissions were not daunting enough, a heretofore little-known gas, sulphur hexafluoride or SF6, used in many green and renewable technologies, is 23,500 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon. It leaks from electrical production sites and is estimated to stay in the atmosphere for a thousand years.

The Amazon rainforest, which had historically been considered “the lungs of the planet,” is now emitting more carbon than it can absorb. Much of this has been caused by fires for deliberate crop clearing and animal grazing, but higher temperatures and drought have contributed to the Amazon now throwing off an estimated billion tons of carbon per year, turning it from a carbon capture to a carbon generator.

The arctic and antarctic icecaps are melting at rates far faster than even the most alarming predictions, and methane is pouring out of these regions, bubbling out of arctic lakes, and hissing out of seas and soils worldwide. Some scientists fear a methane “burp” of billions of tons when a full melt of the summer arctic ice occurs; a full melt has not happened for the past four million years. Should such a sudden large release of methane occur, the earth’s warming would rapidly accelerate within months. This alone could be the extinction event.

The arctic summer ice is currently two thirds less than it was as recently as the 1970s, and the arctic is warming so fast that a full summer melt is likely within the next few years. During the month of June 2020, the Arctic Circle had the highest temperatures ever recorded in the region, with one Siberian town hitting 38C (100 F). The wildfires that raged for months in the Arctic have now set a pollution record by emitting 244 megatons of carbon dioxide during the summer season of 2020, thirty-five percent more than in 2019, which also set a record. This is more than the annual carbon output of numerous countries. The Arctic ice is not only threatened by a warming atmosphere but, according to a study published in the Journal of Climate, “deep heat in the Arctic Ocean has risen and is now melting the ice from below”. The continent of Antarctica is also rapidly melting at an acceleration of 280% in the last forty years. The massive ice melts that are happening there, such as the breaking off the Larsen B ice shelf defied scientific predictions; the ice shelf known as Larsen C, which broke off in July of 2017, was 2,200 square miles in size. The Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica, a mass of ice the size of Florida, is becoming increasingly unstable, now losing more than 100 billion tons of ice each year. Scientists fear that its collapse would cause much of the West Antarctic ice sheet to fall into the sea, since Thwaites currently acts “like a cork in a wine bottle.”

The arctic ice has been the coolant for the northern part of the planet and it impacts worldwide climate as well. Its white surface also reflects back into space much of the heat from the sun, as does the antarctic ice. As the ice melts, the dark ocean absorbs the heat and the warming ocean more quickly melts the remaining ice. Over the past four decades, the proportion of the oldest and thickest ice in the Arctic’s winter ice pack has dropped from more than 33 percent to barely 1 percent today, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s 2019 annual Arctic report.

The U.S., Russia, and China are now vying for hegemony of the arctic region in order to get at the massive reserves of oil that exist there and will be accessible as the ice melts. For instance, in 2019, Russia launched a floating barge on which two nuclear reactors were wired into its infrastructure to power gas and oil platforms in remote regions of the Arctic. In early 2021, satellite images show a build-up of Russian military forces in the Arctic, which, according to a spokesperson for Vladamir Putin, they have deployed in order to implement economic development in the Arctic region, an area they consider part of the Russian Federation. Apart from the real possibility of military conflagrations over control of the Arctic, moving “icebreaker” tankers through and drilling in this sensitive eco-system would cause the dual destructions of rapidly deteriorating whatever ice is left, thereby speeding up the release of methane, and then burning all that stored carbon of newly found oil reserves into the atmosphere.

These and all the other warming feedback loops are now on an exponential trajectory and becoming self-amplifying, potentially leading to a “hothouse earth” independent of the carbon emissions that have triggered them. Each day, the extra heat that is trapped near our planet is equivalent to four hundred thousand Hiroshima bombs. There are no known technologies that can be deployed at world scale to reverse the warming, and many climate scientists feel that the window for doing so is already closed, that we have passed the tipping point and the heat is on “runaway” no matter what we do.

We are now in the midst of the sixth mass extinction with about 150 plant and animal species going extinct per day. Despite the phrase “the sixth extinction” making its way into mainstream awareness via the publication of Elizabeth Kolbert’s Pulitzer-prize-winning book of that title, most people still don’t realize that we humans are also on the list.

Some of the consequences we face are mass die-offs due to widespread drought, flooding, fires, forest mortality, runaway diseases, and dying ocean life—all of which we now see in preview. A few of these consequences could even result in the annihilation of all complex life on earth in a quick hurry: the use of nuclear weapons, for instance, as societies and governments become more desperate for resources; or the meltdown of the 450 nuclear reactors, which will likely become impossible to maintain as industrial civilization breaks down. Since 2011, when a tsunami struck the northeast coast of Japan and caused a near meltdown of three nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, it has taken more than 42,000 gallons of fresh water per day to keep the reactors cooled. Keeping the radioactive elements contained requires dangerous jobs for the workers and building a new steel water tank every four days to store the spent radioactive water. As this process has become increasingly untenable, Japan approved plans in April, 2021 to begin dumping 1.2 million tons of radioactive water into the Pacific ocean.

If we were to make it through this gauntlet of threats, we would still be facing starvation. Grains, the basis of the world’s food supply, are reduced on average by 6% for every one degree Celsius rise above pre-industrial norms. We are now about 1.6 degrees Celsius above and climbing fast; the oceans are warming twice as fast and have absorbed a staggering 93% of the warming for us so far. If that were not the case, the average land temperatures would be a toasty 36 degrees Celsius (97 degrees Fahrenheit) above what they are now. Of course, there is a huge cost for ocean warming in the form of dying coral reefs, plankton loss, ocean acidification, unprecedented storms, and increased water vapor, which is yet another greenhouse blanket holding heat in the atmosphere.

As I became aware of these facts and many hundreds like them, I also marveled at how oblivious most people are to the coming catastrophes. There has never been a greater news story than that of humans facing full extinction, and yet extinction is rarely mentioned on the evening news, cable channels, or on the front pages of blogs and newspapers. It is as though the world’s astronomers were telling us that an asteroid is heading our way and will make a direct hit destined to wipe out all of life to which the public responds by remaining fascinated with sporting events, social media, the latest political machinations, and celebrity gossip.

However, beginning around 2010, a few books and other sources of information began to address the chances of full extinction of all complex life, and these became my refuge, even though the information was the most horrific I had ever imagined.

For decades, I had sensed that things were dramatically worsening, the rate of destruction increasing. As a journalist from 1982 to 1994, I specialized in social and environmental issues. I had written about global warming (the phrase we most used in those days) numerous times in the 1980s, but because it seemed a far-off threat, we could intellectually discuss it without fear that it would affect our own lives in terribly significant ways. As time marched on, I began to awaken to how fast the climate was changing and how negative would be its impacts. It became a strange relief to read and listen to the truth of the situation from people who were studying the hard data as it affirmed my instincts and threw a light on what had been shadowy forebodings, dancing like ghosts in my awareness. It is an ongoing study that has taken me through a powerful internal process–emotional and cathartic–one that I felt might be helpful to share with those who have woken to this dark knowledge or are in the process of waking to it, just as I, over time, found comfort in the reflections of the small yet increasing number of comrades with whom I share this journey.

Because the subject is so tragic and because it can scare or anger people, this is not an essay I ever wanted to write; it is one I would have wanted to read along the way. But the words on these pages are meant only for those who are ready for them. I offer no hope or solutions for our continuation, only companionship and empathy to you, the reader, who either knows or suspects that there is no hope or solution to be found. What we now need to find is courage.

The Coronavirus Pandemic: I wrote the original version of this essay in February 2019. At this writing, we find ourselves twenty months into a worldwide focus on the coronavirus pandemic and the subsequent global restrictions on human movement and business. The imminence of this threat has taken center stage in our minds, but of course the other crises are rolling along in the background, undeterred by a virus, as evidenced in the 2021 report from the IPCC with data showing that the earth is hotter than it has been for 125,000 years. We can also expect more viruses to erupt not only from gain-of-function research and mishaps and overcrowding of human populations, but also from melting ices caps. In January 2020, a team of scientists published their discovery of 28 new virus groups contained within 15,000-year-old ice. All of these viruses would likely be “novel.” The outbreak of Covid has also shown us how quickly life in the world entire can be radically changed and how confused, inept, and corrupt are most of our governments in response to a crisis with a less than one percent death toll.



COURAGE

You got me singing, even though the world is gone

You got me thinking that I’d like to carry on

You got me singing, even though it all looks grim

You got me singing the Hallelujah hymm

–Leonard Cohen

“You Got Me Singing”

For the last quarter century of his life, Leonard Cohen was one of my closest friends. We would often talk at the small kitchen table in his modest home in Los Angeles until the wee hours of the morning, and when I would make a move to leave, he would bring out a fine port he had been saving, or show me some of his recent drawings, or regale me with a story of his time in Cuba in the early Sixties. He loved engagement and there was no place in conversation he wouldn’t go. In his company I never censored my thoughts. Since his passing I have realized that he was not only a close friend but a life mentor. One of the most inspiring aspects in this regard was what one could call his heart bravery. It is, in my way of seeing, the highest form of courage. In fact, the word courage comes from the Latin coeur, meaning heart. Leonard’s special genius was his ability to communicate both the sorrow and the beauty of the world, even in the same sentence. He never looked away from either, not even in his final months when pain wracked his body. He had a twinkle in one eye and a tear in the other.

In those last years of his life, we had many conversations about climate chaos, as he knew I was studying the subject. He always listened intently and asked pertinent questions throughout our discussions. Although climate had not been his own focus (his was more a passion for world politics), there was no surprise for him in seeing how close we are to the edge. He understood human nature and assumed we would do ourselves in. One need only listen to his song “The Future” to know how prescient he was on the matter.

And yet, we laughed over all the years. Laughed like crazy. Leonard was a master of gallows humor, and I have a well-honed appreciation for that form as well. The power of gallows humor, and I highly recommend it in these times, is that it allows a sideways glance at the gathering clouds while one is still sipping tea in the garden. All of these small moments of recognition serve to accustom our awareness to difficult realities, to hammer at the chains that bind, to allow us to let go a bit. In sharing gallows humor, it is also comforting to know that your friend sees the tragi-comedy as well. There is an amortizing of the burden when we share a heavy load.

Courage is often confused with stoicism, the stiff upper lip, bravado that masks fear. There is another kind of courage. It is the courage to live with a broken heart, to face fear and allow vulnerability, and it is the courage to keep loving what you love “even though the world is gone.”



DISTRACTION AND DENIAL

They are as children, playing with their toys in a house on fire.

—Gautama Buddha

Never have these words of the Buddha been more true. We love to be distracted from ourselves, and we have myriad ways of doing that in our time. We pay big money for the privilege and we run about chasing objects and experiences in its service. We seem to be evolutionarily designed to put aside or entirely ignore future threats and instead focus only on immediate concerns and personal desires. This is understandable since for most of human history there was nothing we could do about future possibilities or events occurring far from where we lived. With some notable exceptions, evolution didn’t select for long-term survival planning. Being concerned about climate change does not come naturally to us. Daniel Gilbert, author and Harvard professor of psychology, proposes four features for why our brains respond primarily to immediate threats.

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 But short of such clear and present dangers, our threat response is slow.

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It seems that even our genes favor short-term gain over long-term trouble. The twentieth century biologist George Williams recognized that, due to our genes having multiple functions, some genes have opposing functions. That is, for example, a gene can have great benefits for early life and at the same time cause great harm in later life, a process known as biological senescence. Evolution naturally selects for those genes since the organism doesn’t always make it to later life, so the early benefit has been accrued while the later harm has less chance of being activated.

Biologist Bret Weinstein sees a cultural analog to this process, “Culture is biology, downstream of genes.” As he explains, “Ideas that work in the short term but fail and cause vulnerability in the long term tend to survive in our system because they often produce economic benefit. ...  We now have a cultural system that is making us very comfortable in the short term, but it is liquidating the wellbeing of the planet at an incredible rate.”

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Evolution also didn’t select for us to be overly conscious of personal death itself. It would otherwise be emotionally paralyzing. 

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And so for Becker, whether we’re aware of it or not, and most often we’re not, we are highly motivated to maintain confidence in the veracity of our cultural worldview 

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Becker’s work relied on examining defense strategies for denial of personal death. We are now faced with the death of all. Therefore denial and defense of denial are accordingly amplified and dangerous. Our world is awash in belief systems; everyone gets to pick their own. There is also now a desperate rise of religious fundamentalism, superstition, and new age magical thinking, as predicted in 1996 by astronomer Carl Sagan in his final book, The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. 

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We also find it difficult to think exponentially. We might grasp the concept of an exponential factor but it is not our natural way to perceive. Therefore, as exponential warming triggers other imbalances that also become exponential, we perceive them only as linear problems and assume we will have time to address them. We carry on with business-as-usual and return to “the matrix,” the illusion that things are fairly normal, where our ordinary problems, comforts and entertainments await our attention, just like in the movie. But we have now come to the point of “amusing ourselves to death,” as Neil Postman put it in his 1985 book by that title.

As you begin to awaken to the specter of extinction, you will likely feel the powerful lure of your usual distractions. You may want to go back to sleep. But denial will become harder and harder to maintain because once your attention has turned to this subject, you will see the evidence of it everywhere, both locally and globally.

And you will find yourself among the throngs of humanity who are easily distracted and amused, playing with their toys as the house burns, “tranquilized by the trivial,” as Kierkegaard said, and speaking of the future as though it was going to go on as it has. After all, we made it this far. We have proven our superiority at figuring things out and removing obstacles to our desires. We killed off most of the large wild mammals and most of the indigenous peoples in order to take their lands. We bent nature to our will, paved over its forests and grasslands, rerouted and dammed its rivers, dug up what journalist Thom Hartman calls its “ancient sunlight,” and burned that dead creature goo into the atmosphere so that our vehicles could motor us around on land, sea, and air and our weapons could keep our enemies in check. And now we have given its atmosphere a high fever. But, as the old adage has it, (a phrase I first heard in the 1980s, which has informed my view ever since), “nature bats last.”

You may find yourself in the company of people who seem to have no awareness of the consequences we face or who don’t want to know or who might have a momentary inkling but cannot bear to face it. You may find people who have all the data in hand but cannot see the implications, as though staring at Magellan’s ships on the horizon. You may experience people becoming angry if you steer the conversation in the direction of the planetary crisis. You may sense that you are becoming a social pariah due to what you see, even when you don’t mention it, and you may feel lonely in the company of most people you know. For you, it’s not just the elephant in the room; it’s the elephant on fire in the room, and yet you feel you can rarely mention it. But, as Gandhi said, “Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth.”

I once asked Leonard for his advice on how to talk with others about this. He replied: “There are things we don’t tell the children.” It is helpful to realize that most people are not ready for this conversation. They may never be ready, ...

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SOCIAL UNREST

I’ve seen the future, Brother.

It is murder.

—Leonard Cohen

“The Future”

Of all the threats we face, the one I find most frightening is the breakdown of civilized society. 

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As professor and journalist Christian Parenti said in an interview with Chris Hedges, “How do people adapt to climate change? How do they adapt to the drought, to the floods? Very often…you pick up the surplus weaponry and you go after your neighbor’s cattle or you blame it on your neighbor’s ideology or ethnicity.”

In his book, Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence, Parenti writes: “Climate change arrives in a world primed for crisis. The current and impending dislocations of climate change intersect with the already-existing crises of poverty and violence. I call this collision of political, economic, and environmental disasters ‘the catastrophic convergence.’ ”

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At the 2017 Bateson Symposium in Sweden, Rex Weyler gave a thought-provoking presentation called “Ecological Trauma and Common Addictions.” Weyler, one of the founders of Greenpeace, defines ecological trauma as “the experience of witnessing – consciously or not – the pervasive abuse and destruction of the natural world, of which we are a part, and for which we have a primal affinity. 

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We can easily understand the impulse of greed as most of us are afflicted with it. Perhaps the evolutionary imperatives from ancient times would have had no use for delayed gratification since servicing immediate needs often meant the difference between life and death. However, we can now see that being enslaved to our base desires and impulses is contraindicated to our survival. The physical altercations over toilet paper in stores within the developed countries at the beginning of the pandemic offer a glimpse as to what societal and economic breakdown might look like when there are widespread food shortages and when the infrastructures–production and transport of the food supply, distribution of petrol to run the vehicles, operation of the electric grids–become spotty, too costly to maintain, or are simply no longer working.

OVERPOPULATION AND CO-EXTINCTIONS

In 1952, when I was born, there were approximately 2.6 billion people on earth. There are now 7.8 billion, a more than threefold increase in my lifetime. Our use rate of resources would allow for our planet to sustainably host only about one billion people. As William Catton explained in his 1980 book Overshoot, we are in “carrying capacity deficit.” In other words, the load on resource use is far in excess of its carrying capacity. Of course, the only way we have been able to pull this off is by stealing from the future, 

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As astrobiology professor Peter Ward explained in a story on the BBC, “If you look at any biological system, when it overpopulates it begins to poison its home.”

Of course, when we speak of overpopulation we specifically refer to humans. In fact, human activity is causing mass die-offs of the other species. With overpopulation and pollution we lose habitats that sustain biodiversity and we have consequently lost 68% of the world’s wildlife since 1970. The UN’s intergovernmental report on biodiversity, which came out in April 2019, found that a further one million animal and plant species are now at risk for extinction.

Only our livestock are growing in numbers. Think about that phrase in its two component words: “live” and “stock.” Living animals as stock, as product. To view animals as products requires ignoring the plight of these living creatures: the industrial food systems of torture for hundreds of millions of animals–animals who have emotions, care for their young, and who suffer fear and pain only to be slaughtered in the end, perhaps the only mercy they will know. Industrial animal farming is also known to be one of the top causes of global warming.

The biodiversity loss of wild animals and plants, however, creates a domino effect into what is called co-extinctions: when a species at early risk of environmental changes dies, the various species that depended on that one die, and then the species that depended on those die.

The domino effect in extinctions goes into yet another exponential feedback trajectory. 

...  What they found can be gleaned from the title of their peer-reviewed paper, published in Scientific Reports: “Co-extinctions Annihilate Planetary Life During Extreme Environmental Change.” In other words, the health of the interconnected natural world depends on the web of life within it. When substantial parts of that web die off, it annihilates planetary life in general. This includes, of course, the higher and more complex forms of life. That means us. Thinking that we can lose most of the biodiversity of planetary life and still find ways to feed ourselves is delusional.

Along with all of the other threats we face, co-extinction within the natural world is becoming one of the most pressing problems. For anyone familiar with General Systems Theory, this is easily intuited. Yet many people compartmentalize information when they hear of extinctions of the other plants and creatures and think it has little to do with their own existence. They see the iconic image of the polar bear floating on a small ice chunk and think, “What does the loss of polar bears mean to my life? Nothing.” They might, however, be surprised to learn that the loss of the world’s insects is going to impact everyone on the food chain as the pollination of plant life dramatically slows.

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TECHNO FIXES AND ESCAPE TO MARS

We humans love technology. It has been the means by which we became the dominant species on the planet, doubled our life spans, traveled the globe collecting resources and ideas, and hooked ourselves up to instantaneously connect with anyone anywhere from our own homes. It is a source of entertainment, education, artistic creativity, medical advances, and uses too numerous to list. It has also been a source of destruction. It has allowed us to rapidly denude and poison the eco-system and caused the extinction of much of the natural world.

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As Joanna Macy told me in an interview more than thirty years ago, “We think technology will save us. Technology got us into this mess.”

And yet, many people assume technology will indeed address our gnarly ecological problems by changing us to adapt to the problems or by simply moving away from Earth altogether. 

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The Biosphere experiments might also serve as a cautionary tale to the prepper billionaires who are building luxury bunkers underground here on earth.

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It has been our historical privilege to have new frontiers of untapped resources whenever we overshot any given region. We could always move to another place, either one that was uninhabited or one that might require that we negotiate with, subdue, or eliminate the people who were already there. The earth was large and abundant for most of human history. But it is now rapidly shrinking; that is, we are much more in number while the habitats that can support life are far fewer, 

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Geo-engineering, or climate engineering, is a more realistic form of techno-fixes in that many of the proposals are more possible than cyber tweaking our brains, downloading consciousness, or moving to Mars. For that reason, geo-engineering is more disturbing as it is likely to be increasingly deployed as the world soon becomes more desperate.

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One type of geo-engineering involves solar radiation management (SRM),

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Another type of geo-engineering is known as carbon capture and sequestration, (CCS) which involves 

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If reading about these methods makes you queasy, you are not alone. Many of us intuitively resist messing with the atmosphere or creating methods that allow carbon emissions to go on as before in the deluded belief that we are handling the situation. There is the concern that unintended consequences may likely speed up the destruction. 

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Clive Hamilton, Professor of Public Ethics and a member of the Climate Change Authority of Australia, explores this in depth in his detailed book, Earth Masters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering. See also Greenpeace’s report on carbon capture, sequestering, and storage.

Geo-engineering plans are chilling because they are being proposed not merely by conspiracy kooks but by some of the wealthiest, most powerful, and brilliant engineering minds of our time. And they are being funded by coalitions of big oil and gas companies, along with governments, who rely on science that deemphasizes negative impacts.

Although profit is no doubt a strong motive, it is useless to demonize people who are pursuing these paths, especially when they feel they are mitigating a crisis. But it is also important to understand that their wisdom may not be as developed as their particular forms of intelligence. It is not necessarily true that just because a technology is possible, we should try it because we are in crisis. 

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Had there been a debate about the existence of cars, we would have asked, ‘Do we want the entire landscape to be paved over? Do we want society to move into concrete urban centers? Do we want one resource–oil–to dominate human and political relationships in the world?’ Our culture lacks a philosophical basis, an understanding of the appropriate human role on earth that would inform these developments before they happen. 

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The disparity between wisdom and intelligence may be the inevitable downfall of many other kinds of life in the universe as well. There is a theory known as The Great Filter, which seeks to explain why, despite the overwhelming odds of life on other planets, we have not heard from any of them. Astrophysicists have now calculated that in the known universe there are about 10 billion trillion planets that would have what they call “a goldilocks zone,” planets whose orbits are in a particular proximity to their star that is similar to our own, not too close and not too far. Just right.

The Great Filter proposes that before a civilization reaches the level of development that would allow for intergalactic communication and travel, it wipes itself out through climate change, overpopulation, or other factors having to do with the rise of technological civilization. 

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After all, each and every one of us is a heat engine. 

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Take capitalism for instance. It is unsustainable at its core as it relies on continued economic expansion and growth in a system of finite resources. In the process, it also speeds up the complete elimination of the very resources on which it relies. But the problem is that the human creature will postpone challenging that system as long as the goods keep flowing, no matter the future costs. Capitalism is a perfect representation of the human need and greed for more, future be damned. Very few cultures in modern civilization have managed to resist it. There is now a lot of false hope around “green capitalism” and the Green New Deal in the USA. Given that capitalism, of any color, inevitably relies on extraction of resources in the production and transport of goods, feeling encouraged about green capitalism is another form of deluded bargaining in the Kubler-Ross stages of grief. As Derrick Jensen elegantly defines it: “Capitalism is a system by which the living is converted into the dead.”

Capitalism itself is heading to its own extinction. As resources dwindle and the numbers of people vying for them increase, we are facing collapse of the largest Ponzi scheme of all, the global financial system.



THE END OF LEGACY

As your awareness metabolizes the deadly threats ahead and the unlikeliness of solutions that will change the course, you might find a strange re-ordering of your thoughts and motivations. 

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Letting go of the future means re-ordering your tendencies of thinking about the future. How psychologically invested you have been in your ideas and hopes about the future will likely determine how well you adapt to ignoring those kinds of thoughts as they arise. You may also find a stronger habit in present awareness begin to prevail. 

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NO BLAME

“Throughout all of history and prehistory, human advance has coincided with ecological devastation.”

John Gray (British philosopher)

Straw Dogs, 2002

You may feel fury at times in seeing the desecration of the natural world and in realizing that its destruction is due to human activity on the planet. It seems tragically unfair that one species could cause the elimination of almost all the others. 

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“If only we hadn’t developed agriculture” (which allowed for long term food storage and overpopulation); “If only the world had been run by matriarchies;” “If only we had a bottom-up economic system;” “If only we had all learned to meditate.” If only.

Writer James Kunstler proposes a pithy theory for why humans chose each step of our path in history: “It just seemed a good idea at the time.”

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Nearly all of us went along on the ride and enjoyed the benefits, and now the party’s over and the bill has come due. But where can we lay blame?

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GRIEF

We grieve because we love. To the degree that your heart is shattered over loss is precisely the degree to which you loved that which has gone. 

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All the world over, there are waves of distress, anxiety, and depression, which are based on circumstance and not merely on brain chemistry gone awry. Distress, anxiety, and depression are appropriate responses in facing the threat of full extinction.

No matter how clear and rational our understanding of the situation, many of my extinction-aware friends admit that the magnitude of the loss we are undergoing is unacceptable to the innermost psyche. 

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Many of us are also in anticipatory grief; that is, in the period leading to full extinction, we are aware of how hard things will become, just as it is for those who are already living marginally, 

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Few people are even minimally prepared, emotionally or physically, for what is coming, perhaps especially those who are most privileged.  A friend told me the following story: his father was a survivor of one of the Nazi concentration camps. He said that the people who had the best chance of survival in the camps were the ones who had come from poverty and hardship in their lives before the camps. Those who had come from privilege were the first to die.

I am aware that virtually no one in my family and few of my friends are either ready to hear this information now or will be prepared to face what is ahead in time. It is pointless to try to warn them if they are not ready. My attempts at hinting usually lead to blank stares or agitation. I have come to accept that for some people, their fate is to continue the romp of life, oblivious to the dangers ahead. Maybe it is best that they enjoy whatever good times are left, even though there might be extreme panic in the last phase. Maybe it is just as well that they continue as they have been for as long as possible. Maybe it will postpone chaos and lawlessness the world over until the systems fully crash. But for those of us who cannot look away, we carry the anticipatory grief for those who cannot bear to look.

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Award-winning climate journalist Dahr Jamail ...
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“Hope is about the future and gives us a sense that we have more time when, in fact, we are out of time. I think it is awesome that people are doing things to mitigate the damage as it is the right thing to do. Some of us feel morally obliged to take action in those ways. On the other hand, when you look at the amount of carbon that needs to be drawn down and how fast that has to happen, it is a physical impossibility to scale that to the level we would need.

“Take, for instance, wide-scale rejuvenation of soil. If every farmer were incentivized and mandated to incorporate practices that would rejuvenate soil at world scale and we coupled that with wide-scale tree planting—of course, all of these things take time–at least we would have set in motion some actions that might still help. What makes natural geo-engineering, soil sequestration, planting trees, and so on impossible for actually turning the tide on this is that there is a near total lack of political will to mandate any of it. If all of a sudden we could replace the horrible governments with functional ones that represented what we now need and if that is where all the funding went, yeah, it might actually make a dent in mitigation. But the reality is that there is not one country that I know of doing everything it can in that direction. Certainly none of the major emitters–Russia, the US, China, and India–are doing anything of significance; all four are just stomping on the gas. There is nothing to indicate that a change of course will happen. Nothing. Not now. Not next year. Not in ten years. So the lack of political will is going to negate any and all natural geo-engineering efforts. Nevertheless, we are still obliged to do what we can in our own ways, even if there is no chance for long-term mitigation. ”


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 celebrate old clichés such as, “You gotta have hope,” “We mustn’t lose hope,” ”Keep hope alive.” 

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But clinging to hope when there is no longer anything to be done, when the course cannot be changed, makes hope itself a burden. One is forced into internal pretense, deeper denial. For people who have limited capacity for denial, and I suspect that if you have read this far you are one of those, maintaining hope becomes impossible. It is a surprising relief to let go of it as there is only cold comfort in false hope.

However, you may then experience the brunt force of sorrow. Grief, straight up.

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LOVE

So come my friends, be not afraid

We are so lightly here

It is in love that we are made

In love, we disappear

—Leonard Cohen

“Boogie Street”

What else is there to do now? Here we are, some of the last humans who will experience this beautiful planet since Homo sapiens began their journey some 200,000 years ago. Now, in facing extinction of our species, you may wonder if there is any point in going on. If your future projects make no sense any more, if you feel it is unwise to have children, and that things are going to get really hard and bad, you may not want to bother living any longer. Yet, there are other ways to use your attention that make life still relevant and even beautiful.

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Make your moments sparkle within the experience of your own senses, and direct your attention to anything that gladdens your heart. Live your bucket list now.

There are also some simple thought reflections and actions that might be helpful: 
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Find your calm. In addition to wisely directing your attention, include also whatever daily activities induce greater calm in your life......

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Resist being constantly immersed in the increasing data of the chaos. ...

Have a fast from the news as needed, and rest your weary mind. 

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But it is likely you have also had many moments when you knew that love was all that ever really mattered. And in your final breaths it is likely to be all that is left of you, a cosmic story whispered only once.

As Leonard said, “It is in love that we are made; in love we disappear.”

—Catherine Ingram

NSW, Australia

First published in February 2019

(last updated July 2021)