The Sixth Great Extinction Happening Before My Eyes and, Even Though I Hate to Admit It, Why Nothing Will Be Done About It...

I have been out of the mix on writing lately. Things are happening so fast, I had to take a step back and think about what exactly it is that I am seeing and, even moreso, what I am doing in my life in response to what I am seeing. I read a really good article this afternoon at lunch on www.countercurrents.org, one of the truly great sources I have for reading about all the things the world is experiencing now. The title of it was 'The Psychology Of Systemic Collapse' and the author was writing in direct relation to what it is that I know I am viewing in my time. It is pretty morbid, but really an honest assessment of where we as a planet are at this place and time. I agree with almost the entirety of what he said except that 6 million being the carrying capacity of the Earth. Yes, in a best possible case scenario, this would be something that would definitely leave enough land and resources for the 6 million left, but I don't even want to think about the catastrophic things that would have to happen to get the current population of 7 billion so low. It would be other worldly. I sure wouldn't want to live through it.

In the article, the author references the fact that this mass expenditure of time and resources to get to some semblance of a sustainable environment should have begun back in the 1950's and I concur with that assessment. This was back when my parents were children and Elvis was ruling the pop charts. I am not really sure when it should have begun, probably a lot earlier than that to be honest. I have read of scientists in the 1800's who were talking about the level of carbon dioxide emissions affecting the environment, such as Svante Arrhenius. (I would suggest anyone read the section on his wikipedia page that deals with the greenhouse effect). The one thing I am sure of is that it is too late now. We are locked into a 2 degree C change in the climate and there is no going back from that. The only thing that we can do now is mitigate as much as we can and try to acclimate ourselves to the future environment. Will this even happen? I think not.

So, I go back to what it is I am seeing and what I am seeing is the Sixth Great Extinction. The thing that is truly strange about this extinction is that this will be the first time in recorded history that a species' acts leads to its own demise. Every other creature that has walked the face of the Earth died off due to unforeseen natural occurrences, be it a change in climate or the environment or natural catastrophe. These changes were beyond the control of any living creature on Earth. It is illogical to think that man, the first and only creature that is able to reason (seemingly anyhow), will cause its own demise, but every thing I have read and seen over the past ten or so years of my life has led me to this conclusion. I have looked at this from every angle and tried to go through all the different scenarios that might play out and at the end of the day, I come back to only one conclusion that is slowly creeping up on us all: total system collapse that is leading to world economic destruction, overall resource depletion, the dawn of industrial civilization and, most importantly, catastrophic climate change that may make the world uninhabitable. Until recently, I thought that there was a way out of this thing, but unlike the comic strips or James Bonds movies, there won't be a turn of events that allows man to escape the ravages of the natural world. I would like for that to happen, but for me to say that it will, would be for me to subscribe to the childlike belief system that 'everything will work itself out' or 'the goodness of man will always win out'. This would be asinine when everything points to the direct opposite. And whatever else my mother may have raised, she didn't raise a fool.

So, what am I to do? Document it to the best of my ability as a running journal. Some people would blame folks like me for not 'doing anything', whatever in the hell that is because I still haven't received a clear explanation of this. Sometimes, I hear that I should start an organization of some sort like Greenpeace or Earth First! or Forest Ethics or the NAACP or the Green Party or any number of organizations. Each and every one of those organizations are the one thing that I hate about people above all else: they are hypocritical. They are hypocritical because not only are they lying about the solution to any of the things that are ailing the world, they receive their financial backing from the same institutions that they are seemingly combating. How can this happen you might ask? It is simple for me. People want to be lied to. People want to believe that slowly but surely racism, which is white male supremacy and nothing else make no mistake about it, is ending although we are seeing more people of color (primarily black men) being sent to jail and prison. People want to believe that buying an all electric vehicle will solve the problem of carbon emissions when you will emit more carbon through charging your car than you will emit through a regular car running off petroleum. People want to believe that jobs are going to come back when every economic indicator is showing that a consumer driven society based off diminishing resources will disallow there EVER being a 'rebound' of the economy. These are just some of the overriding things that are ailing the world, but is just the tip of the iceberg, in all honesty. From geoengineering to biofuels to clean coal to jobs bills to banning incandescent light bulbs, they are all tricks by all the institutions of the West to keep the people appeased under the delusion that they are 'making a change'. Therefore any organization I could start under the auspices of the capitalist system would have no chance of being successful economically or socially because it would not lend itself to propping up the industrial, consumer driven, racist system that we all live under. It would be geared towards destroying such a system. But, the difference between now and every other time known to man, is that this civilization could actually end life as we know it.

I am in the middle of reading Clive Hamilton's 'Requiem For A Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change'. He details exactly why nothing has been done or is being done about climate change and the ramifications of this apathetic attitude. He has the obligatory 'things we can do that negates everything that I just spent two or three hundred pages saying was coming to pass' chapter which gives people the thing I HATE most in the world: false hope. An even better book that I LOVED was 2030 The Coming Tumult: Unlimited Growth on a Finite Planet'. It details all the problems from water scarcity, peak oil, population growth and climate change, but there is no feel good end chapter. The author Richard Mosey says nothing will be done about it and leaves it at that. Anyhow, the point is that since nothing is going to be done, when will the stress fractures that are already prevalent in society, finally unleash hell on Earth. Or, to summarize an old story, when will the little boy with his thumb in the dike finally say, "Uh-oh, I am fucked". Therein lies the only question.

In the NY Times, a columnist Joe Nocera wrote a piece on the Keystone XL pipeline. He says that you can believe that climate change is a substantial problem and also be a proponent of the pipeline (which is a lie, but not important for what we I am writing now). At the end of the article he writes the following:

Maybe — just maybe — stopping the Keystone pipeline would be worth it if it really was going to change our behavior and help usher in the age of renewable energy. It would, indeed, be worth turning our backs on oil that we badly need and that is already making our country more secure and prosperous.

But let’s be honest. It’s not going to change anyone’s behavior. If Keystone is ultimately blocked, the far more likely result is that everyone who opposed it will get to feel good about themselves while still commuting to work, alone, in their S.U.V.’s.

In response, Bill McKibben, a leader on the liberal left when it comes to climate change (although a charlatan in many ways, which I will touch upon in later posts), who was interviewed for Nocera's article, says in response:

The last paragraph is very unfair. ‘everyone’ opposed to keystone is not commuting to work alone in their suv; the people i’ve met in the course of this fight are the most spirited, engaged, sincere and lovely bunch of people i can imagine.

But you know, you could add one more thing from me please: “Nocera at least heard the criticism of his column and circled back for another look. He didn’t reverse what he said, but he did soften his tone. And that’s good. This is complicated stuff if you’re new to it, the power of the status quo is strong, and over time our leading journalists are starting to figure it out. It wouldn’t surprise me if eventually he ended up where the New York Times editorial page arrived many months ago: understanding that Keystone really was an important part of the fight for a working planet.”

This is why Western civilization is not going to make it and life as we know it will be coming to end relatively soon. It won't be the racist, stupid, privileged, arrogant right who feel that all this is their birthright of being white, male and dominant in society and if this means their kids, grandkids, loved ones or anyone or anything else dies in the process, so be it. The reason will be the delusional, pollyanaish, fanciful left. Someone like a Paul Krugman or Bill McKibben or Joseph Romm or Al Gore who KNOW the issues prevalent in society as well as I do and then are going to sit there and say that the Average American or Westerner in all honesty is going to give up his privilege to solve this problem is venturing from being blind to utterly stupid. But now, I see as it more insidious than that. It is straight up lying to the highest degree, nothing more and nothing less.

Nocera is correct in his assessment. I know a lot of 'nice' people from friends to family to loved ones to people I work with to people I know in passing. I would be hard pressed to believe any of them believe we are facing societal collapse or even think about it once throughout their daily lives. The ambivalence of these people who range from all ethnicities to social strata to political leanings have no clue with what is going down. It is disheartening to me, but I am anything but shocked about it. I would be shocked if the pendulum swung the other way where someone asked me about any of the structural fissures we are seeing or if I saw people outwardly talking about it.

My life consists now of watching death happen right before my eyes. To use an analogy, it is like I am looking at man in his physical manifestation standing in front of a mack truck barreling towards it. Man is watching this truck driving towards it, but won't get out of the way. Be it because of stupidity or faith that he will survive it or having a death wish or being insane or a combination of all the above and any other mental ailments, man refuses to move and, to be honest, is running towards the truck. I am looking at this and after seeing the truck drive faster and faster and see man run quicker and quicker to meet the truck head on over the past few years, I started realizing that man is trying to kill itself. And slowly but surely as I have learned more, I have started walking to push him out of the way. And the truck gets faster (temperature getting worse, resources being depleted, species collapse, neoliberal capitalism bankrupting countries, and so much more) and man runs quicker (more empty consumerism, vacuous commercialism, more burning of fossil fuels, rabid racism and the list goes on and on). And as I learn more and more, I start to pick up the pace so I can push man out of the way. This has been my life.

Now, I realize that I won't make it in time. I keep running but I know that I started running too late. Truth be told, I realize that I would have never been able to stop it. Even if I had started running earlier, the only thing that would have happened is that I would have been splattered also because you can't stop man, a behemoth, from icing itself if that is what it wants when I am just one single person. All you can do is get out of the way and let it happen. I am still running, but it is only to see what I can do once the truck hits man. Can I help put man back together in some semblance of its former self? Can I help breathe life back into man? Can I nurse man to a facsimile of its former self? Who knows? Maybe, but one thing I do know. When all these things finally do cause systemic collapse to whatever degree it causes it, be it a mass die off of disease or pestilence or climate change or water scarcity, just like when a person does get hit by a mack truck, man may survive it, BUT he will NEVER be the same again. Definitely not walking away from this unscathed.

So, I am in the Sixth Great Extinction. How far will it go? Will I make it once it hits rock bottom? Will anyone make it? For centuries, civilizations advanced and stayed at pretty much the same level with different societies having predominance for any hundreds of years and then collapsing. This is analogous to every few years or so, you go out on your balcony and jump down to the ground floor. You live on the second or third floor so you get a little messed up and bruised, maybe even break your foot or leg, but nothing major. The ritualistic jumping off the balcony today is a little different though. The thing that Western civilization did was go from that second or third floor that the world had known previously and gone to the fiftieth or sixtieth floor and jump. The delusion of the man is that it thinks that it has become strong enough and bad enough that once it jumps it believes it is going to fly off like Icarus or if it does plummet to Earth, it will survive no worse for wear. The left is that part of man's mind that acquiesces to the more powerful right and hopes and prays that everything will be okay although it knows it won't be okay at all.

So, what is going to happen? I don't know. At the end of the day, I am not Nostradomus. One thing I do know though: The ship be sinking....

Coming soon: My take on why man is destroying the Earth and, once again, why nothing will be done about it.