by John Duffy
I want to start this with the written equivalent of a sigh. Not even a sigh, but a deep expulsion of exhaustion from the very core of my being. Usually I try to write with flowery prose, attempting to adorn logic and rationale with a tinge of poetry. Not today. My feeling as I sit here is that I shouldn’t have to be sitting here. What I’m writing shouldn’t need to be written, because it’s already been written. In fact, rather than writing this, I’d like to be able to look everyone in the eye, and say, “cut the shit.”
We are going to go extinct, and we are going to probably drag a large majority of the other species on this planet into that permanent abyss of nothingness with us if we don’t stop jerking off, and take some real action now. The die off has begun. It is not theoretical. It is not this ethereal “what if” that hovers over some distant tomorrow. Right now, it is estimated that over one hundred species are going extinct every day. Every god damn day. The Arctic sea ice is melting faster than was predicted, positive feedback loops have begun kicking in as methane is released from melting permafrost, and the oceans are rising in acidity killing off the phytoplankton which provide us with the majority of the oxygen that we breathe.
But this has all been said, and still, here we are. So the saying is not enough, because no one is believing it. Even the people who say they accept that climate change is real and that it poses a grave threat, don’t really believe it. Their actions prove that. They still get up and go to work and watch TV and upgrade their cell phones. I’ve been thinking about the economy lately. People seem to love this thing called “the economy.” No one knows why they love it or why they are so interested in preserving it or encouraging it to grow. It’s a self evident truth. One of those unquestioned premises slipped by us so early on that we kind of just assume “the economy” is a naturally occurring thing which must always be protected like some runt lamb weak from an illness at birth.
I’ve been thinking about the types of things conventional wisdom claims are good for the economy. Let’s list them, shall we? Prisons. Drug prohibition. Debt. Wall Street financial wizardry such as derivatives. Bank bailouts. Corporate welfare of many stripes. The pharmaceutical industry. The insurance industry. Unaffordable housing. The college loan racket. Mind boggling wealth disparity. Greed. Materialism. An advertising industry hell bent on making people, especially young women, hate themselves so they will buy a bunch of shit to make themselves feel better very temporarily. Environmental degradation of every kind, from deforestation to toxic waste storage, nuclear power to mountain top removal for coal, tar sands extraction and deep water drilling. Oh, and don’t forget war. Economists and politicians love telling us how good war is for the economy. You know, the mass murder of entire populations? Poisoning entire landscapes with depleted uranium. Yeah, this is all just a real shot in the arm for the “economy.”
So, reigning this all back in for a moment, let’s summarize; all of the worst shit is good for the “economy.” The “economy” seems to feed on the misery of the human species, while also eradicating every other species who is deemed “inconvenient” or “unnecessary.”
When I think about myself, and ask, “What are the things I need to survive and to be happy?” the list is much different. I need clean, drinkable water. I need clean, breathable air. I need clean, healthy soil capable of supporting plant life so I can eat. I need clean, viable wild spaces where animals and birds and fish and insects can thrive. I need community. I need love and laughter and song and spirit.
Notice anything about this second list? None of these things, not one of them, requires an “economy.” In fact, the “economy” is actually quite destructive to all of the things I need to live and to be happy. Looking at it plainly, the “economy” seems to be a giant, insatiably hungry monster that seeks to destroy everything human beings require. It’s a radioactive Godzilla that smashes and devours everything that is wonderful and holy, and instead of sending out the troops to make battle against this beast, we worship it. We feed it. We continually do all of the things that help this monster gain in strength and size, no matter what wonderful and beloved beings and places must be sacrificed on its altar.
This is fucked. Straight fucked. We should be working quickly and decisively to drive a massive stake through this bloodsucking, Earth raping, leviathan’s heart!
If we want to avoid extinction, if we have gotten used to this whole being alive, and living on the planet and like, having kids and stuff thing, then we must see the “economy” for the great evil that it is. All of our attention must turn toward its immediate destruction.
Of course, there are a bunch of people who will read this and feel the need to push up their glasses from the bridge of their snotty nose and then point out to me how “Actually, the economy is just a method by which resources are distributed to the people in a fair and…bla bla bla…” Save it! All the cleverer-than-thou, professional internet assholes can just fucking save it. The “economy” is not just this invisible sum total of our efforts to equitably distribute resources and make sure our needs are met. Look around. A vast, vast minority of the human race has access to wealth beyond measure, while an overwhelming majority has next to nothing. To make matters worse, what very little the global poor do have is stolen from them by the wealthy, as the wealthy claim these poverty stricken people owe them for debts. This is naked insanity. If the “economy” is the sum total of an honest attempt at equitable resource distribution, then it has failed. Game over. It isn’t working. What it is doing is immiserating the majority of the human population while simultaneously wiping out the Earth’s ability to harbor life at all. A quick glance even here in the wealthy west betrays to me that the “economy” is the sum total of our collective misery. Millions of us going to boring, mindless, meaningless, soul crushing jobs every day so we can pay for the luxury of getting to live on the land where we were born, and to pay off further debts that we apparently also owe to the wealthiest handful of humans. Where is a guillotine when you need one?
So let’s add it up, and cut the B.S. The climate is changing even more rapidly than the majority of climate scientists estimated. The land is drought stricken, the oceanic food chain is watching it’s foundation go extinct, methane hydrates are venting from the Arctic Ocean speeding up atmospheric warming, etc. etc. long story short, the shit is hitting the fan. The only reason ever proffered for delaying any meaningful action to mitigate our ultimate demise is some made up fart in the breeze called the “economy.” This false religion, this cannibalistic Wendigo of a deity invented by high priests with fancy degrees and expensive suits subsists on our collective humiliation and death. Now that we get this, let’s stop even discussing the issue within the parameters set by those who profit from our misery. When some schnook tells you that shutting down tar sand extraction or mountain top removal coal mining would be bad for the economy, don’t try to offset his concerns. Don’t try to play to his premise by offering that “green energy” will create X amount of new jobs. Stand tall, look him in his black, soulless eyes and emphatically state, “Good! Fuck the economy!”
While we’re on the topic, so called “progressives” need to get off this green energy kick, this eco-wise fantasy about some future where our lives are exactly the same, but everything we do is accomplished just a little differently with a sustainable twist. If we want to not die, then we need to stop doing the things that are going to kill us. We don’t need to spit shine the assault on life. We don’t need a new brand of exploitation. We need deindustrialization, and we need to wring the bloody neck of capitalism, before hanging it, drawing it, quartering it, and setting the remaining bits of its corpse on fire to make sure it can’t rise from the dead like the unholy zombie that it is. But then again, maybe I’m crazy for assuming avoiding extinction is something most people could get behind.
This is all to say, I can’t fight my enemies and my allies at the same time. Liberals, lefties, environmentalists and everyone else who purports to give a damn has to give up on being capitalism apologists who somehow think we can keep this gravy train of mass consumption going and that there will be joy, abundance, and a hydrogen powered car for all. Recognize that our culture, our habits, and our way of seeing the world and interacting with it are the root cause of the converging crises we face. Recognize it, or else be just as much of an obstruction to life as the “economy” and all those who grovel at it’s blood soaked feet.
________________
John Duffy is an anti-civ writer and an activist who is currently working with the TarSands Blockade in East Texas.
December 5th, 2012 at 6:03 am
Yes! Fuck the “economy”! Cut the shit! Kill it with steely knives! Apologists be damned. We’re all damned now; all that’s left are the last shreds of love and integrity that can be mustered.
December 5th, 2012 at 6:19 am
+100 (as he gets put on a few more of the innumerable “lists” now being maintained by TPTB)
I especially like this line, “This is all to say, I can’t fight my enemies and my allies at the same time.”
Too many doofuses surround me.
As James Howard Kunstler penned, We believe in “Too much magic” that will surely save us (from our own stupidity and hubris). Not bloody likely.
December 5th, 2012 at 6:36 am
You missed out the bit about how destroying the “economy” means bringing forward the mass die-off. Funny how that part is often overlooked.
And one of “the things I need to survive and to be happy”, if I “want to not die”, is, like many others, the pharmaceutical industry, or at least some portion of its products.
I get a little tired of hearing how we can escape the corner we’ve painted ourselves into just by destroying the life-support system we depend on now that we’re so far into overshoot. If you think that killing most of us now is an acceptable price for the species to continue in a livable environment in the future, then have the honesty to say so.
December 5th, 2012 at 7:13 am
The bottleneck we’re beginning to experience will quickly ramp up to the point that the economy will not be able to sustain itself and the mass die-off (Landbeyond above mentions) will take place ANYWAY. The premise here is that were we to have the bravery to stop this activity called “the economy” now and suffer whatever human losses we get, at least life will continue for a while.
Now, to be fair, i too disagree that the collapse of the industrial economy will take place “in time to do any good” for the rest of the planet. It’s far too late since we’ve gone well past the tipping points we were warned against years ago. In Guy’s last talk he mentioned that we’ve tripped EIGHT of these now (where it was 5 about 8 months to a year ago). More evidence comes out every day to show that the IPCC completely low-balled their estimates of how long we have to “fix” the damage we’ve done and the (bullshit) climate talks in Doha are producing the same meaningless drivel with which to contine business as usual.
For the life of me i cannot understand how these big business leaders and government stooges can continue doing what they’re doing, unless they are just not paying any attention at all to the facts right in front of them – Hurricane Sandy, Typhoon Bopha, continuing drought in the Southwest US and spreading (not to mention worldwide), diseases, crop loss, record warm temperatures year after year, and massive flooding worldwide. What, they don’t see the pattern? This is going to effect them and their loved ones too! Nobody is going to survive! We’re looking at next year to maybe 5 years out producing cataclysmic problems for life on earth. As witnessed here with massive tree death, ocean acidification, difficulties raising crops and livestock getting worse and all the rest – all you have to do is “connect the dots” to see that they’re all related and that we’re in for big trouble real soon (and it’s irreversable at this point).
Nevertheless, i appreciated the essay and completely agree that the economy should be re-engineered to a more localized system of self-sufficiency for as long as it lasts rather than continuing along our same crazy path.
December 5th, 2012 at 8:03 am
Ironically the word economy is derived from the word economize….
….which as a definition is anything other than what our economy is today……..
……..to conserve and regulate for the long term..
.to economize…
….is in direct contrast to a current day economy that is predicated on the short term success of the next quarter’s earnings even if planned obsolesce of consumption is necessary to facilitate that growth……..and of course, all at the peril of the limited resources and environment in which this system of exploitation is exercised.
…….when you really think about it…….
…the building of wealth has led to the inequality and abuse of all systems……
….wealth in its simplest terms is an excess of essentials for the purpose of either expanding material desires or planning of the future. But in order to build wealth an unequal distribution of the use of resources is most often the result……….when you add to the equation of wealth building an exponential population growth then the system will head to collapse in one way or another………is there anymore dramatic example of this inequality when you consider that on this planet, 1 billion humans are overweight/obese while 3 billion are undernourished and starved?
Humans are a product of their own success……..like the dinosaurs, we are the dominant species on the planet in our time.
……….but unlike them, we have the cognitive ability to recognize and manipulate the planet unlike any previous living species.
Perhaps the evolution to self-awareness coupled with appendages to convert that cognitive ability into tool making material wealth may be the end of the road for most living systems on life sustaining planets in the universe if that self-aware species doesn’t supersede an economic system of exploitation before either exhaustion or collapse……
In other words………..we are destined to extinction before our time………….and much of the environmental evidence says we may be too late to stop this premature extinction…….
It is the economic model of a debt based global banking system that will assure us that the engine of economic progress will drive full steam ahead whether it is real or illusioned…….until it flys off the cliff of sustainablity…….taking us and most if not all living species with it……
Economists always say growth can continue through material substitution and/or increased productivity and they’ve been right for most of the last 300 years….
………..but you can only substitute and produce for so long until like bacteria in a petri dish……..you hit the end game of food resources just when it appears you’ve taken over the whole dish.
This is really sad stuff to contemplate……..I’d like to think I’m completely wrong but no evidence I’ve researched indicates to me that I am.
December 5th, 2012 at 8:45 am
Thank you, Duffy, for expressing your sentiments.
Animals that have no interaction except mating with other members of their species, not even parental care, are solitary. When the only other interaction is parental care, they are subsocial. When there are other transactions in interactions with adult members of the same species, they are parasocial, but it still falls short of eusociality of ants, wasps, bees and termites.
Humans fall into the category of parasocial. In the tree from the evolution of our primate ancestors, we have social groupings in all the great apes and our hominid ancestors. Transactions amongst individuals is through a gift economy, the exchange of gifts. With the earliest divisions of labor in human societies, this was still adequate, but increasing complexity necessitated a commercial economy with a medium of exchange. This is the basis of the “economy”, viz. a non-gift economy. The primary economy continues to be the natural resources, the secondary economy continues to be the useable products created therefrom, and “economic activity” is the conversion of resource into product. The tertiary economy is the management (and now the nefarious manipulation of the medium of exchange, which is the symbols or tokens (also mnown as money) that are exchangeable for items of the primary and secondary economies. As long as the division of labor amongst humans is too complex for a gift economy, there will be a conventional economy. Man making money is the better for it. Money making man is the worse for both.
December 5th, 2012 at 8:54 am
Land Beyond you wrote “You missed out the bit about how destroying the “economy” means bringing forward the mass die-off. Funny how that part is often overlooked.”
I guess you missed out on all the essays on this site that say not destroying the economy will bring forward extinction – ie mass die off of EVERYONE forever.
OTOH Many of us think that is inevitable now anyway so it doesn’t matter if some want to end civ and some don’t.
December 5th, 2012 at 9:22 am
Usually, the negotiation for an extended life is made … in exchange for a reformed lifestyle.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BCbler-Ross_model
Bargaining Nobly
Good and evil, defined by some sage,
Are imbued at an early age:
‘Tis nobler to suffer
And show that you’re tougher
While working the bargaining stage.
December 5th, 2012 at 9:53 am
Landbeyond,
I’m not sure what you need the pharmaceuticals for, but I would be willing to bet a dollar that what ailment you suffer from itself is a product of industrial civilization.
If not, well, I’ll mail you the dollar. I will also point out that the pharmaceutical industry — indeed, the entire healthcare industrial complex — is reliant upon the fossil fuel industry. This means first, it cannot survive the global peak in petroleum extraction. More importantly though, it means that the healthcare industrial complex while “healing one person” is making another sick. Plastic, vinyl, and latex, biological waste, reliance on fossil fuels for electricity, all if doesn’t vanish after use. It ends up incinerated and in the air, or dumped in a pit and thus in the water, etc.
So still, killing the economy is a net gain for ALL life in the long run, despite the immediate suffering it would cause those dependent on it now.
And yes, I long ago accepted that however this culmination of calamity strikes us, it will likely kill most of the people I know and love, including myself. I’m OK with this. Because I don’t believe that I am more important than the web of life on Earth.
Nothing is free. We have a lot of sins to pay for.
December 5th, 2012 at 10:42 am
“South Park” on the economy:
http://www.southparkstudios.com/full-episodes/s13e03-margaritaville
“Margaritaville” reflected Parker and Stone’s belief that most Americans view the economy in the same way as religion, in that it is seldom understood but seen as an important, elusive entity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaritaville_(South_Park)
December 5th, 2012 at 10:58 am
Nice rant. You seem to imply that humans have a chance. Is that correct? If so, you are at odds with the premise of NBL and many of the regular posters here. If humans are already doomed, and NTE is in the oven and expected to be done no later than 2030, what’s the point of ranting and activating? What’s to be gained, when the fat lady has already sung?
December 5th, 2012 at 11:40 am
I feel every bit the despair and anger that you have poured forth in this article. Every ounce of me wants to see this fiscal cliff plunge and as you say, have this man made construct buried once and for all.
Love and Rage,
C2R
December 5th, 2012 at 11:45 am
Collapse, I think I share Guy’s perspective which is we are likely fucked, but if we do nothing, then we are surely fucked.
I also think beyond human beings, and want to do everything possible in the hope that something survives.
Further, I as a matter of personal character, cannot abide bullies, abusers, and/or oppressors.
I guess a large part of the essay is killing the “Environment VS. Jobs” argument.” Fuck jobs. Fuck the economy.
December 5th, 2012 at 12:21 pm
.
I’m sitting here in my room
Where it’s pleasant to talk about gloom;
Once the pain has begun,
It won’t be as much fun,
So I’m not looking forward to doom.
December 5th, 2012 at 12:24 pm
Great blog post. I think we’re pretty much doomed at this point. If you read the reports of what’s coming out of the talks in Qatar it’s basically NOTHING. And, true to your blog it seems most nations are either using their economy or their national security as reasons they can’t implement significant changes to, at least, curtail climate change.
Hopefully several millennia from when we drive ourselves to extinction whatever form of beings evolve to replace us will find evidence of how stupid we were with our environment and do better.
Oh, by the way. All those TV shows, advertisers and such have successfully ensnared young men now too. There is a rise of young men trying to be thin and “buff” who are buying all sorts of supplements and spending hours and hours at the gym. Also taking illegal steroids.
Just like the young women; they are trying to change or mask their inherent body type for one that is idolized on TV and in advertisements.
December 5th, 2012 at 12:32 pm
Sorry John, but your essay doesn’t seem to fully take into account the science behind NTE. The exponential ecological dilemmas now at hand, are unfortunately well beyond homo-economicus, it’s nothing but anthropology from here on out. It’s terribly difficult for us to accept the very thing we are attempting to discuss from one moment to the next.It’s a tinderbox of passion and grief all at once.
But, I see NBL as a forum whose basis is founded on the acceptance that we are now living pass the point of no return. If it’s not, then we have no business halfheartedly discussing NTE. Continuing to jump back and forth between to existing paradigms, only allows us to falsely imagine we’ve the agency to change the very thing we claim is now out of reach.
December 5th, 2012 at 12:51 pm
In case anyone missed it, please read Daniel’s post from the last thread again:
” Daniel Says:
December 5th, 2012 at 12:08 am
Random thoughts on NTE
Apparently, it’s a strange yet common compulsion to reach out in desperation, to either commiserate or alleviate the unparalleled anxiety that comes with the acute awareness of our collapsing world. I’ve seen this behavior repeated enough times, by countless others, to know that I too, must be acting out of duress far more than whatever moral imperative I once imagined to be my driving force.
We all get lost in discerning who has and hasn’t the proper credentials, to corroborate all the pieces from specialized fields into a complete picture, so as to distinguish what is otherwise staring us in the face. We are all guilty to some degree, of subscribing to the meritocracy which attempts to shine a light into the very darkness it creates.
Whether we’re unable to see the forest through the trees, or a tree in a forest, our inculcation has made fools of us all. And for those sentient beings who have seen what was coming for an awfully long time–and there are many–it now appears to have only aided in bringing those of us that much closer to losing our minds in such unprecedented acceptance, that it seems to be defying the act of acceptance itself.
The relentless internal and external conflicts that consume the lives of anyone who has chosen a similar path, has found only insoluble unprecedence at every turn. Wherein, being intellectually trapped by the overwhelming evidence that has made acceptance and defeatism nearly inseparable, we are but left to individually wrestle with the subtle distinctions between what it means to be completely heartbroken, and just finally fall apart.
The further one digs for the truth, one eventually must comes to terms with the hypocrisy, culpability and privilege which has afforded us the opportunity to dig for the truth in the first place. And whatever conclusion one draws, it is but an indirect result from such privilege. This is one of the most unidentified and duplicitous aspects of attempting to discern reality from what our culture buries, given we are all mired in the very traditions we imagine ourselves to be living outside of.
If you look at something long enough, it inevitably changes, you just don’t see it the way you did in the beginning. Often it’s idealism that brings something new to our doorstep, but such rosy romanticism often quickly fades into familiar patterns. The same goes for what we think about. Contemplate anything for long enough, and inevitably, it will alter under the weight of inquiry. Doesn’t matter what it is, just the act of thinking about something, has the power to change the way we see everything. And if one dedicates their life to specifically contemplating the collapse of both civilization and the Holocene for a significant amount of time–as many of us have–inevitably, we’re going to have an entirely different opinion then we did from day one. Study anything for years, and we’ll discover most everyone to be in the dark in regards to whatever lessons we’ve come to learn.
NTE is a story of what happens when you look at something for too long. When the basic power of deduction eventually distills our entire culture down to nothing but vain meaninglessness in the face of our self-destruction. When perceived solutions to society’s ills, not only fade, but are gradually revealed to have only ever been imaginary to begin with. This is a story about how literally everything that we believe–the very act of believing in fact–is barely removed from most childish fantasies.
Once reality forces us to examine our obvious failure to prevent the collapse of our biosphere, one discovers only voids in the very places we once “believed” to be filled with potential significance. Wherein absence of sober rational acceptance of our true state, we find only blind faith in comforting fairytales across the entire spectrum of humanity. Where it takes the entire Arctic to melt, before society finally accepts that life on earth, might not be able to magically walk across water.
When a citizen within a completely unsustainable culture, eventually comes to grasp the depth of our civic invalidity in all respects, there are only two options left us: continue the fantasy or engage in despairing.
But this was true long before we discovered the reality of NTE. However, we’re now learning this juggernaut, is shooting everything out of the sky.
So now what?
That does seem to be the one question we can’t stop asking ourselves, nor can we find any satisfactory answer to. And it’s not as if we should be surprised, we are after all, literally considering the single greatest unfathomable dilemma in the history of the human race. So, it only makes sense that we would be at a complete loss as how to respond. One could easily make the claim, that there has never been a better cause to be completely confused, sad, lost, depressed, defeated and outright miserable, and that these emotions are wholly appropriate given the circumstances. One could argue further, given the staggering loss of life, if it’s at all possible to honestly feel any other way?
Again, while the empirical evidence is quickly becoming incontrovertible, this window of time in which we are currently commiserating is still being framed as a relative abstract concept. For us, food still abounds, even amidst increasing drought, with worldwide famine looming just over the horizon. We’re presently inhabiting some sort of unparalleled reality between a priori and a posteriori knowledge. While our judgment is based on an event that is currently happening, its dire impact has yet to fully manifest. That’s one hell of a Sword of Domiciles. Nor is this a confident position from which to ponder such life altering phenomena.
But, regardless of this inescapable dilemma, most of us, I would presume are feeling extremely compelled to make some kind of major life altering change, especially if we are still young enough to undertake it. Particularity, if making that change doesn’t involve having to dash the aspirations of our dependent children.
If NTE is anything, it is blunt. And for anyone who has the internal fortitude to value truth at all costs, where we allow such communicable evidence to spread throughout our vested interests, beyond the point of self-preservation, bluntly, soon discovers there really isn’t much left to consider once we have. It’s not as if there’s a bevy of options to weigh, as to how NTE is ultimately going to play out. Aside from one incredibly loaded taboo, they’re all gruesome in their own right. They’re all utterly hopeless.
The awareness of NTE metaphorically has ran from a once lush passive valley floor, up the steep learning cliffs, pass the accredited timberline, into a barren wasteland where the radical air has always been thin. Our lungs gasp and our minds grapple with the unwanted view. The journey has been epic, such sacrifice. But who could have imagined we could now see so far, with there being so little to be seen.
There is no life up here, only death and indifference. If we remain inaccessible in this awareness, all the living below becomes its own frightening abyss, and we’ll freeze to death in our contempt of it. At some point we must descend back down, pass the raging fires to the flooded valleys if we desire to hold onto what precious moments remain.
I remember the folly in having something to prove when I started the climb decades ago, that there must be some ultimate truth buried in the crown of our achievements. But now I can see clearly for myself. My guides are all trapped in the ice and I no longer care who’s right, or what that profound truth means anymore. We’ve all been mistaken, there is no more work to be done. There is nothing to prepare for.
I thought I was somehow escaping, but all I discovered was resignation. Strange that I can no longer tell the difference.
Death is coming my friends,it’s already here, there is nothing to fear, all we’ve left to decide is how we’ll meet it. I am done resisting. I am done with self-preservation. The inescapable sadness has finally found a way out. Time to let go, and finally live, as we’ll never be again.”
I wish I could get people to understand your post, Daniel. I’ll keep trying.
December 5th, 2012 at 1:25 pm
There’s not much point raging against the Fates or the Furies.
I’m not particularly angry or outraged any more. Once I was, but now I’m just fascinated, amazed, amused, bemused, curious. I attach no moral dimension to this unfolding any more, though once I did. Now there is no blame, no more agonized wishes to rewrite the past, no more fearful visions of a shattered future.
We are what we are, we did what we did, we ended up here.
I’v very curious to see what comes next. Aren’t you?
December 5th, 2012 at 1:49 pm
For decades the excuse for inaction was, “Someone else is working on a solution. Experts will figure it out.”
Now the excuse for inaction is, “It’s too late. No one worked on a solution. Nothing can be done now, so just accept it.”
Seems to me that maybe, just maybe, people like to find reasons to avoid doing things that seem hard.
If I walked into a room and my wife was being stabbed to death, even if I entered at the moment that life was draining from her eyes, I would still beat her attacker to death with my own hands. Even if it was too late to save her, I would fight. Because that’s what we do when we love someone.
But this culture has us not loving our home, not loving our living family, and not even loving ourselves.
December 5th, 2012 at 1:49 pm
As I drove home from work yesterday, all I could see in both directions were miles of headlights and taillights. All I could think to myself was that “this is unsustainable.” It has become a daily mantra for me as I see the waste and endless environmental degradation that our economy and Western civilization produces. This is unsustainable!!
December 5th, 2012 at 1:52 pm
New comments on Arctic News:
http://arctic-news.blogspot.ca/
December 5th, 2012 at 2:37 pm
Starving snowy owls migrate to British Columbia:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2012/12/05/bc-snowy-owl-starving.html
Just a lack of lemmings this year. No biggie. Oh, and it was bad last year as well. Fancy that. Natural cycle. You know. Happens every so often. Nothing to worry about.
December 5th, 2012 at 2:47 pm
John, would it be better if I shared your outrage? Why? The world is big enough for us both, no? I have plenty of love for the things that need loving – the moment I live in included. I even love parts of my culture. Parts not so much – like everything else in life.
I spent 10 years being angry at everything and everyone for being so stupid, docile or venal. Then I realized it wasn’t the rest of the world that was being stupid. I don’t think we need to judge everything in sight in order to work for a better world. So I stopped. I’m happier now, and I actually get more done. My adrenal glands will now last at least until TEOTWAWKI.
December 5th, 2012 at 3:08 pm
I don’t care if people share my outrage or not. I care whether or not they are defending the systems which are killing life. If you can dance between the raindrops and keep a cool head while fighting the good fight, great.
Nothing in the essay I wrote is asking people to emote a certain way about this. It’s asking people to smash the acceptable parameters of the discussion. The narrow window in which we are allowed to talk about this is generally in a context of what deindustrializing will mean for us economically. We need to firmly say, “I don’t give a damn!” That’s like watching a professional baseball player rape your kid, and when you try to stop him, people asking you to first think about how that will effect his season.
December 5th, 2012 at 3:36 pm
I think things could have turned out different for us, given our amount of smarts and lack of wisdom. Some cultures lasted a long time and didn’t wreck their environment. Some still do. What is the difference? In my opinion, they see themselves as a part of nature, doing a dance with nature that we call the food cycle. The partners in this dance, (think of a square dance), are the plants, animals, phytoplankton, air, water, land. All partners are respected and needed and appreciated so they are cared for. They grab their partners and dance while they have the chance to.
The food chain tells us to kill everything below us, that we are at the top and thus it stops there. And it IS stopping there. We killed our partners.
December 5th, 2012 at 3:40 pm
Do you see a difference between “defending the system” and “choosing neither to defend nor oppose the system”? Some people believe that’s not possible, and take the Manichean view that one can only defend or oppose. those who try to remain neutral are seen by the defenders as opposition, and by the opposition as defenders. What’s your take on that?
December 5th, 2012 at 4:05 pm
Many of us old timers read of our fate in the 70′s. It was clear then that it would be bad now if we did nothing. We did nothing. The minority of us who tried a different path were ridiculed.
I too see no point to rage. It looks like the projection of the personal responsibility each of us have, and continue to have. We remain a part of the forced march to our demise. No rant spares us from our responsibility.
Plainly our species is not up to doing the right thing. At its base this problem is about all of us. I agree we should be truthful, but it will not make any difference now.
We should keep in mind that the studies predicting our demise are about 2 years old. These greatly revised studies of a year or two before they were published. What we observed this year on the ground seems clear — we are exponential now. I doubt we have 10 years left. We don’t need the next 2-years-too-old study to point out what is going on. It is terrifying.
So what now? Prepare to die, prepare to comfort those who made the wrong choices that made this happen, just as we must forgive ourselves. This is coming on very fast. We are flying blind quoting 2 year old studies. It is not time for rage, it is time for compassion and understanding. Yes, it is time for love that understands we are indeed all fallible, and yes, we all failed. All of us.
Michael
December 5th, 2012 at 4:09 pm
Daniel Says: …jump back and forth between to existing paradigms….
Studying doomer decline
Makes mental parts realign;
A new paradigm
Requires some time
For the parts to correctly combine.
December 5th, 2012 at 4:14 pm
Daniel, from where I sit that’s the clear and honest truth. Compassion, love, forgiveness and surrender are the high arts we need to practice now.
December 5th, 2012 at 4:33 pm
John: i’m not arguing that your point has validity (ie. trying to stop our ridiculous “economy” as soon as possible – today, if we can – so that at least the planet can continue along), and no one here is simply throwing in the towel and doing nothing. We’re all still part of this mess – even if we’re trying to stop it! Look at all the people trying to stop the Keystone XL pipeline or fracking (which i’m involved in)! We still have to commute, communicate, and consume. Where the problem arises is that a good 90% of the population has NO IDEA that this is coming! All they see are the day-to-day changes (more rain per storm, gustier winds, persistant drought, unpredictable or at least unreliable weather, and effects on plants, bats, bees, birds, fish, etc.) but they’re too busy with their little lives to connect the dots. It would be great to end the economy, but it takes a while to transition to a more local variety and to work out all the details. We don’t have that kind of time any more.
i believe the powers that be know all this and are actively “prepping” for it, while we are resigned to our fate (but still living our lives).
The consensus here, i believe, is that no amount of prepping is going to save anyone in the long haul. If you’ve been following Guy’s talks he quotes the science as saying that all this carbon (and now methane and nitrous oxide too) we’ve put into the atmosphere will be there for THOUSANDS OF YEARS and that the real effects of it will make the planet uninhabitable before long (like the middle of this century) – even if all carbon pollution stopped today!
Your analogies regarding saving a PERSON from harm are far removed from what it will take to even slow this “runaway freight train” of civilization down, what with all the vested interest groups making money off of the perverted, unsustainable way it is and no leadership from the corporatist governments anywhere on the globe. We’re locked in, and the only choice is what you individually want to do with your remaining time and energy. i still fight the fracking in my state actively, but i know that down the road (and the road ain’t that long anymore) it’s all going to stop anyway. Many are waiting for the economic crash to occur, which will have the affect of stopping everything (human) in its tracks. As brought up by many here, one main concern is shutting down (decommissioning) the almost 500 nuclear power plants while we still have the energy,money and time – so that they don’t all go Fukushima on us at the same time. That would be a great place to put your energy. Stopping the economy isn’t going to happen because we ask nicely, or point out that we’re going the wrong way or that we’re killing ourselves and the planet – these soulless corporations don’t care and the 1%ers won’t allow anything to get between or slow down the money they’re making.
Face it – civilization was a big mistake and now we’re going to pay for it. Where we should have been like the Native Americans or the Caribbean islanders when Columbus found them, we (the “dominant” invaders) only saw “opportunity” – and look where it got us. The christian church funded these trips! It’s all so twisted and wrong, but that’s what happened.
Live your life out as best you can (everyone) and go down fighting to bring awareness of our predicament to those who have the ability to change the way we, as a society, live. No matter what way we go a lot of humanity is going to die in the process, and most of us here think that, at this point, all of us are relegated to the dustbin of history (just another failed civilization) because we never heeded the warnings when we had time (look at Rachel Carson, Paul Ehrlich, and many others).
So, to conclude: it’s not sitting by and doing nothing. It’s changing the way YOU want to live so that YOU feel better on the way out.
December 5th, 2012 at 4:34 pm
Sorry, I meant Michael… My apologies.
December 5th, 2012 at 4:44 pm
@ Paul, I thought you were talking to me. That sort of thing does not bother me, it’s the thought that counts.
Michael
December 5th, 2012 at 4:52 pm
So, basically, the author of the essay hates everything and everyone who’s allowed this “economy” thing to exist. That begs the question: what would he have the objects of his hatred do? Bitch and moan? Blow stuff up? Drop what they’re doing and follow his example? What is his example, anyway?
The fact of the matter is: humanity existed long before any of us were around, and will continue to exist long after we’re all gone. Each generation faces what seem like insurmountable perils, and then somehow surmounts them — only to wind up as worm food, of course. It’s wishful thinking that leads to a belief that everyone else will join us before their respective times are up.
My advice would be to just enjoy life. If the Earth eventually succumbs to man-made disease, so be it. There’s nothing you can do about it, anyway. In the meantime, there’s still plenty of drinkable water, breathable air, healthy soil, etc.
Nothing lasts forever — even cold November rain.
December 5th, 2012 at 5:32 pm
but my friends keep sending me these links about a urine powered electrical generator… you mean that wont save us… sigh
December 5th, 2012 at 5:45 pm
NTE:
A certainty, a probability, a possibility, or an impossibility. It can’t be all of these, it either will be or won’t be. Dieoff or not. But even among those who say not, some will concede a coming dieBACK. And amongst those again there are vastly differing opinions on HOW FAR back.
Few who think that corrective action is necessary would posit that the window is wide open. The main point of difference is on how far that window has closed (and if shut, whether there is indeed a “bottleneck” that some can squeeze through, escaping extinction).
With Dr. McPherson’s essay “We’re Done” the premise of NBL shifted to a shut window of opportunity for rectification. The idea of a bottleneck past a closed window had already been discarded.
This does not mean that heretics should be burned at the stake. One man’s believer is another man’s heretic. Indeed for those who consider NTE a done deal, it is as pointless to oppose BAU as to oppose the advocates of corrective action. All that matters now is how to minimise and mitigate suffering (h/t to the virgin terry for first mentioning it on NBL).
Those who grouse about the inconsistency of proposing corrective action with the premise of NBL have their own inner conflicts that provoke the grousing. The inconsistency does not bother confirmed NTErs, since to them the inconsistencies no longer matter. That is why Dr. McPherson puts up such an essay.
December 5th, 2012 at 6:42 pm
A recent national newspaper headline in Australia:
Sydney Morning Herald
‘The End Of The World As We Know IT’
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/its-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it-20121202-2ap4l.html
This has a video segment on the website, of which is not going to shock any regulars here, but interesting it is on the front page now.
A snippet:
“The world is on track to see “an unrecognisable planet” that is between 4 and 6 degrees hotter by the end of this century, according to new data on greenhouse gas emissions.
As United Nations climate negotiations enter their second week in Doha, Qatar, an Australian-based international research effort that tracks greenhouse gas output will release its annual findings on Monday, showing emissions climbing too quickly to stave off the effects of dangerous climate change.
The new forecast does not include recent revelations about the effects of thawing permafrost, which is starting to release large amounts of methane from the Arctic. This process makes cutting human emissions of fossil fuels even more urgent, scientists say….
Emissions are growing in line with the most extreme climate models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, according to a paper in the journal Nature Climate Change that explains the Global Carbon Project’s findings.
The trajectory means a temperature range of between 3.5 and 6.2 degrees by the year 2100, with a “most likely” range of between 4.2 and 5 degrees.
Although the climate has changed due to natural influences in the past, human emissions superimposed on top of natural variation is now driving change 20 times faster, according to NASA estimates. Civilisation evolved in a more moderate environment.
The new data is beginning to confirm what scientists had been warning people about for decades, said Andy Pitman, director of the Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science at the University of NSW.
“There are papers that should come with a warning: ‘do not read this if you are depressed’, or ‘please have a stiff drink handy as you read this’. [This] paper is one such example,” Professor Pitman said.
The greenhouse gas emissions path the world is taking “is not a tenable future for the planet – we cannot be that stupid as a species,” he said.
…”
That stupid?… Don’t bet!
Also, see how far off 2100 is….and this is how we arrived here, listening to those with some social ‘authority’.
December 5th, 2012 at 7:33 pm
BC Nurse Prof
In the comments from the previous post you wrote:
“Sometimes I wonder: who will be last? Will it be someone who is rich now? Will it be a poor person hunting and gathering to the end? Someone who gathered slaves from the starving masses to produce the last of the food for them? Or someone who has never encountered civilization.
A moot point, to be sure, but I’m reduced to wondering anyway.”
My take is that it will be the Aboriginals here who will finally get their land back, because they have so many hundreds of thousands of years of memory of how to survive on this huge continent that will sustain them, if anyone can make it.
BTW, it seems obvious to me the whole European concept of individual ownwership, and then property ownership, is one key root of the development of the industrial way of life.
Shared ‘ownership’ or interdependence between human and land worked well for so long.
Maybe it will be again somtime?
December 5th, 2012 at 8:00 pm
Well written John. I was reading in Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual today and Bill Mollison says something very similar to what you say.
“Although this book is about design, it is also about values and ethics, and above all about a sense of personal responsibility for earth care. I have written at times in the first person, to indicate that it is not a detached, impersonal, or even unbiased document. Every book or publication has an author, and what that author chooses to write about is subjective, for that person alone determines the subject, content, and the values expressed or omitted.” p. 1
Bill is advocating personal responsibility for what we are doing to ourselves and the Earth. Personal Responsibility. That means taking on our share of the burden, no matter what the results will be. If we manage to save anything, that’s ok. If we don’t manage to save anything, at least we tried to redeem ourselves for our foolishness in disconnecting ourselves from the world we live in and attempting to rule over all when we quite obviously lack the wisdom that idea requires.
It’s time to get back to values rather than putting a $ sign on everything we see.
December 5th, 2012 at 9:44 pm
I thought I would post this, from a right-wing website to show you the typical attitude of many on the right in the US towards efforts that shows any concern for the environment. In this case Portland OR, which is trying to reduce water waste into its rivers in order to save the Oregon salmon from extinction. Note that the author of this story never bothered to find that out. To them all such efforts are only done to annoy conservatives or restrict their freedom. The pure horror of having to pull the lever on a toilet twice is just too much of a restriction on their freedom to waste. It’s common to see ridicule of people who drive electric cars or rage against people who ride bicycles, which only get in the way of their massive gas guzzlers. I remember reading some joking that when they see electric cars it makes them want to idle the trucks in the driveway just to waste gas in response. Judging from the Romney vote, you have to figure at least close to half the people in the US have these kinds of attitudes.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/11/brief-adventures-in-portlandia.php
December 5th, 2012 at 11:12 pm
On John’s article:
The ice cores from Greenland revealed that abrupt climate change has happened before, with temps fluctuating as much as 20F in spans of time as short as a decade. Let’s just say that this coming year, temps stay 10F or even 5F above average over most of the US, I’m no expert, but wouldn’t that mean that by Sept/Oct the entire country will have burned to the ground in Dresden style firestorms, thus putting an end to the industrial economy? Won’t climate change put an end to the economy long before any activism could be able to do it?
December 5th, 2012 at 11:18 pm
Here’s the place to follow the story, until the servers get roasted in the the firestorms.
http://www.weather.com/maps/maptype/currentweatherusnational/usdeparturefromnormalhighs_large.html?clip=undefined®ion=undefined&collection=localwxforecast&presname=undefined
December 5th, 2012 at 11:28 pm
Dave balance says says:
“Hopefully several millennia from when we drive ourselves to extinction whatever form of beings evolve to replace us will find evidence of how stupid we were with our environment and do better.”
Interesting notion, but highly unlikely. In the darkness (of consciousness) in this part of this galaxy following the closing of the human chapter, it will be many thousand millennia before any species will even be close to having the kind of self-reflective consciousness capable of entertaining the kind of thought processes you suggest. The reason being he many likely species to evolve such consciousness will be taken down with the extinction of Homo sapiens sapiens. Given this vast length of time, it will be more than enough tome for the continents to move and the geological processes to completely scour the surface and bring down any record of the human race into the deep crust of the earth to be crushed, melted, and churned out of existence. No one will know we were here unless some passing Alien traveller or their robotic ambassador happens by this part of the galaxy before such time as the aforementioned geological scouring has been completed. Thanks for all the fish.
December 6th, 2012 at 12:53 am
Thanks John, and also Guy, Paul, Michael, Tom et al. This is the most honest and advanced discussion of this subject I’ve found, and reading it filled me with relief. I am torn between becoming an activist devoting what’s left of my life to smashing the system that’s killing us, and just giving up and living my life to the fullest every day (while still doing my small and totally inadequate part passively to minimize my contribution to the destruction). I’ve realized that there’s no ‘right’ answer as to which to do. We each need to find our own answer, and do our best to inform others so that they do too. As Derrick Jensen says, we need it all. Even though we know it’s hopeless, we still need it all.
December 6th, 2012 at 2:03 am
Here on the dairy farm, I have one full time employee. He knows what I think of the situation but takes the position that “I might be wrong”. I told him I just didn’t know what action to take. Currently, we use lots of fuel, electricity, chemicals etc. to produce lots of food. Should I stop doing that? I tend to think I should go all out to produce food until I can’t. He wants to convert to a grazing operation. That would require lots of electric fence, lots of plastic pipe to pump water lots of different places. What’s the point of even trying. I told him my main problem is I don’t have the ambition, motivation required to do changes. It doesn’t matter any more, especially if the changes still use technology. We agreed to stay flexible and adapt to the “changes”. That’s a loaded word if ever there was one.
December 6th, 2012 at 3:26 am
OZ man, I used to think like you that some hunter-gatherers would be last. They have such incredible skills. Of course we have to look at the map of where the nuclear power plants in the world are http://blogs.ft.com/energy-source/2011/03/16/the-nuclear-world-interactive-map/#axzz2EGYHKjKl and this too gives many hunter-gatherers a chance to be last as they are clustered in the Northern Hemisphere.
But given coming extinction it seems like being last in a world killed by others is a terrible fate…
December 6th, 2012 at 3:31 am
We don’t even know all that will go missing….a beautiful love story, but so very sad. Thanks for all the fish
The Deep Sea Mystery Circle – a love story
http://www.spoon-tamago.com/2012/09/18/deep-sea-mystery-circle-love-story/
December 6th, 2012 at 5:37 am
One quality that I see in almost all humans I encounter is the need to “do something”. It seems to be a unique quality of ours. As I watch the animals on our little farm, none of them seem to have the same compulsion. Sure they are driven to eat and drink and sleep and mate, and the young ones seem to love to play. But as far as I can tell none of them worry about anything. They just live in the moment. While I can certainly appreciate the feelings you express in your essay John, I’m not convinced that “doing something” isn’t exactly what caused humans to have problems in the first place.
To be clear, I have the same compulsion myself. I have felt the need to “do something” my entire life. Whether it involved my career, my relationships, my social life, my home, the environment, those with HIV, “doing something” has been my mantra.
There is no evidence, however, that “doing something” has made the world a better place. In fact, to the contrary, all of this “doing something” is what has led us to where we are.
Following that train of thought, I am convinced that nothing we do now will make things any better, but rather will simply worsen our current situation. For me, I’ll just relax and try to stop “doing” so much.
If I can. Man, not “doing something” is a tough thing to “do”.
December 6th, 2012 at 6:12 am
According to this person, the cell phone industry is causing much more damage than they acknowledge, from brain tumors to widespread pollution of the environment. He also says microwave technology has the capacity to induce physiological, neurological, mental and physical damage and that it’s been perfected into a weapon for control and decimation of populations. Sounds paranoid and far-fetched, but he makes a valid point.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQaRecYakdg
As John Prine says: “blow up yer tee vee, throw away yer papers, go to the country, build you a home . . .”
December 6th, 2012 at 7:11 am
4 Most At-Risk Foods for Radiation Contamination
Considering John Duffy’s point and Kathy C’s consistent pounding home of the 400+ Fukes, is it wise and ethical to continue on as a dairy farmer? The Jews who cooperated with the Nazis and led their fellow Jews into the gas chambers and shoveled their bodies into the furnaces did so with the idea in mind that they would survive……somehow. With the certainty expressed with NTE, saying “it doesn’t matter anyway” falls a little too loosely from the lips. Considering the article, to be a dairy farmer when in agreement with the certainty of NTE, is worse than leading fellow Jews into the showers. It’s the Nazis dropping the Zyklon B, meaning you are administering an early and heinous death via the delivery of radiation-tainted milk to people’s doorsteps. Sure, you can rationalize it away, but so too did the Nazis rationalize it away, and if the Nazis were successful, it would have been seen as a positive thing throughout the entirety of history thereafter. Only because the Nazis were defeated, did history attach a stigma and stern admonishment, but had the Nazis won, history would have looked upon them as saviors.
December 6th, 2012 at 7:26 am
Kathy C.,
Thanks for sharing that story. The immensity, variety, and beauty of this living universe constantly amazes. And think of all the species that have come and gone in the eons before human time, and all the planets circling all those stars spread across this galaxy that have amazing forms of life that have come and gone, and all those galaxies spread across this universe, and all those universes bubbling up and expanding forever from the very quantum foam that reality is made of…
Does it sooth the soul to know that Sub specie aeternitatis, we are but a very brief light, a firefly in an infinite ocean conscious beings going back to infinity and forward to infinity. And though as we perceive time this is all a “very long time”, this flowering of life and consciousness Sub specie aeternitatis is continual, like an eternal summer.
How to act if you know that our story, the human story, though may (or may not) be ending soon, is just one of an infinite number evolving, flowering, and eventually passing and spread across eternity?
With dignity, joy, love, laughter, sorrow, hope, despair, and all the other jewells that are the gift of the infinte flowering of consciousness.
December 6th, 2012 at 7:31 am
I am interested in a thread that attempts to get a better grip on how this all fails and when. We understand many basic facts. Reality is closing in now, I feel much like it must be when huge bombers can be hear coming at a distance. We know it is coming, we imagine it might not get us.
My guess is that we have 10 years, and quite possibly less. Here is my thinking:
1. The technology that got us into this mess, cannot get us out of it. There is no human project that can scale up to the global scale required, if it could, there is not enough time. No technofix. We must lose this line of bullshit, it clouds our thinking and displaces our personal responsibility. There is no “they” who will “fix” the “it” we really don’t understand very well. There is no political will anyway.
2. The self-reinforcing methane feedback loop is impossible to characterize, and to understand. Recent studies have all been quite bad in predicting timetables, not only because they ignore the positive feedback loops, but I doubt they understand how whole climate systems operate, or for that matter how whole systems operate. We are flying mostly blind, it is the best we can do. The feedback loops are far worse than we predict. We are always surprised in the wrong way.
3. Because we congratulate ourselves as being the top of the food chain, we somehow imagine we will be the last to die off. If we know that roughly 200 species go extinct a day, then when can we expect the faltering ecosystem to kill us? If the total extinction of all species projected about 2030 (or so) is correct, our reliance on other species will kill us well before 2030, I think 2023. Also, our die-off does not require a complete die-off of all other species. It only requires a significant contraction in the total population of those species. This is what I think I am seeing first hand by the way. Witness the bee die-off for example.
4. Some of us, because of wealth or our survivalist strategy (pick one), imagine the “other people” will die before we do. Perhaps, but looking deeply I don’t see how this holds up to careful examination. A brief tour of badly stressed populations around the world does not reveal a willingness to just die, they will do what they have to do to survive. We are all in this together, we will live together and die together. I am not advocating “bullets and beans”, none of that will work.
5. Lack of compassion and community are our Achilles heel. Will we share when others have no way of reciprocating? Do we have the emotional maturity to be compassionate in the face of emotional outbursts or attempts to steal from us (to survive)? Perhaps this is the most difficult ground, it is hard for us to face up to it. Pointing the finger is easier.
I would be interested in what others think on this. My essential points are 2,3, and 5. These take me to 10 years to lights out for you and me. This makes it up close and personal. If 2030 something is when extinction of all species is complete, surely we will be gone well before then. What do you think?
Michael
December 6th, 2012 at 7:40 am
There is a great joy to be had in breaking your cages. I’ve dangled high up in a forest canopy, I’ve laid hidden in full camouflage tracking the movements of police and loggers, I’ve ducked for cover from helicopters circling my camp, I’ve worked all night in the dark to rig a tree sit attached to construction equipment, and I’ve done things I’d never admit to.
Even if it can’t prevent the extinction level event, it feels really good to fight back. It feels RIGHT to no longer spend my days trying to blend in with the “productive members of society,” and to fully embrace my place as an enemy of this society and everything it stands for.
For Christ’s sake, do you really want to be at work when the end comes?
December 6th, 2012 at 8:07 am
To have an idea of how long evolution takes, one may use the unit of millions of years (my).
4,500 Earth
2,000 single-celled life
600 multicellular life
420 fish
300 terrestrial vertebrates: amphibians
250 reptiles
200 mammals
160 placental mammals
60 monkeys
30 apes
2 genus Homo
0.2 Homo sapiens
How soon replacements will be found depends on what goes extinct. If all terrestrial vertebrates go kaput, we
will have to wait till another fish crawls onto the land.
To approach the size of humans, circulating haemoglobin contained in cells and lungs are necessary to carry the oxygen to structures far removed from the atmosphere, unless Nature comes up with another system.
Earthworms have free haemoglobin, but free haemoglobin in the concentrations found in vertebrate blood will make the blood too viscous. Gills are not as efficient as lungs at oxygen exchange, and moreover the development of technologies involving combustion and electricity are not possible in an aqueous environment: dolphins and whales may be intelligent, but they are out of luck in this regard.
And even if some mammals were to survive, the next ones up might not be mammals. Other reptiles did not replace dinosaurs as the dominant group.
December 6th, 2012 at 8:23 am
Michael, that’s a very good starting point for a sub-thread. Here’s my two cents’ worth.
I’m currently focused on climate change running faster and more severely than expected, impacting the food supplies and infrastructure in various regions through accelerating extreme weather events. Methane feedbacks will be part of this, and I think their additional impact could be noticeable in two or three more years (and measurable before that of course).
Reading Hansen on paleoclimate has convinced me that we’ve drastically underestimated the impact of relatively small rises in global mean temperature. As a result I think we’ve just passed the threshold of dangerous climate change.
I expect the resulting ripples of social disruption to turn into waves in the next three years, then into a storm in ten. The cracks in GlobCiv 1.0 will become really serious around 2030 as nations begin to focus on worsening internal problems to the exclusion of international ones – with the exception of spreading regional wars over water and refugees. I figure the wheels will finally fall off the GlobCiv enterprise in 2040 or so.
I don’t project NTE for this century, though I think it’s distinctly possible next century as temperatures continue to soar past +6C. Depopulation to 1 billion or less by the end of this century is possible-to-probable.
We’re going to keep burning fossil fuels at all costs to try and prevent the end of GlobCiv, which will simply make it more certain. We will probably burn through all 1,000 GtC of available fossil carbon reserves before the end of the century, which will introduce a rather interesting bump into the decivilization process.
Somewhat related to your question about compassion and community is my rumination on how we can achieve equanimity in the face of all this, for without equanimity there can be little compassion. I think there are two roads to peace of mind, and which road one chooses depnds on whether one is more left-brained or right-brained, more scientific/concrete or artistic/abstract.
The left-brain road to equanimity is typified for me by my father. He spent his working life as a research biochemist and biologist as well as being a classical violinist and a deeply, broadly curious free-thinker. This combination has given him an evolutionary, deep-time perspective on the human situation, into which he has been able to integrate his son’s growing awareness of the impending collapse with very little sturm or drang.
I have also run into a growing contingent who find as much equanimity by moving towards an Eastern philosophical perspective founded on an awareness of the spiritual/ecological interdependence of everything, with lashings of non-dualism and Buddhist non-attachment. This group has become my tribe.
What I have not found is any significant number of people who have achieved lasting peace of mind while remaining psychologically attached to standard Western anthropocentric cultural concerns, values and arrangements. Interestingly, whether they remain attached in support of, or in opposition to, the mainstream paradigm seems to matter little. Both positions seem to generate a similar level of disturbance in the psyche.
This tells me that freeing oneself psychologically from the current paradigm of civilization is more important than precisely what worldview one adopts in its place.
In my opinion the quasi-Buddhist path is more likely to bring about the compassion and altruism we’ll need, because they’re explicitly built into the philosophy. However, some people are allergic to the frankly spiritual orientation of this path. For those whose minds require a more concrete worldview, the evolutionary, deep-time perspective definitely grants peace of mind.
December 6th, 2012 at 8:34 am
Robin Datta,
Yep, a long time if ever for self- reflective consciousness to come into being again on this particular planet. But what is time, after all? Oddly, that self-reflective consciousness brought about the civilization and “the economy” which were the seeds of its own doom. A brief flowering in this part of this particular universe, with infinite more before us, and infinite more to come.
December 6th, 2012 at 8:57 am
Earth is a big beautiful planet in the sky, partly because of the life it contains. But we look out at the stars and find them beautiful too, even though they are just burning balls, and the planets we know of seem not to hav life. So perhaps it helps to think of this immensity of beauty as unchanged by whatever happens on this little ball we call home. The viewers (or this set of viewers) will be gone, but the beautiful star filled skies will still be there. While that doesn’t matter to us when we are gone, I find it a bit comforting to know the moon will still shine, the sun rise and set, and the myriad of stars still sparkle….Funny the comforts I can find having rejected the comforts of denial, belief in an after life etc. But there you have it
The stars will shine after we’re gone
The sun will still mark the dawn
Tho the viewers disappear
We need not fear
The moon stars and sun will go on.
December 6th, 2012 at 8:59 am
I’ve speculated that the seeds of our eventual, inevitable downfall were sown in our development of self-awareness. The ensuing separation of the perceived universe into self and other is what made it possible for us to exploit the other for the benefit of the self, on every level. This turned the universe (including all the people who are not-me) into a bag of resources. The rest, as they say, is history.
This sense of separation has to be overcome, but in order to do that we must first recognize it as a problem. Western science is “unhelpful” in this regard.
December 6th, 2012 at 9:08 am
Michael, good thoughts.
Re 3. The species that will do well for a while will be bacteria and viruses that will find humans an easier target once sewers and water systems fail and starvation set in they will thrive (see the book suggested by BC Nurse – The Coming Plague
Re. 5 – My hope is that just before I die I reflect on my actions and am not ashamed – well not too much. Plenty to fault oneself over for living the good life in Western Civ. But I hope to not try gaining a few days or even a few years by turning away others. I don’t believe in an afterlife or judgement, but I would like to die feeling I didn’t do too badly. Won’t matter after I die, but at the moment when I know it is near I don’t want to be ashamed.
December 6th, 2012 at 9:19 am
In an previous thread, Kathy C Says: For me being able to say over and over NO ONE DIES WHO WOULDN’T DIE ANYWAY is the way I stay sane with this knowledge of the end coming.
Elephants
Elephants, wondrous and gray,
Because of their tusks become prey;
Suppressing dismay,
I tell myself, hey,
They’ll all be dead soon anyway.
December 6th, 2012 at 9:36 am
John,
You would probably lose that dollar, but never mind. I’m aware of all you say in your article. I share the satisfaction, as well as the trepidation, many feel at signs of the decay of industrial civilization, and when I look at a hospital I see an energy sink. I see that in the comments you recognize that what we are facing cannot be cured (Guy no longer doubts that “we are surely fucked”), even if the economy, however defined, could be “killed”, and that you do appreciate what the consequences would be.
Now it’s clear where we differ. You say: “killing the economy is a net gain for ALL life in the long run, despite the immediate suffering it would cause those dependent on it now”. Your attitude is similar to Guy’s, and one I’ve never understood. Why place such importance on “ALL life”? Animals and plants all die, and all species become extinct. What does it matter, if there is no one to appreciate or benefit from them? I cannot see that any species, including our own, or even the biosphere, has moral “rights”. Rights apply to individuals, singly or in groups. Does it bother a koala if koalas are going to become extinct? What bothers a koala is being too hot, or too cold, or hungry or in pain. Dogs will in time be extinct, and all dogs die: that doesn’t make it okay to kick a puppy.
Unlike you, I’m not okay with “most of the people I know and love, including myself” being killed. I have no romantic attachment to “the web of life on Earth”, any more than it does to me.
What concerns me is that we are heading for incalculable suffering and premature death for billions of human beings, including people I care about personally. I would like this to be mitigated as much as possible. I’m hardwired to want our species to persist, but perhaps it would be better, morally, if it did not.
So rather than effectively committing mass suicide (and we know anyway that the “economy” is safe for the time being), I advocate “powering down”, localization, population reduction etc: containing the economy, if you will. If we are going out, the moral approach is to make our extinguishing as pain-free as humanly possible. Fat chance, though.
December 6th, 2012 at 10:06 am
I hope you are correct Paul about the timetables. Certainly it is OK to disagree on these points. I do defer to science, my training in general systems points to the real possibility of a phase change event. As I suggested, I don’t think our science is up to whole systems. There are always unexpected nonsummative emergent phenomena.
On the spiritual side, I tend toward earth religion and buddhism, both reasoned views from my core sensibilities. Ultimately we need to detach from concern about our own mortality. I believe I am there, and from this perspective a lot of issues about the conduct of one’s life become clear. This is the legacy stage of my life.
I don’t see my point of view working in our society or catching hold at all. Our media of cultural transmission are computer screens and TV. As this crisis unfolds, we already know it is being masked and denied outright. As we continue to lie to ourselves, there is little prospect for widespread change. This will not go so well. I am just speaking plainly here.
Whatever happens, and whenever it happens, I will do the same thing I did last year. I think what we might do is understandable. For a couple of years now I think what remains for us is to promote real community and to work inside the art of the possible. I am constantly redesigning my gardens with the primary criteria coping with of water limitations and excess heat. I believe we have moved 2 planting zones in the last 2 years. As they say, all you can do is all you can do.
Michael
December 6th, 2012 at 10:09 am
Last night I had dinner with my daughter, who is married to a guy making a lot of money in a very energy intensive transport and rigging enterprise which utilizes huge equipment. Her hopium thought is that there are some creatures who evolved to survive deep in the sea or hot geysers and so forth – and so all life won’t be extinguished. When I asked her why she and her husband are doing nothing to prepare for disaster, even though they could easily afford to, it became clear that they are convinced the expected catastrophes will occur far from them and/or far in the distant future. I suspect that is the attitude of many wealthy conservatives – they know it’s coming but they think they personally will be insulated by distance and time.
I have no such illusions since I am convinced that, accelerating catastrophic climate change aside, the ecosystem is collapsing even faster from pollution. Trees are dying from ozone and coral reefs are dying from ocean acidification, both of which are roundly ignored by climate modelers. I have a friend who spent this week at the AGU conference in SF – he says out of 100 papers about the ocean, not one was focussed on acidification.
It’s idiotic. Long before low-lying areas are swamped by sea-level rise, everyone will have starved or left because there will be no more fish in the sea, and that is mostly what they eat for protein. Long before drought kills off all the trees, they are already dying from toxic gases, even in places that climate change has made wetter, and crops are likewise reduced. To say nothing of the wars that will ensue as food becomes more and more scarce.
So there is little doubt in my mind that we face NTE, and soon – although my opinion could of course be premature. What I worry about – aside from how to live life in the interim, a constant conundrum – is, when the zombies who didn’t bother to stockpile food are howling outside my door about to break it down, that I’d rather arrange to be dead BEFORE they start chewing on my flesh.
Is anyone besides me thinking about contingency plans for that?
December 6th, 2012 at 10:28 am
Michael, I see it as a phase change event too. The end of GlobCiv over the next 30 years is phasey enough for me, even though it might look downright gradualist to others here.
I’m finding a lot of evidence of an expanding, coalescing mind-shift taking hold out there. It hasn’t hit all the soccer moms yet, but it’s even making some small ripples there. It all depends on where you look and the questions you ask. Maybe it’s just confirmation bias, but that really doesn’t matter to me. I’m going to act as if it’s real and try to facilitate it, because I think the “alchemy of consciousness” is a crucial component in whatever the heck this is.
Some of us think there will be a phase change in our physical situation, some think there will be a phase change in our consciousness. I think we’re seeing both, with a feedback between them. If it doesn’t happen the way I think (and what ever does), at least I’ll go down having worked for something I think is important.
December 6th, 2012 at 10:30 am
As they do in life, people will prepare for death in many ways, even by denying that they are doing so. But when it really gets down to it, those ways will be pared down to a few, IMHO. But true to our basic programming as the planet’s most cruel and violent species, the way that physically overpowers and negates all others is:
“May you die today so that I die tomorrow.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The Gulag Archipelago
December 6th, 2012 at 10:37 am
Michael Says: We are all in this together, we will live together and die together. I am not advocating “bullets and beans”, none of that will work.
Bullets, band aids, and beans
Could fail hypothetical scenes:
If we have a fast crash,
You won’t need a big cache,
And they won’t help preserving your genes.
December 6th, 2012 at 10:41 am
@ Gail
I agree that eco-collapse is in front of global warming. I am a professional wildlife photographer and I see signs, I see what is missing. It is unsettling.
I am planning my Arkansas garden as though it is Zone 9, not 7.
Re: zombies. Zombies are people too.
I will feed them. We cannot forget those might be relatives, and conservative relatives who live in the “me first, and only me” space. They have been enculturated to this point of view. Like addicts, they will only come off it when they hit bottom. Hitting bottom is an untidy road to enlightenment. Many never make it. That is what we face.
The saddest part is the truth of our situation is not on our cultural radar. All the “green” BS is telling folks we can have it both ways, be green and be a consumer. It is a sea of marketing BS, a crime against posterity.
We can hold fracking up as an example of how much we care about the environment, how little our politicians lead, and how insignificant community has become. The fact that lifelong neighbors will sell out to drilling concerns and doom their neighbors for money is astonishing.
Perhaps the hardest part is being patronized for our knowledge and vision of the future. There is a terrible mismatch between the timetable for cultural adaptation and the pace of eco-collapse. Nobody wants to hear it, and we are judged as nut cases. I think a lot about how to reach these people and keep my spiritual center.
Michael
December 6th, 2012 at 10:50 am
I see no point any more in trying to awaken those who are still asleep. We have all been overtaken by events. It may be a kindness to let them keep sleeping – like dying unconscious on the operating table. It’s enough to help those who are already waking up.
December 6th, 2012 at 10:53 am
After the Permian-Triassic Great Extinction event, it only took about 10 million years for life to come roaring back. This is a mere blink of an eye. And then, some 100 or 200 million years later, self-reflective consciousness may develop again and then a new civilization and then…
And so it goes…that eternal cycle…that awesomely beautifully ugly terrible captivating eternal cycle.
I watched my Cosmo flowers grow from seed this year, finally blooming in August before bowing their heads and fading in September until their death in October. They passed with dignity and grace, somehow knowing thier seed would grow and bloom again. This planet is life’s seed in this particular region of this particular universe. All things have seasons. Live with the simple acceptance of passing season as at least the flowers are wise enough to. That you, and we humans ever even had a season is wonderful enough in the face of the incredible improbability of it all.
December 6th, 2012 at 11:02 am
@Paul
I understand that POV, let them sleep, we can awaken only very few anyway. When they awaken they will be hungry. I will feed them. I have that much worked out.. After that, we shall see.
Michael
December 6th, 2012 at 11:06 am
Paul,
As we observe the hoards descend upon the stores this season, in their mass-consumptive driven frenzy, you are correct– do we wake them or even attempt to wake them? If a sleepwalker is headed for an inevitable cliff– that is a cliff you are sure they are going to go off– do you attempt to wake them at the last minute and scream, “wake up and watch your death!” Or perhaps it is more kind to let them enjoy that last few moments of whatever dream they are having, before the passing of wind by their face and the horrified feeling of falling naturally wakes them just moments before death mercifully releases them…
December 6th, 2012 at 11:19 am
NOAA Report Card for 2012
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/12/06/1293011/noaa-climate-change-driving-arctic-into-a-new-state-with-rapid-ice-loss-and-record-permafrost-warming/
December 6th, 2012 at 11:23 am
First, a quick update from Japan:
http://www.pakalertpress.com/2012/12/04/almost-half-of-fukushima-children-now-have-thyroid-disorders-from-radiation-poisoning-officials-blame-too-much-seafood/
Now, about this “timetable” thing we’re currently speculating about.
My humble opinion is that significant human die-off from the interaction of all the factors we’ve mentioned on this site [and some we haven't dwelled on much, like the economic collapse and natural phenomena like earthquakes and volcanic action which have increased greatly over the past few years, war and disease] will occur within the next year to 10 years from now interval, max. i’m 90% sure things will drastically change in the food growing, harvesting and distribution sector and our biosphere will fail to support most life within 2 to 7 years and that we’ll more than likely be reduced to well under a million total worldwide after 8 to 10 years, if anyone is still around at all.
i base this on my own back of the envelope statistics (more like intuitive differential equations) and see our species dealing with the coming crises (plural) with the usual ineptitude, violence and stupidity. Military responses like nuclear, biological, chemical, microwave, EMP, and “secret” weapon warfare only make it more likely to happen in a shorter timeframe. A pole-shift (it’s been moving for a while) is also possible as early as next year (or even before this year is out, according to some) and could wreak havoc.
i’ll leave it at that for now. i’d like to hear what everyone else thinks about this – again, it’s only speculation and no one is holding anyone to their guess. Hell, i hope i’m dead wrong and look like a damn fool in the coming years, since it all turns out just fine . . . (fat chance).
December 6th, 2012 at 11:45 am
Paul said:
“I see no point any more in trying to awaken those who are still asleep. We have all been overtaken by events. It may be a kindness to let them keep sleeping – like dying unconscious on the operating table. It’s enough to help those who are already waking up.”
That’s one of the most sensible things I’ve seen in a long time. I have wondered what is the point of trying to get people to recognize the destruction all around them – they will most likely panic and be miserable and it won’t do any good anyway.
I can’t get into the “spiritual” response to ecopocalypse, so I guess I’m left with the “well at least the stars will still shine” response, which is more than nothing, after all.
However my question about marauding zombies was a serious one. They are difficult to negotiate with no matter how willing you are to share. Has anyone here ever been physically assaulted and in very literal fear of their life? I have, and survived obviously, but someone they attacked the following week did not. I know how those people who jumped out of the tower windows felt because I tried to do the same thing, and I never want to feel that way again. I don’t want my children to ever feel that indescribable terror.
It seems to me that the breakdown of civil society to be replaced by Mad Max – and/or a fascist response to that – is at least as likely an outcome as people just sitting in the dark waiting for their teevee’s to come back on, as Guy once so evocatively suggested.
It seems that not preparing for such an outcome is sort of arm-chair doomerism. I’m not sure what to do – if I could afford it, I would stockpile a supply of potentially lethal medication.
December 6th, 2012 at 11:59 am
I think 2013 is going to be a bad year for the deniers. Drought, fires, water rationing, a worse food harvest and maybe another big storm or two are going to wake up the people who aren’t comatose and who’s brains haven’t been fried by Faux News.
It’s going to be a very bad year for those who’ve been thinking that technology will save us (which is practically everybody I know). It will become very clear to those people that the ecosystem that is earth is way more complex than our intelligence has yet grasped and that there is no more time for whatever technofix they have in mind.
No one else has mentioned this, so I’m going out a limb here, but I’m having a really hard time with the “Merry Christmas” shit and the “next year” hopium shit and yet, I still want to be a civil and kind person. What the hell do I do? We’ll be around family, breeders with small children, and I have nothing to say to them except “we’re doomed.” No one wants to hear that.
I read somewhere recently, and I can’t remember where, of course, so don’t know if this is accurate, but something to the effect that there are 300 million guns in private hands in America. You all seem committed to feeding the hungry when the shit hits the fan. I admire this and hope to emulate it, but I’m really scared about potential violence.
My very uneducated guess is that each year will get worse than the previous one (for humans, and for humans in the USA) and that by 2018 or 2019 the writing will be on the wall for even the Faux News team.
December 6th, 2012 at 12:27 pm
Gail,
There are poisonous plants you could cultivate, instead of stockpiling pharmaceuticals. What trips me up is preparation.
December 6th, 2012 at 12:39 pm
Gail, you wrote “… I’d rather arrange to be dead BEFORE they start chewing on my flesh. Is anyone besides me thinking about contingency plans for that?”
People write living wills to keep others from making them into the living dead. Some people who live in progressive areas choose Dr. assisted suicide rather than suffer the pain of a drawn out dying. Making plans for early exit from end of the world as we know it suffering are really no different in kind than making plans for early exit from terminal disease.
See the book Final Exit by Derek Humphrey for some possible options
http://www.finalexit.org/
December 6th, 2012 at 12:40 pm
…”one of China’s biggest construction firms will spend £2.2bn to flatten 700 mountains” which “…”could increase the area’s gross domestic product to £27bn”…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/dec/06/china-flatten-mountain-lanzhou-new-area
December 6th, 2012 at 12:44 pm
Wildwoman – christmas – we don’t celebrate it, we have mostly educated our kids not to send gifts (hard but we are winning), we don’t go anywhere, we just treat it as another day.
If you have to do the Christmas thing, maybe pretend they all have a terminal disease and the best thing you can do is bring some joy into their remaining time. I have been working on that and everyone is happier for it. Since I no longer think any plans for preps will buy much time at all, it has become easier to just not talk about it any more.
Ron Currie’s Everything Matters deals with the issue of what to do if you know and others don’t.
December 6th, 2012 at 12:56 pm
However, some people are allergic to the frankly spiritual orientation of this path.
There is nothing spiritual about apprehending Who One Really Is. Not looking at objects – and even the subtlest of concepts is an object – and even past the subject, for the “subject”, the “I”, is also a mental concept.
December 6th, 2012 at 1:33 pm
There were bees flying around my yard the other day. Bees in Dec.
Yet my associate told my proudly, with his arms crossed, and his chest puffed up, that CO2 levels were at 1992 levels. The article he referenced in USA Today had a headline that emissions fell to ’92 levels in the first quarter of ’12 in the US. But by golly, all he saw was 1992 levels. All is good. I briefly tried to point out the flaw in his argument, but apparently all my info comes from CNN (Communist News Network). Gee, I haven’t have cable TV for about 4 years.
You can’t awaken those who are intentionally comatose, nor should you. It just pisses them off.
Perhaps, years hence, he will be stung by a December bee.
December 6th, 2012 at 2:09 pm
Tom you forgot the New Madrid Fault which could take a good part of civilization in the eastern half of the US down….is it related to the Louisiana sinkhole?
http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/monster-sinkholes-an-indication-that-major-earth-changes-are-coming-along-the-new-madrid-fault
December 6th, 2012 at 2:44 pm
If you feel an earthquake, here’s where to report it:
Did You Feel It? — Unknown Event
(In ‘mericuh, of course.)
December 6th, 2012 at 3:19 pm
@Kathy C. I don’t believe in an afterlife or judgement, but I would like to die feeling I didn’t do too badly. Won’t matter after I die, but at the moment when I know it is near I don’t want to be ashamed.
I used to practice/teach an esoteric (my description) branch of yoga, and my teacher advised to live as if someone is always watching, because there is. No, not God. You. You are always watching, and you alone will be witness to your own life when it flashes in that moment before death.
@wildwoman re: the “Merry Christmas” shit.
Well, as a breeder with small children who has denounced Christmas, I find that I can still embrace the spirit of giving. I have to share a funny story with you. I picked my son up from pre-school on Monday, and his teacher pulled me aside to ask if we had ever had a real Christmas tree. For one split second I panicked, thinking omg, she found us out! Then I realized she was asking because of his numerous severe allergies. They were planning on getting one for the classroom and didn’t want to do so if he was allergic. Last year I started a new Christmas tradition of NOT celebrating Christmas, but celebrating winter solstice, instead. I guess this year it will be a double celebration. Winter solstice/armageddon. Anyway, I like to keep things simple, and I find people always appreciate homemade things, especially food. A good batch of cookies never goes to waste.
December 6th, 2012 at 3:41 pm
@Collapse Watch
You addressed the issue of the dangers of cow’s milk, but when you think about it, all milk is dangerous. Chemicals, pesticides, etc…, accumulate in fatty tissue, so most mammals, including humans, likely have contaminated milk. You will find women who are vehemently pro-breastfeeding, who think formula is poison, but I wonder if they ever considered the poison in their own breast milk? I think about it as I just weaned my youngest, and each of my three babies were breastfed for well over a year apiece. How much harm did I do? I’ll never know. As long as there are babies, they will need nourishment.
December 6th, 2012 at 3:42 pm
An amazing thread. So many fearless people gazing at the spectre that confronts us all.
Seems like the old trees are deciding it is time…
Alarming Increase in Death Rates Among Trees 100-300 Years Old
December 6th, 2012 at 3:49 pm
“Seems like the old trees are deciding it is time…,”
Lots of wisdom in old trees. When you lie under one, grand thoughts seem to fall down on you and infuse you with their wisdom…
December 6th, 2012 at 3:51 pm
Kathy C and BadlandsAK,
Thanks. I’ve read Everything Matters, but sounds like I need to read it again. I do make a mean, kickass cookie that is much in demand. Maybe I’ll go crazy this year.
I can get behind the Solstice idea, especially as an act of resistence to the Catholic Church, since they co-opted it anyway. Talk about a marketing marvel!
Kathy C, the link to the bad news about the Madrid Fault line made my day. Our Kentucky property sits pretty damn close to it. I miss Roseanne Rosannadana.
December 6th, 2012 at 3:56 pm
We are getting together with friends and eating too much. There will be good natured bitching about how FUBAR Christmas is, while ironically celebrating our feast of friendship and love. All of us might be considered atheists, but we are more nontheists. We just pass on the whole deity issue and smile. And feast. Why not?
Michael
December 6th, 2012 at 5:10 pm
I doubt the old trees are deciding it is time…I think we’re murdering them. In return, they are falling on houses, cars and people at rates never before heard of.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/04/us/storms-topple-new-england-trees-and-raise-fears.html
December 6th, 2012 at 5:17 pm
wildwoman Says: I miss Roseanne Rosannadana.
Ah, Gilda!
A Mr. Richard Fader,
Fort Lee, New Jersey tenth grader,
Says, “Hey, what’s the deal?
Is doom really real?”
And he asks how to be an evader.
Inspired by watching some flick,
He insists we should do something quick;
So I said, “Mr. Fader—
Big fucking crusader—
What’cha trying to do, make me sick?”
“It just goes to show you,” I said,
“It’s always something to dread;
The news that I bring:
If it ain’t one thing,
It’s another makes sure you drop dead.”
December 6th, 2012 at 5:41 pm
Gee, I thought I could consume until Jesus returned. Jesus wouldn’t let the human race go extinct, would he?
A ridiculous view? Yes, and tens of millions of Americans probably hold it, even if they won’t admit it.
December 6th, 2012 at 5:56 pm
Gail : I doubt the old trees are deciding it is time…I think we’re murdering them.
I guess it was a figure of speech. I don’t think trees make decisions in the sense that humans do. But after surviving the centuries they have decided that now the abuse is too much for them, and so they leave, and that means that the ecosystems that they are a part of are collapsing, which is an indication that the whole biosphere, the sum of those ecosystems will collapse, which means we are also leaving, because without forests, so much that we depend upon will vanish, including rain and oxygen.
Someone above ( forgive me for not scrolling through the thread again, it’s late ) said that a koala doesn’t see any moral aspect to extinction, or some such sentiment. I think that the moral aspect lies in the fact that we are murdering the thing that created us.
Whatever you want to call it – it doesn’t even need a name – it took all that time, and it produced us, and supplied everything that we needed.
And yes, this murdering of the trees is just part of murdering of the entire living biosphere. Murder is immoral.
In my conception of what is moral and what is immoral, I’d say that marks the extreme end of the scale. There is no greater, more heinous act that is possible than the annihilation of most living things. Whether our own extinction is a just punishment I really don’t know. The whole business is so far away from ordinary human notions of justice and ethics I don’t know how to think it through.
December 6th, 2012 at 6:52 pm
Paul Chefurka
You wrote:
“I see no point any more in trying to awaken those who are still asleep. We have all been overtaken by events. It may be a kindness to let them keep sleeping – like dying unconscious on the operating table. It’s enough to help those who are already waking up.”
Look, I appreciate and respect your position on this, but how did you get to be ‘awake’ on these issues?
Somewhere in your lifespan you had someone influence you, and yes, I bet you worked pretty hard to keep your sanity, and develop the independent thinking that has enabled you to ‘wake’.
I suggest it is by centred engagement in life, amidst this maelstrom of death and ‘change’ about us, that wakes people in proximity.
My point here is I feel it is hubris to pre-suppose people are not influenced by others they know or briefly encounter, especially as I suspect many people are anxious under the social verneer of civility and pride, about all these issues here.
In attempting to regenerate, in a small way, understanding and acceptance of the Gift Community in my location here in the Blue Mountains, West of Sydney, I encounter the attitude often that “We can afford to pay you”, and some slight chagrin that I may have insinuated that they ‘need’ charity.
I grew up on social welfare, after my father abandoned us for an easier existance in his adolescent stomping grounds in seaside Sydney back in the mid 1960′s. My mother scrimped and worked her arse off to provide, and she lost a son to Leukemia from the fallout from French and other nuclear testing in the Pacific.
I am not ashamed to have been supported by the greater community, albeit in some financial manner delivered without human contact. Many others find it socially demeaning, and have all sorts of made up justifications for never needing to rely on others.
My other brother is a school teacher, and I retrained too, later, to do the same, and it was in part because we wish to give, not give ‘back’, simply give.
One of the founding lies of industrial civilisation is that you can live independently, full stop. A prerequisite is the accumulation of wealth, but personal wealth and social power especially.
As many would know, that lie is now debunked, but, I suggest it is not true that people will not wake up.
If they see or encounter someone ‘going for it’, in a creative and open sense, and not strategically to ‘get back’, they notice, and are often surprised it is possible to live differently, and an opportunity to change is created. That is the authentic chain of events that brings love and growth, inner growth, into the world, regardless of your ethical/spiritual beliefs.
I just think that to conceptualise the ‘deaf’ and ‘blind’, metaphorically, as the ‘other’, reinforces some unnecessary differeces, and I’d be willing to bet all who feel themselves to be ‘awake’ were influenced by others along the way.
That is not preeching, it is just saying when you centre yourself and grow in your own time, not only do others see it, you notice the greatness in others as well, and can access it.
Some will never wake up in this lifetime, but who are you to judge who they are?
December 6th, 2012 at 7:04 pm
As an addendum to my last comment, I think it is far more sane to get on with life knowing these events are coming, and changing the biosphere, and remain open to all people, (and non-people), because we don’t know what strategies, behavious and type of subsistance may work in the near term, and many many many people are going to need help.
Those who can will, and I want to be one who can, no matter what the ‘heat’ I get for it now.
December 6th, 2012 at 7:12 pm
I think I have a dilemma that has been touched on a little in the above comments. I have people that I love and care for very much but I cannot bring myself to mention NTE even though I am believing it myself.
When I first found out about peak oil and shared what was possibly going to happen I was wounded by the person I shared it with-they couldn’t believe that I had the nerve or whatever to think that things could get so bad. Now, I have something that is so much worse, even for me, even for many of you,but especially for all of us to even think about-that I just don’t know what to do.
I find solace, of a sorts from reading all your responses, Daniel,Jennifer, Kathy C, U,Michael,BC Nurse,others but it doesn’t help me to address the practical question of how and should I even go there with my special people!
By the way, there is more than one Carol commenting and I have a partner of 37 years who is totally on board with NBL and we are making changes as quickly as we can together and we know we are NOT kooks!
From the previous stream, about nightmares. I have been having them regularly, but when I wake up and remember the truth, the real nightmare begins.
Anyway, thank you all, I just wanted some empathy too. I guess that I will just keep doing what quite a few of you recommend-showing love and compassion to all that I can.
thank you for listening
carol in alabama,
December 6th, 2012 at 7:17 pm
@ Ulvfugl
At this stage of the game, I would think we’re sadly accustomed to compartmentalizing almost everything out of necessity, in lieu of becoming a danger to both ourselves and others. Your death of older trees link, however, cut through the armor and ran right through my heart. Trees were the alpha and omega of my early ecological awaking. I’ve slept under them, slept in them, chained myself to them, even spiked them to keep them from being destroyed. Life without trees, especially old growth has caused me so much grief over the years, it’s wound that won’t ever heal. Even now, as I contemplate NTE, and how I might live out the world’s end, all I know is that I’ll be surrounded by trees when the time comes. Never quite had to think about it, but what makes life worth living, if not the love of trees?
This quote from the article struck me as somehow being symbolic of number of things:
“The alarming decline in old trees in so many types of forest appears to be driven by a combination of forces, including land clearing, agricultural practices, man-made changes in fire regimes, logging and timber gathering, insect attack and rapid climatic changes, says Prof. Jerry Franklin.”
As if “rapid climate change” is somehow just one of any number of factors.
FUCK!!!!!!!
December 6th, 2012 at 7:26 pm
It is interesting how few will ID a date when it all comes down. If I recall from reading all the replies, maybe 4 ID’ed a time frame?
This timetable is so hard to face. On the way home this evening my wife wept at a sunset, feeling (knowing)this is all running out. Of course there is more, there are our children, and our grandchildren who will be swept away.
I do want to face this head on. On the matter of an early exit, I have thought about that. You all are probably aware now that more of our young are suicidal because they see no future. Perhaps that must be our project, to help them understand life is a moment-by-moment project.
If you decide to leave by your own hand how many years do you lose? How many moments of joy and compassion do you abandon? I do not personally believe that a moment’s joy is lost or pointless if we die in the next moment. We can chose to live life in a granular way with deep compassion, nurturing and love moment by moment until there are no more moments. I want to face death with a passionate embrace having fully lived.
I have listened and I still think it is 10 years to lights out, that is what my gut and daily observations are telling me. If I am given 10 more years, that is a good run to 73. For the young, acceptance of a significantly shortened life will require of them deeper spiritual work to not die bitter. Perhaps there is a role for me in there. I like to believe that elders are not obsolete, but I am prepared to accept that as well. It is worth a shot.
Michael
December 6th, 2012 at 7:33 pm
If I can make it to 73 that would be a gift but how do you wrap your mind around the fact that your children will not live to be the age you are now and your grandchildren will not make it to their teens.
I love the trees too and spent many hours today raking their leaves and just being outdoors.
December 6th, 2012 at 7:35 pm
@ Ozman
Your last response to Paul.
What wonderful writing, I read it twice. Whole lot of truth there. Though we stand on different footing when it comes to the role of spiritual practices, I love what you bring to the conversation. Keep the faith friend.
December 6th, 2012 at 8:39 pm
I love this recent thread, and all Guy has posted on his blog as well as all the thoughful comments by you kind folks, but I often despair after reading each one as reality puts a boot straight to my head.
Let me explain:
As I type this comment I am in a home where my 12 year old brother is in his room with his television, light and probably ipod on, my 23 year old brother and his girlfriend with the living room television on and an ipad going and my mother who is in her room with a television on.
My brother and his girlfriend just recently moved in and the entire time they are home they watch television (I’m taking 12+ hours a day!!!) – as my brother broadly understands climate change as well as peak oil. When these two get even more bored they either find somewhere to drive to or they go to a local fast food source to get their food.
These are just a few members of my family while I could describe stories of mostly all the people in my life who share the same lifestyle. It angers me and at the same time makes me sad. This is all they know!
So threads like these are beautiful and I support the message all the way, but I’m sorry to disappoint anybody by saying that nothing is going to change in the forseeable future. Either this thing called an economy crashes or we can all seriously just say goodbye.
December 6th, 2012 at 8:47 pm
@ Michael
I’ve been asked by Guy to submit an essay for NBL, and while I’ll most likely accept, I know I will probably attempt to answer some of the very questions you just asked. Or more accurately, I will probably only re-frame the same questions we’re all asking. I sense that for many of us here, even in spite of our well trodden “doomer” paths, NTE (or just the last three years) has been analogous to a kind of intellectual whiplash. While the impact of the evidence has already hit us, it has taken a while longer for us to become aware of the damage done. We are all, now, closing in on the same immovable decisions we know we must somehow decide between. And frankly, I wouldn’t listen to anyone who thinks they “know” how to live with this reality.
Some of us, have the luxury to let such acceptance in, unimpeded by the moral obligations to our children. Obviously, as a childless adult, I possess no wisdom, as to how young parents with even younger children are going to cope with a reality which I find impossible to accept from one moment to the next.
One the more amazing things about this site, and how it has already changed my perspective, is how I’ve been completely taken back by the courage of some of the contributors who do have children (Jennifer Hartley, Ozman, Badlands….forgive me if I left some of you out). These people humble me, they’ve become my new heroes. Compared to them, I have it easy. All I have left to do, is contemplate all the subtleties of death, which frankly isn’t much of a stretch for me. However, the loss of the rest of life….now that’s a whole other level of grief entirely.
It’s going to take someone far wiser than I, to be able to articulate what is or isn’t appropriate behavior, for when that moment finally arrives, when life is no longer worth living.
For me, commiseration is now the highest form of communication, and I fear that this may be all we have left, to help alleviate an anxiety that will most likely only get worse, before we’re truly able to let go, and honestly live with the knowledge of what little time we have left.
Thank you Michael, and everyone else, for making it a little easier to ask such impossible questions.
December 6th, 2012 at 8:55 pm
I see no point any more in trying to awaken those who are still asleep.
Tradition has it about a certain person that when he reached enlightenment before dawn, looking at the morning star he grokked his identity with all sentient beings and said to himself “I had reached complete enlightenment when the first of the enlightened beings reached it, and my enlightenment will not be complete until the last sentient being achieves it”.
He felt no need to emerge from his enlightenment, but a little later in the day as he saw the sun rise over a pond, he noticed that some lotuses were in full bloom, and some buds were still under water; but there were some ready to open waiting for the sunlight. He decided to shine the light upon those others that might bloom by it.
Prior to his enlightenment he was only known as Siddharta Gautama.
December 6th, 2012 at 8:56 pm
@ Daniel
Yes, I’ve loved them so much, since early childhood, they weren’t even trees then, more like mysterious kindred personalities.
For a few years I gave up everything else in my life to work on their behalf
http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~chrislees/The%20Trees%20and%20the%20Wood/trees1.html
Yes, several annoying and silly bits in that article, I think those guys don’t get it, don’t get what the trees are telling them, but there we are, that’s what you said, the paradigm shift, it’s probably impossible, middle class guys doing their careers, used to looking at the world in a particular way all of their lives.. It’s not just the trees of course, it’s everything, the birds, the fish, the insects, etc. People don’t seem to comprehend that an artificial world of manmade structures and gadgets is not a viable self-sustaining entity, whilst the natural biological world it is destroying and replacing was.
December 6th, 2012 at 9:44 pm
pretty good rant, john duffy. however, let me add to landbeyond’s brief and devastatingly to the point critique the following angle:
u say ‘kill the economy’, but how? don’t u mean we need to kill the incredible ignorance, stupidity, and insanity that has created this culture and this economy? how does one kill deeply ingrained and long standing ignorance, stupidity, and insanity, not only among ‘elites’, but ‘commoners’ as well?
like i said, good rant, but that’s about it. made u feel better to write it, was good to read, but ain’t gonna change anything. only thing can, and will, is mother nature. surreality’s such a bitch!
December 6th, 2012 at 9:54 pm
Michael, you mention planning your Arkansas garden. I didn’t realize we are in the same state. That’s at least four people (or is it five?) who post here from time to time who are from Arkansas. It’s somewhat surprising to me that our little state has such a representation here on NBL.
December 6th, 2012 at 10:09 pm
@Robin Datta re:enlightenment of Siddharta Gautama
For some reason your examples & analogies really resonate with me. Before having children, I used to teach art and yoga. As a teacher, it was my goal to challenge students in order that they could live up to that challenge and surpass their own limitations and expectations of themselves, in this way giving them an experience. The other thing that was imperative to me was to nurture their creative spark, which is a difficult task in the university setting. People learn at different paces and in different ways, so one lesson, or even twenty, may not “click” for someone, but you never know when that spark will ignite.
As a mother, my only goal has been to NOT ruin my kids by putting out that spark. (Well, besides keeping them alive.) So thank you. I believe a lifetime of struggle and loss and pain can be worthwhile if you can be that gift for another person, offering that moment of interaction where they recognize their own gift. We just never know what or when that will be.
So, that brings me to what I intended to say before I read your beautiful comment.
Which is, nothing. There are no words. I decided there are not enough swear words in the book to properly voice my anger and frustration at this world. Each day of my life is a series of contradictions and compromises, none seemingly intended. And so I came to realize I’ve been in a kind of purgatory, unable to articulate anything.
Since I can only relate to things based on my own experiences, it is similar to an ongoing experience that framed my entire childhood. Growing up as the caretaker of the family, the oldest of 6 kids, in a home with drugs, alcohol, violence, abuse, etc…, school became my refuge. I cried if I had to miss it. Every day after school when I got off of that bus, I would make the walk down the long driveway, wondering what I would find when I opened the door. And you never knew until you walked through, who had been drinking, what the mood was. As one of those kids, though, you can read any situation instantly.
But that feeling of dread, that long walk, has been consuming me. I guess my life has become a series of days, just trying to get to the next day, and in all of the flailing, it has lost any meaningful intention on my part. So, now I have work to do…
December 6th, 2012 at 10:11 pm
@OzMan:
I tend to speak with one of two voices when I write on the net – provocative or didactic. Using the provocative voice is always risky because I may strip away too much of the broader meaning behind the words in order to make a nice strong point. Then, when it triggers a reaction (as I of course intended) I have to go back and clean things up, which is always less fun than stirring the shit in the first place. That post you quoted was written in the provocative voice, now here’s the cleanup post. I hope I can keep it from getting too didactic :-/
Let me start by saying that I think you have imputed messages to my meager 50 words that are in fact not there. You may feel that those meanings are implied by the tone of the post, but keep in mind that tone of voice is just a little hard to judge on the internet.
Awakening is a tricky business, and it’s almost always a mutual effort. Somebody wants to wake up, and someone else helps. It’s the “wants to wake up” part that I stripped out of my original post in my desire to add punch. I am helping a lot of people to wake up right now. Some of them didn’t know they wanted to do that – or even what it meant – until they talked to me or someone like me. All of them, however, have expressed that desire, either in word or deed.
Looking back at my post now, I see it would have been more correct to have said, “I see no point in forcing those who desire to remain asleep to wake up instead.”
Facing what is in front of us now takes an enormous amount of preparation, inner resources and support. I am in awe of those who want to wake up and face this dragon, and I’m thrilled to support their growth. But modern urban North American “civilization” gives most people precious few psychological or spiritual tools that are up to that task. Waking up to the fact that this snark is a Boojum without the necessary tools or support can be a recipe for mental disaster. I know that because it almost killed me. The despair can be so deep that suicide begins to seem eminently reasonable. I do not want to inflict that sort of distress on anyone, ever.
When I was in the depths of my despair, during my “Peak Oil is gonna kill us all!” days back in 2005 or so, I gave a number of public lectures. I encouraged everyone I could to come and listen, and I pulled no punches at all about what I felt could (or as I said then, “would for sure”) happen within a scant handful of years. It was the same litany of calamity we talk about here – the food shortages, the social upheavals, the collapse of medical and governance systems, the dieoff. What I found was that only those few who were already awake or at least awakening could even hear me. Those who were still asleep were not particularly moved, as far as I could tell. Later on, when I calmed down, I characterized the message I was trying to spread as, “Quick everyone! Wake up and kiss your children goodbye!!!”
I wonder today if some did perhaps wake up during my talks, with that message ringing in their ears and not the faintest clue about how to cope with it. That’s not compassionate, it’s not kind, and it’s not helpful to anyone. I was not spreading awareness so much as being a despair factory. Only as I got further down the road myself did I realize what a responsibility we take on when we deliberately shift another’s consciousness.
So if someone shows signs of waking up I am delighted to help, but I remain cognizant of the psychological risks. I expend a lot of effort ensuring that they have some tools to deal with this awareness. Even for someone who is mentally resilient, it takes a lot of time before they begin to feel stable with such bleak knowledge. And all of us here agree that time is something we have pretty much run out of.
What about someone who is happily sleep-working at a mainstream job, sleep-walking through a mainstream life, in love with a mainstream husband and her mainstream kids, with no desire whatsoever to wake up to a certain of extinction and all the shit that will precede it – and doesn’t have the tools, resilience or support system to cope with it if she did? I think it would be desperately, egotistically cruel to pound on her desk until she recognized her children’s looming fate and realized she couldn’t do squat to prevent it.
Now if she were to come up to me some day and ask hesitantly, “What’s this thing about global warming? It sounds kind of bad. I heard you know something about it. What’s really going on?” At that point it’s truth time – perhaps not all of it at once right at first, but enough to suss out how much she really wants to know.
I’m not into acting in loco parentis to anyone. What you take for hubris and judgement, I see as compassion, caution and realism. Scaring the crap out of people “for their own good” isn’t the act of a teacher; it’s the act of a sociopathic bully. As a free agent, I have the right to decide who I will work with and who I’d rather not. If I think my knowledge would be more hurtful than helpful to someone, I’ll exercise that right and take a pass. I feel a much greater obligation to Compassion than to abstract notions of Truth and Freedom.
That’s how I see it. I still think the 50-word version was more fun, though.
December 7th, 2012 at 12:42 am
What’s the point of continually replaying the onanistic fantasy that we’re going to resist the system and take down the economy in order to save the planet?
I thought the folks here were into the cold, nasty facts and were tired of the Disney mind games.
One small reason why we are not going to resist in any meaningful way and take down the economy is the U.S. military. The military’s raison d’etre is to kill anyone who fucks with the economy in any meaningful way. It also secures resources all over the planet to feed the economy’s incessant need to burn carbon.
I suspect that the Chinese, Russian and European armed forces will also crush anyone who attempts to save the planet by trying to impede their economic machines. The Chinese military can be pretty mean, too. Just ask the Tibetans.
When food prices kill the retail market along with Wall Street, because the sans culottes’ threadbare pockets cannot afford the latest Korean made gadgets from companies named after a fruit, then our betters will dump a fat load of police state on our heads and keep us from screwing around with what’s left of their debt based control system.
When kicking people in the face and throwing them into gulags doesn’t work anymore and then it’s anarchy at home and chaos abroad … it will be Fukushima time and scenarios not unlike Cormac McCarthy’s The Road will ensue, but with less light heartedness.
December 7th, 2012 at 3:37 am
Paul Chefurka
I appreciate your reply, and longer explaination. You are obviously on a path of learning the greater engagements of being a teacher, not at all a psychopath, I warrent.
If I may, I will respond with a ‘few’ personal anecdotes to illustrate my point that speaks to the universality of all the human capacities being there in all of us.
If I ever did, I no longer see categories of people, just people.
When I was in the last years of elementary school, about 11-12, I attended a new ‘radical’community school in the upper Blue Mountains. It had a mix of educational philosophical ideas, Montesouri, Steiner etc and was run by the parients. Prior to that I attended state school.
At this community school, (which had its problems and shortcomings), I got to do things way in advance of normal schooling. Because I was strong in spacial and mechanical ability, I made a working static steam engine, with help of course. We did practical trig and theodelite work, learned about maps etc. I learned macrame, and weaving, and there was all kinds of exposure to ‘kooky’ even semi-dangerous ‘hippy types’( no perjoritive there) of adults. It was the 70′s!! Irresponsibility was noted, as well as anal retentive personalities, and easy pushover personality types too, especially the adults.
When I was about to enter high school I became aware I didn’t know any kids at the local high school, and I had repeated a year as I was young for the school year I was in. So I went to the local elementary school for the last term before high school. This was a bit strange, but I remembered the operational processes, and desks bells, etc.
When I got to what we call year 7 at high school, I found myself in 7f.
I those days in mid 70′s ‘f’ meant F, the lowest academic ranking. The class was filled with kids with behavioural problems, learning difficulties, disabilities, and one semi deaf kid who otherwise seemed sociable and smart too. My mother and I took a while to figure out what had happened.
By end of 1st term testing I was put into 7c, and by end of year into 7a. In 7c were a lot of mixed ability kids, from mainly middle class families and some roudiness in class. In 7a it was all high achievers and kids with academics for parents, and those migrant kids that made it to our region then, (very few).
Consequently by the following year I was aquainted with kids from a wide social mix, and levels of academic and sporting ability. As it happened as we progressed, I was usually found resolving some dispute between ‘others’ in the playground, often actual fistycuffs.
What had happened to me was that because the primary school had marks for only one term for me, they refused to give any data, and consequently the high school put me in 7f.
Now don’t you think it may have been fairer to put me, or anyone else, into 7c and see if they track up or down, (older concepts now I acknowledge)? Now if I was a kid under stress, and just coping, I may have stayed in 7f and achieved very little, but luckily for me, I did well in core subjects except English and Geography, the two areas left off the to do list for the comminity school.
One of the core values intended and which I did learn from the community school was that schooling, or education, is more about enabling someone to know how to learn what they want to learn, rather than bodies of codified knowledge.
Out of all that I also learned to see all kids, and by extension people, as equals, equals of each other, and of myself, so I have always approached the social world and all people I meet as equals, no matter who they seem to be, or think they are.
We are simply beings, here, and we are all full of so much life. I have gained so much from people simply by noticing them, and seeing to another level, beyond the contrivance and artiface of their,(our) personas. Some refuse the ‘gaze’, and others come to the moment, and to our mutual credit some unique friendships have been my great privelage to have come to.
This is not stalking, I emphasise, but I feel it is incumbent upon oneself to sign that you wish to have an authentic life experience, and humour, sincere enquiry and emotional receptivity are all normal human functions we need to engage with if we want more from ourselves and others in any circumstance.
I want to say it is a poor teacher who makes their students dependent on them alone. Any gift of awakenning is one that at its core is the seed that once shaken awake will never go to sleep again, and would rather live on the vapour of a dungoeon like a toad than regress to less awareness.
The truely great teachers help you find your path, although it may mean departures. People do have what it takes to grow beyond their limitations, and I shy not from the shocking evidence of shattered lives and mental illness. I have seen extremely abberent individuals come back to sanity over time with the greatest of strength coming through their hearts, and it’s all because they have been given a gift of self understanding.
What I proposed was a way of existing that I have only come to under some pressure to find a creative way forward, IF IT IS AT ALL POSSIBLE, and given I have 5 kids and no home ownwership.
I simply had to let go of the underlying idea I could either do it all, or find a way myself. I realised that the community, of which I contribute to, is the only ‘common’ agency open to most of humanity that is strong enough to accomodate and provide for all our simple basic needs.
That said, it will of course go pear shaped, but whenever the local town meetings begin to happen, I will be already doing that walk we were referring to some threads back.
None of that is to be in a superior, teacher role. It is because every cell in this body knows the only way to survive is to ‘give’, and give it all, for it is only in giving that we realise the interconectedness of all beings.
Since that recent realisation I have had many silent and powerful signs from the natural world telling me that this is the right path.
I can only applaud your efforts to help others now and into the future.
We are all going to need to give, and receive, all we have if any are going to survive, in some local circumstance.
Best wishes with your work.
December 7th, 2012 at 3:50 am
Sometimes we need to think of what people do in extreme situations to get a better handle on things (not that NTE is not extreme, but the extreme parts of us haven’t hit in the first world yet)
One of the best movies I have seen to explore morality in extreme times is The Grey Zone.
The film tells the story of the Jewish Sonderkommando XII in the Auschwitz concentration camp in October 1944. These prisoners were made to assist the camp’s guards in shepherding their victims to the gas chambers and then disposing of their bodies in the ovens. The film opens in October 1944, in the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. A small group of Sonderkommandos are plotting an insurrection that, they hope, will destroy at least one of the camp’s four crematoria and gas chambers. (per wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grey_Zone )
The Sonderkommando get about 4 months of extra life plus more food for assiting the camp’s guards. So the first moral decision you see is that of what would you do to extend just 4 months? But many further moral decisions follow. One is to fight the system they have in part just joined, and to die in a different way if necessary. They cannot really know that the war is close to an end but perhaps they have had hints. At any rate the seemingly futile plan to blow up a few incincerators, does succeed and because the Germans are near the end they are not rebuilt, and the liquidation process therefore slows. It is based on the book Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account written by Dr. Miklós Nyiszli. The Doctor has also made choices which are compromised or not depending on whether it is moral to put your family first in such a situation.
When I first watched the movie I was afraid I would be terribly depressed, but instead I got totally immersed in the issue of what is moral in such immoral a situation. The question is asked over and over in different aspects of what choices people are confronted with.
I recommend it as a very thoughtful, thought provoking, even in a way beautiful movie. None of us know how the collapse will come and what choices we will face, but perhaps thinking about the various choices others have made can prepare us….
December 7th, 2012 at 5:42 am
Kathy C.: i didn’t list the New Madrid fault, the San Andreas or Yellowstone supervolcano (there are many others) separately, i just put them all in the natural disaster probability bucket and listed them as natural phenomena. Thanks for the link in your reply – i’ve been keeping up with this too.
Carol: In answer to your last question above, i have grandchildren too and friends of ours just celebrated “being pregnant”! i don’t share my dark thoughts with anyone other than strangers who start conversations with me, but rather spend my remaining time with my kin enjoying what we’re doing (even though it’s pointless). i try to encourage their wonder and growth instead of filling them with doom and gloom (my wife’s comment about my “attitude” – she doesn’t want to hear it either). As i mentioned above, i’m still very active in the fight to stop fracking and mountaintop removal mining, among other interests. i’m not giving up, i’m resigned to the fact that we’re on our way out and just want to continue to do what’s right for the environment before it’s over. Of course it won’t matter either way, but it’s what i feel compelled to do. This may (and probably will) change in the coming years.
depressive lucidity: i hear ya regarding the military. One thing to remember is that when it gets to the point where there’s nothing to eat, the military will be in the same situation as the rest of us and many will choose using the ammunition and weapons on themselves and compatriots rather than comply with their insane orders (see Afghanistan and suicide rate of the military).
Paul C.: Great follow-up post – my feelings about interaction with others regarding our fate rings true with your words. i can’t help feeling that many who are still blithely living their wonderful lives will be completely shattered when it dawns on them that “somethings not right” and the situation gets increasingly worse over time.
Daniel: You’ll do a great job with your essay if you continue to write from your heart. i look forward to reading it.
Ryan: Just work on your own development and don’t worry about your brothers, sisters and others. It’s the only work that matters in the end and they’ll come around when the proper stimulus instigates their realization of what we’re facing. Then, you’ll be in a position of experience – having already gone through all the psychic and mental awakening that this “secret” (in plain sight) engenders. In other words, you may be able to help them along when the time comes.
Michael: Thanks for your observations above. i read your comments and some others here and find it hard to distinguish any difference between what i read and how i feel. The words resonate and i feel them as my own thoughts. Hang in there and we’ll walk this road together, making observations as we go.
Everyone: Thanks for sharing your thoughts and links. This site is such a haven when kindred spirits interact.
December 7th, 2012 at 6:13 am
To return to my simplistic way, on this board we have plenty of brainy people and deep general awareness of what is coming although it is not too precise, and there is no precision to be had. We have evoked this belief system and that, we have harvested wisdom and shared them in a respectful way. I think much of the acceptance ground is covered and well.
Here is my concern. I don’t see action. Just as the dominant cultures see technology as energy, we intellectuals tend to see awareness as action. This is all understandable, but my nature requires me to do something beyond thinking, and quickly move to action.
I think action is the antidote to the dysphoria we have articulated in so many ways. There are times when it makes sense quit worrying about the final nuance of awareness and dig into the dirt. After all, we all recognize how hard it will be when the SHTF.
I am not being pious, when we push our view of our demise, it is absolutely essential that we also push strategies to make the best of what is coming. As one writer put it, the standard lifestyle is passive and in front of screens, TV, phone or whatever pretty much filling their heads with intellectual sawdust (or worse). I see them as in a trance, and really challenged. How do we awaken them and tell them nothing can be done? It won’t work.
Last night was a pretty good example for me. A very religious guy I know and I were kicking around global warming. I told him about methane venting, and the reinforcing feedback loops that point to early human extinction. While he is certain god will ease his demise, our conversation quickly turned to the what to do. In my opinion, that makes the line of awareness peddling constructive, and credible. I don’t bother telling him I am an atheist, he does not peddle Jesus to me, but together we are working on some new garden concepts. I think this is the path.
It is clear to me nothing ultimately works, but the newly de-tranced must be furnished with a few paths they can venture down. For example if they garden and learn to can, they are off the food grid in some measure, and as things unhinge they will understand some of the pathways to more self-reliance. Will this ultimately work? Not enough I think, but perhaps fewer will go the zombie route.
Our conversations must quickly from awareness to action. We smart folks tend to create our own internal TVs and focus on putting a fine point on our awareness as though it matters. Awareness does not matter except in the broadest way as a motivator to action.
I would like to see Guy’s work, and the conversations on this board move to an action thread and be a bit less intellectual. It matters what you think, it matters more what you do. We must get busy. We must not forget that the considerable gifts we have from an accident of birth are not widely shared. People who are more regular need the “what to do”, they are not so into awareness. Let’s get busy on the ground and compare notes.
I do plenty of things that will not ultimately work. But they might just work for 2 years longer than if I did nothing. That is enough. I am certain that the folks around me busy on these deferred failures are happier for feeling like they are doing something. In my mind this is fundamental to our mental health and sense of well-being. If we are working out a plan of action here, I am certain this has to be in the content.
Michael
December 7th, 2012 at 6:38 am
http://permacultureglobal.com/projects
December 7th, 2012 at 6:48 am
I think any action that assists other species is good, you know, help some obscure newt, salamander, lizard through the bottleneck, who knows where that might lead ? Give yourself some good cosmic karma, eh
The ravens are only here because all those previous forms made it through much adversity.
December 7th, 2012 at 7:05 am
I’ll admit to having a somewhat jaundiced view of the concept of “action” – after all, action is what got us into this mess. I prefer the First Rule of Holes: When you’re in over your head, stop digging.”
Or my personal favorite: “Don’t just do something, sit there!”
We are an outward-looking, results-driven species. I think a little quiet introspection would go a long way right about now.
December 7th, 2012 at 7:22 am
Michael, Paul, maybe sometimes act, sometimes not act ? As appropriate ? Know the difference ? What is the opposite if being ?
Someone asked an extremely ancient and withered buddhist monk what was the meaning of enlightenment ?
The reply came ‘Sometimes I raise Shakyamuni’s eyebrow. Sometimes I do not.’
December 7th, 2012 at 7:23 am
What is the opposite OF being ? Can you show it to me ?
December 7th, 2012 at 7:29 am
Paul Chefurka Says:
December 7th, 2012 at 7:05 am
I’ll admit to having a somewhat jaundiced view of the concept of “action” – after all, action is what got us into this mess. I prefer the First Rule of Holes: When you’re in over your head, stop digging.”
I agree with the above statement although I find myself taking action all of the time anyway. It seems that all of are “doings and makings” will be our undoing.
We create tools to ease our days
Often with the best intentions
Only to find the road to hell
Is paved with good inventions
December 7th, 2012 at 7:29 am
…maybe sometimes act, sometimes not act? As appropriate? Know the difference?
Knowing the difference is the key it seems to me. Or as someone else has said:
Grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
The courage to change the things I can;
and the wisdom to know the difference.
That’s why I teach awakening and not environmentalism.
December 7th, 2012 at 7:36 am
@thestormcrow
Humans can no more keep from acting than we can keep our own hearts from beating. The inevitability of action is what makes wisdom and discernment so vitally important.
We tend to define action as “Going somewhere and hammering on something.”
However, even sitting still is an “action”, as is developing one’s awareness. Perhaps we could broaden the definition a bit.
December 7th, 2012 at 7:59 am
I guess we have discovered our fundamental point of departure.
Our imperative must be to pursue “proper action” not to just sit around thinking. Permaculture is one fundamentally sound body of actions, a way of being. There are others.
How about “being (and becoming) through action”? How about “thought informed by action”?
If our best thinkers do not act, nothing will hit the ground. However elaborate and nuanced, any line of thinking that leads to nothing hitting the ground from my perspective is a sort of intellectual pornography, titillation without engagement.
I believe our “game” is not only acceptance, it includes a moral imperative to action. Thought leading to action is not inferior, it is informed by a dialectic with the dirt. To equate (conflate) local action with the actions of our species at large scale is intellectual nonsense. I believe a “radical localism” (permaculture) is our path and it has little to do with global industrial sins except to cope with them.
I do think we (and Guy) need to provide avenues for involvement and action or the message will not be received. We need to promote the nuts and bolts of doing better.
The waking up of entranced screen zombies without offering them an action path is just awful, and it is pointless. I think it makes us look pretty silly honestly.
Michael
December 7th, 2012 at 8:25 am
Michael, is thought not action? If not, at what point does thought become action? Is speech driven by thought action? Is refraining from action in it itself an action?
I disagree quite fundamentally about the imperative of action in the terms I believe you are proposing, and would urge you to widen your scope.
December 7th, 2012 at 8:35 am
The first step towards “killing the economy” would be killing people’s admiration of it. Like I say in the piece, take joy in it’s demise. See it for what it is, and celebrate it’s foundering. Let this attitude be sturdy, sure, public, and loud. Stand in solidarity with protesters, monkeywrenchers, bank robbers and rioters.
Cease respecting the property of the wealthy. Cease desiring to have what they have. Become unruly.
December 7th, 2012 at 8:40 am
John – now THAT is a sentiment I can get behind all the way. Every change of direction begins with an act of refusal. No mas…
December 7th, 2012 at 8:57 am
Sir Bob Watson, Chief Scientific Adviser to DEFRA ( UK GVT agency )
now says that 2degC is unachievable, blah, blah. Remember, that was supposed to be the ‘safe limit’ which must not be crossed… or so they told us…
http://fallmeeting.agu.org/2012/events/union-frontiers-of-geophysics-lecture-professor-sir-bob-watson-cmg-frs-chief-scientific-adviser-to-defra/
But for twenty years people just like him in position just like his have been telling us what have proven to be blatant lies, so why now should his words be taken as suddenly credible and plausible… just because it would be nice if they were ? And people’s futures depend upon reducing emissions ? Ha !
December 7th, 2012 at 8:59 am
Will Philippines negotiator’s tears change our course on climate change?
At the COP18 climate talks, the Filipino delegate broke down as he appealed to the world: ‘no more delays, no more excuses’
December 7th, 2012 at 9:02 am
Are we talking about collective action, or individual action?
If you want to screw with the Masters of the Matrix, only collective action is relevant. Of course, the Matrix loves it when a band of eco-terrorists tries to take collective action because they can then justify rounding up the fools and crushing them in some sterile federal court … or perhaps worse.
If we’re talking about individual action on a dying planet, then it’s just a case of culturally induced onanism in the face of cosmically imposed Nihilism (IMHO).
It’s so Amerikan to think that we always have “to DO something.” That’s because we invented the “can DO” spirit. Here, in gringo-landia, everyone is expected to follow his/her dreams until they win a singing competition and become stars, or maybe even superstars.
Why is doing something better than doing nothing when the real world is about to annihilate us? Isn’t doing nothing at least a recognition that NTE is now inevitable? At this point, action is just a perpetuation of our attachment to a plane of existence that we turned into our private toilet.
What would the average man do with a full consciousness of absurdity? He has fashioned his character for the precise purpose of putting it between himself and the facts of life; it is his special tour-de-force that allows him to ignore incongruities, to nourish himself on impossibilities, to thrive on blindness.
Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (1973)
December 7th, 2012 at 9:05 am
Well, thought might be imagined as action, but not endless thought.
Good luck to you all.
MD
December 7th, 2012 at 9:10 am
The unfairness of who bows to whom
Is not the unfairness of doom.
December 7th, 2012 at 9:14 am
Depressive, I agree with your comments. Hubris makes us think it is up to us to “do something”, and as you note gringo land has a double dose of hubris. We don’t expect cows to do anything – thankfully they don’t or we might see cows with guns.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQMbXvn2RNI
But one thing we humans can do is laugh, laugh at ourselves, laugh in the face of danger and sorrow, laugh at our own sense of importance.
December 7th, 2012 at 9:17 am
“…Stand in solidarity with protesters, monkeywrenchers, bank robbers and rioters.
Cease respecting the property of the wealthy. Cease desiring to have what they have. Become unruly…”
Not that anyone who reads NBL would need it, but a terrific antidote to complacency and respect for the property of the wealthy – if anyone is looking for an hysterically funny movie, which I downloaded last night from itunes – is The Queen of Versailles.
It’s actually a documentary, hard to believe this family would allow a camera to follow them everywhere for three years. The pater familias is now suing the filmmaker, quite likely because of shady business practices revealed in the rejected clip shown at the top here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/13/the-queen-of-versailles-d_n_2121325.html
Anyway if you’ve got $3.99 to spare and want a “Born Rich” meets “The Osmonds” real-life parody of American excess, hubris, frailty, and absurdity, get out the popcorn.
Sometimes all there is left is to laugh in astonishment.
December 7th, 2012 at 9:37 am
I think part of the weirdness and the abhorrence of the ‘Amerikan Way’, is how the post-modern capitalist culture kinda cannibalizes itself, you know, there’s the horror on tv of some gruesome mass murder, and a few weeks later, there’s a movie made about it, and some guy gets rich and famous exploiting tragedy, and the zombies feast on the spectacle, it’s sordid and depraved and decadent, but there doesn’t seem anywhere else for the culture to go….
(Links below in seperate comments)
I kinda agree with both points of view, if you want to sit like a stone doing zazen, become unified with the all. It’s said that 36,000,000 died in the An Lushan rebellion in about 760AD. Considering the world population at the time, that’s an astonishing mortality. Must have seemed like the End Times. The taoist hermits in the remote mountains have watched stuff like that come and go, it’s a tried and tested route for five thousand years and more.
But there’s no obligation, is there. If a person’s character and calling says they need to act, then seek an opportunity and collaborators. Vinay Gupta whom I like very much works flat out all the time trying to change the world. I mean, he’s a mad tantric anarchist kapalika Bond villain genius, amongst other identities, who has infiltrated NASA, the Rocky Mt Institute, the US DOD, the bureacracy of the European Union, etc, anywhere where he can cause mischief and mayhem by opening people’s minds to new visions of reality, sort of… aaahahaha… you get the idea ?
That’s a ‘way of action’ personified, IMHO
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GA8Nsjh_4YivgkdydTzgxrW9qIdeijmCyZ8ACuT-ZHk/edit?disco=AAAAAEZY-FQ&pli=1
December 7th, 2012 at 9:40 am
Zombie example
December 7th, 2012 at 9:47 am
Another
You know, the ‘Land of Opportunity’, grab your chance, even if it’s the end of the world, there’s still a chance to make a buck exploiting your neighbour…
December 7th, 2012 at 9:54 am
I do love this thread.
I agree that we need to become more unruly. At this very moment, there is a handmade sign hanging off a bridge in our downtown with the message:
Burn the rich. Not fossil fuels.
Also this morning, I see where drones are flying all over the United States airspace.
The stated goal of the US Military is “full spectrum dominance.”
Deep Green Resistance (the book and the movement) tells us to defy and resist but no one tells you how to join up because they are an “above ground” movement and there needs to be a strict separation between above ground actions and sabotage. Ok, I get that. Doesn’t help with the dilemma though.
I do not want to be in a concentrated human feeding operation (aka prison) when the crash comes.
Want to hear something sad? Last time I flew, the only act of resistance I could come up with was to give the finger (both hands) to whomever was looking at my image in the fucking scanner.
The murdering motherfuckers that run our country(and the globe) have won. We can resist on small stuff (a pipeline here, a proposed mined operation there) but time has run out on us.
December 7th, 2012 at 10:25 am
Apologies, I messed up the Zombie Example link, it was meant to be this, it’s as if they are expecting it…
http://spaceandpolitics.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/world-revolution-z.html
December 7th, 2012 at 10:45 am
wildwoman, one of my favorite unrulies is the anonymous freeway blogger (who, I believe, coined or at least disseminated the evocative term ecopocalypse) who has had quite an operation for a while, producing signs in a garage that are placed for however long they last on overpasses and fences: http://www.freewayblogger.com/
Long live the Freewayblogger!
December 7th, 2012 at 10:49 am
Oh dear, another apologia, re Vinay, that should be NSA, as in National Security Agency, not NASA as in the Nationa Space thingee… anyway, I think everyone can agree he does a good act…
http://youtu.be/EkQCy-UrLYw
December 7th, 2012 at 11:12 am
Calling sustainability journalists and advocates everywhere to investigate the ‘no man’s land’ of human population dynamics. A cascade of ecological events with unforeseen consequences is occurring around us in our planetary home. There are multiple causes. But human overpopulation of Earth is the prime factor.
http://www.panearth.org/
Climate scientists are speaking out. Where are the population scientists? Why are they not more vocal?
The deliberate silence among population scientists with unfulfilled responsibilities to assume and duties to perform with regard to their skillful examination and careful reporting of extant research on “human population dynamics” cannot be excused by the recognition that such woefully inadequate behavior “exists in all professions”. There is much too much at stake. Scientists have to stand up and consciously speak out about what is true to them, according the ‘lights’ and scientific knowledge they possess.
Solzhenitsyn reported, “One word of truth overcomes the world.” Could it be that for the lack of one word, one word by people in possession of truth, as their lights and science indicate ‘what is’, the world and life as we know it is being destroyed before our eyes? As the sages of old said, perhaps it is time, finally, now and here to “speak the truth as if you are a million voices, for your silence is killing the world.”
December 7th, 2012 at 12:48 pm
Some more are beginning to notice:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2012/12/07/big-trees-dying.html
Steven: It’s my understanding that after Paul Ehrlich’s complete rejection by the public and of course the Catholic Church (go forth and multiply until you overrun the place and use up all the resources), the climate scientists are just going to sit by and watch, since nobody seems to be listening to them or any of the mainstream scientists.
There has been so much denial, ruining of careers, and dismissal from academia by the 1%ers and their corporations who fund or own everything that these scientists aren’t going to further jeopardize their livelihoods by being overly vocal. The Union of Concerned Scientists routinely issue dire warnings and every day the same crap happens – nobody is changing anything anywhere so why bother? They should just take out a front page spread in the NY Times with the heading:
“You lazy ignorant slobs wanna kill off the whole planet? Just keep doing the usual – but don’t start yelling ‘help, help’ when the real calamities start in earnest in the coming years.”
Katrina, Sandy and Bopha are just tastes of what lies ahead. In fact before the devastated areas can be rebuilt they’ll be smashed again before long, so don’t be surprised. It’s not just overpopulation, it’s capitalism too (the subject of the current essay here) and who’s going to change that immediately when we’re all immersed in it up to our eyeballs?
December 7th, 2012 at 12:50 pm
Near Term Extinction should take care of the population problem quite nicely.
December 7th, 2012 at 1:56 pm
Methinks the prophet doth profess too much.
Y’all do realize that theories about NTE and TSC (The Second Coming) are analogous, don’t you? Enjoy life, and stop with this useless, self-important nonsense about saving our planet. It’ll either be fine or it won’t, but you’ve got little say in the matter. Bike, grow crops, recycle, love one another, etc., but try to be a little less preachy while doing so.
December 7th, 2012 at 2:02 pm
The heat is on again in the U.S. After recording its first cooler-than-average month in sixteen months during October, the U.S. heated up considerably in November, notching its 20th warmest November since 1895, said NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) in their latest State of the Climate report. The warm November virtually assures that 2012 will be the warmest year on record in the U.S. The year-to-date period of January – November has been by far the warmest such period on record for the contiguous U.S.–a remarkable 1.0°F above the previous record.
More on the data and scary charts at http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=2306
December 7th, 2012 at 2:05 pm
Goodness “but try to be a little less preachy while doing so” sounds like a bit of preaching to me.
December 7th, 2012 at 2:08 pm
Climate scientists are speaking out. Where are the population scientists? Why are they not more vocal?
The only thing that the population scientists can say is that several billion people need to disappear ASAP. And even if they disappeared tomorrow, it’s not a guarantee that we survive to 2100 anyway. Making that statement publicly would only get them lynched and nothing would come of it.
We are beyond the point of making statements and spreading the gospel. That ship has sailed. The methane feedback monster has been triggered and there is no going back. Some of the elites already know this and probably have a bunch of crazy survival plans a’la Dr. Strangelove (they’ll live in underground facilities, move to Antartica, who knows?)
The simple reason nothing of any consequence will be done is because the solution would require the system that sustains billions of people to self-deconstruct. This is like telling a parent that in order to save their family they have to kill 2 of their 3 children and then one of them has to commit suicide. It’s unimaginable.
December 7th, 2012 at 2:48 pm
“This is like telling a parent that in order to save their family they have to kill 2 of their 3 children and then one of them has to commit suicide. It’s unimaginable.”
Maybe it’s more like telling the parents that one of them and the 4 grandparents have to kill themselves off.
That would be more fair.
December 7th, 2012 at 3:36 pm
My partner and I have three children, ages 5, 3, and 1 1/2. We have no community/support system, he works 10 hours a day in the trades, I was laid off from work shortly after having my first baby, so am now a “stay at home mom”. We both have many practical skills, as well as our own tools. We get by, and feel lucky to do so. He is a gifted hunter/fisherman, and when I say that, I mean, it is uncanny. He does not seem able to miss a shot. If the limit is three pheasants, he puts three shells in his pocket. If the limit is five fish, he will have to throw several back. He put three deer in the freezer this season, so we are eating well.
Anyway, this was a conversation we had recently. In short, he was sending off an order for contacts and is in the process of having his glasses fixed. I have been urging him to get a second pair. He said, If the bottom falls out and I can’t get my glasses, I’m fucked. I said, no, If the bottom falls out and you can’t get your glasses, we’re all fucked. (meaning our small family) Without his glasses, he probably can’t see a foot in front of his face. How will I be able to step in and provide food for my family? I haven’t shot a gun since I was about 18. To me, it is well worth the $300 for extra glasses.
So, while I see the folly of our industrialized civilization, and the evils of the economy, it’s downfall/deconstruction is going to be more than a rude awakening, even for those of us who have our eyes wide open. The loss of pharmaceuticals necessarily means the death of my son. Even with the medicines, I have literally watched him go from normal, to deathly ill from asthma, in a matter of hours. Or a matter of minutes with anaphylaxis/food allergies. So, sure maybe when things are bare-boned, It’s just tough luck to the weaklings, you know, culling the heard. That’s just not something I’m ready to embrace.
As for myself, I’ve been close to death more than once, and I find it to be no big deal. Quite comforting, really. But I don’t have that luxury anymore. When you have children, your life is no longer your own consideration. So, I guess it just adds to the pain of living in daily contradiction. I want to protect them, but what do I do? Action? No action? What does the action look like? I’ve already had my day of despair about the state of the planet, mourned the slaughter of innocent gorillas, elephants, forests, a list too long to name, but I let my guard down and started over and started a family. And while I was looking away, the world decided to go into a nose-dive.
I know there is no sound, practical advice. We decided to stop wasting time and resources with yet another move, so here we are in South Dakota, a landscape that even without the prospect of NTE evokes death. Just look at the buffalo & Lakota Sioux. A good friend from Standing Rock, whose family adopted my partner into the tribe, used to do extensive work in suicide prevention on the reservations, only to recently hang himself. Now there is a contradiction that is not easily, if ever, reconciled.
December 7th, 2012 at 3:38 pm
ulvfugl
That link to the Fillipino delegate, and his breakdown would be a gamechanger for a lot of middleclass-semi-anxious-climate-change-fence-sitters-untill-shit-hits-their-neck-of-the-woods-kinda-folk, were they to view and read it, IMO.
Please everyone read it:
I post it here for convenience again:
‘Will Philippines negotiator’s tears change our course on climate change?’
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2012/dec/06/philippines-delegator-tears-climate-change
It is quite poetic and ironic the delegate is talking about the difference between talking and acting, exactly as the discussion on this thread has been running.
For what it’s woth I wish to have a say about action and talking, and doing nothing too.
I worked for about 28 years making little scale ‘boxes’ for architects developers and even rich real estate mob types,(unknowingly at the time it seems), and I explored the implications of the term ‘Modelmaker’ in abstraction, as an occupation in many long hours of toil, and yes while taking the 20 pieces of silver, too. Actually it only became the 20 pieces much later in those years as I woke to the devastation ‘new’ developments were having on the environment.
Anyway, the term ‘modelmaker’ is a good beginning to understand how ordinary folk relate to reality.
We construct models of reality, moment to moment, and these models are how we concieve of ourselves and our purposes, and our place in the world. Our visual cortex cycles at about 40 hertz, or 40 cycles of refress per second. That is enought to kill a dear with a spear, and a fush, but sometimes not enough to see the car hitting you in the side on an intersection. All our other sensory systems do something analogus. So too our whole body-mind refreshes and reconstructs our perceptions of the world and the self in it as models, or approximations of reality.
But these models also justify and account for what we are doing at any particular time with any action. Say a moral action to help the poor. It is structured in our personal model of why and what we are doing.
We may be doing something completely counter to it by someone else’s model, or society’s model, hence endless bar fights and marriage problems, and a lot more.
Er you all must get this by now, ok
But to me the issue is how often, if at all, is one’s own model updated to anywhere near ‘reality’.
I believe, that word again, without experiencing reality, the model(s) we use are ineffective and based on illusion/hubris.
It has been my intention, as a spiritual endeavour, to know what is ‘real’, IN ORDER TO ACT IN THE WORLD EFFECTIVELY, and not to go off half cocked and waste my time and energy.
So IMO the contact with ‘reality’ is key to the inner motivation to act directly in accordance with the needs of the moment. If one’s model of reality is way out of date, then the action is our of time.
Perhaps this is simply obvious to many, but the world I was born into, has been so full of lies, and FUBARed concerns, acting is all I ever wanted to do, but to know how to ‘effectivly’ act has been the rub.
That was my rabbit hole, from which I can say I emerge every time I wake now.
Acting in this world is slightly easier, and I look for the signs I am on the path. The signs would be different for each individual I expect.
Great post ulvfugl!!!
December 7th, 2012 at 3:39 pm
Goodness : “…about saving our planet.”
Don’t recall anyone on this blog ever having mentioned that phrase ‘saving our planet’.
We’ve recognised the parallel with eschatological movements long ago, but the distinction is very clear. People here are informed by contemporary science, not biblical or any other mythology.
“It’ll either be fine or it won’t,.. What nonsense that is. Perhaps you’d care to define what condition would constitute ‘fine’, or it’s opposite, and judged from what perspective, and at what point in time ?
Your comment sounds rather patronising, condescending, to me. ‘Go back to sleep children, there’s nothing you can do about anything anyway’. In a word, ‘preachy’.
December 7th, 2012 at 4:51 pm
People here are informed by contemporary science, not biblical or any other mythology.
Actually, I need to amend that. People here are informed by just about everything known to humans from the whole of human history and prehistory, and anything and everything imaginable…. however, the distinction between NTE and other ‘End Times’ tropes, is that NTE is solidly supported by empirical scientific evidence.
One person, alone, is powerless, unless you happen to be a Ghandhi or a MLK or a Mandela, who can inspire millions to act, but obviously, if enough people acted, the course of history would be changed.
The topic was the economy, and I agree with the analysis. But the economy could be changed. Instead of a monstrous machine that destroys nature, enslaves humans, funnels all wealth up to an elite who already have more money than they know what to do with, or could possibly spend in hundreds of lifetimes, a different economy could be designed that served the real needs of people. See, for example, Graeber’s book. There’s lots of different ways it could be done.
https://gemmabone.wordpress.com/2012/11/28/david-graeber-debt-the-first-5000-years/
It is possible, in theory. Of course, if it’s mentioned, in Amerika, people have heart attacks and get hysterical, screaming about communism and socialism… even the so called Christians… wasn’t there something in the Bible about to be a follower of Jesus meant giving away everything that you possessed ? Funny how that’s been so conveniently forgotten…
December 7th, 2012 at 5:19 pm
Badlands, wow I admire you for laying it all out. I feel for you having young children at this time. This is of course why I have often urged folks to get sterile before birthcontrol is no long available. I’m not quite sure I could be as put together as you are with the kids and especially the asthma problem. My grands are far enough away that unless we have a slow motion collapse, I will be unable to help them in any way at all, so most days I just don’t think about their future.
Getting the extra pair of glasses is good advice as well. I took care of that some years back by keeping old lenses in frame and buying a new frame for the new lenses. I know someone on another blog who didn’t want to have toothaches post collapse so asked a dentist to remove all his teeth – the dentist refused.
So like you I am not in the ideal place to be come collapse but we can’t bear the thought of moving so here we will stay until we can’t….
December 7th, 2012 at 5:27 pm
The glittering, icy landscape of Greenland is being marred by soot that falls from the smoke plumes of Arctic wildfires, new satellite-based research shows. That soot darkens the surface of the ice and makes it absorb more sunlight, hastening its melt.
Researchers caught what they say are the first direct images of wildfire smoke drifting over Greenland this past summer with NASA’s Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation (CALIPSO) satellite, which they presented this week at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.
rest at http://www.ouramazingplanet.com/3857-greenland-ice-soot-melt.html
December 7th, 2012 at 5:48 pm
A bit of light relief. Me, I’m on the side of the equine quadruped, every time
http://i.imgur.com/yY55O.gif
December 7th, 2012 at 6:02 pm
There have been five mass extinctions in the history of Earth. All of those were caused by some sort of natural event (unless an advanced civilization lived then but all traces have been wiped out over the eons).
If we imagine for a moment that humans had not totally screwed up the planet leading to the sixth mass extinction, but instead some natural process was at work leading to the same conclusion, then would we feel the same urge to “do something”?
Probably. But it would be just as futile as our efforts now are. The forces we’ve unleashed and the processes we’ve set into motion are so much bigger than us and completely out of our control.
Someone mentioned above that just because extinction is around the corner doesn’t mean we should kick a puppy. I agree 100%. If we are “doing” anything, it should be putting our energy into the things over which we can exert some measure of influence. We should work to minimize the suffering of those we love, now and in the coming catastrophe. We won’t prevent their suffering, but we might just make life in the few years we have remaining a little more tolerable. At least we will be doing something that will make a difference in a few lives.
December 7th, 2012 at 6:10 pm
ulvfugl People here are informed by just about everything known to humans from the whole of human history and prehistory, and anything and everything imaginable….
The world is coming to an end. Isn’t that Biblical? Isn’t that the reality of particles and energy merging with eschatological mythology?
It was the Enlightenment’s reduction of the world of mystery, which was beyond our dominion, to a world of dead stuff with no greater purpose than to serve the desires of spiritually dead people that killed the biosphere.
So why must we understand what is occurring solely through the darkened glass of the technocrats and the vivisectors?
It’s time to let the world go. Saving the world is now just another game of materialistic attachment. Even if the world could be saved, it would require more violence, more dominance, more injustice … and a world saved on those terms is Hell. We are not enlightened enough to save the world.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biBFmFrzNEA
December 7th, 2012 at 6:18 pm
Many interesting thoughts here. It seems that there is no solution to our predicament, if by ‘solution’ we mean a voluntary and painless way to get from where we are to a sustainable global human civilisation… even if we had the will to try such a thing. It’s probably still worth saving the whales, growing a forest garden etc., even if those things eventually become impossible, because for now they give us pleasure and make life worth living. It’s definitely worth spending a lot of time enjoying what is left of our natural world, even if it’s in decline (or *especially* if it is). None of us know for sure what the future holds so it’s still worth making the most of life while we can.
December 7th, 2012 at 6:21 pm
TRDH : … completely out of our control.
Not sure I see it quite like that. Yes, out of my personal control, as an individual. But not so much out of human control altogether. Bush, Cheney, et al, chose to start the Iraq War. That was a conscious decision. They could have made a different choice and the world now would be different.
China and USA, etc, could choose to cut emissions drastically. That would make a big difference, to what happens in the future. Theoretically, they have the power, it’s not out of their control entirely, in the sense of an asteroid strike or the Yellowstone supervolcano. It’s human policy decisions.
What seems to be happening is that this present generation in power is choosing the option of sacrificing future generations ( and most other living things ).
December 7th, 2012 at 6:45 pm
ulvfugl
I agree that the path we are on was not predetermined by history, it was collectively chosen. Over the last 500 years we built an imperialistic killing machine and exported that model to the entire planet. The machine knows how to kill for oil, strip mine for coal, amass nukes, rip the souls out of people through digital propaganda to keep them supporting the slaughter with a Coke and a smile. This thanatological cyborg is not designed to save biospheres; it doesn’t see the beauty of forests, it sees collections of timber for future suburbs and strip malls. The machine is now bigger than any of our so called leaders. We serve the machine because we are biologically and psychologically plugged into it. Without the machine most of us die. At this stage of the game, the end result is virtually fatalistic because the changes that would have to be made to derail the machine are beyond our reach.
December 7th, 2012 at 7:36 pm
depressive lucidity : The world is coming to an end. Isn’t that Biblical? Isn’t that the reality of particles and energy merging with eschatological mythology?
It was the Enlightenment’s reduction of the world of mystery, which was beyond our dominion, to a world of dead stuff with no greater purpose than to serve the desires of spiritually dead people that killed the biosphere.
So why must we understand what is occurring solely through the darkened glass of the technocrats and the vivisectors?
It’s time to let the world go. Saving the world is now just another game of materialistic attachment. Even if the world could be saved, it would require more violence, more dominance, more injustice … and a world saved on those terms is Hell. We are not enlightened enough to save the world.
You’re covering a lot of ground there
Not sure I’m up to an adequate response… I’ll give it a go 
It’s Biblical in the sense that there have been people talking of the Apocalypse in Biblical terms pretty much annually for the last two thousand years. But they were probably doing it long before, Hindu Kali Yuga predates the Bible and Buddhism, not sure how much,perhaps Robin knows, depends how old the ancient Hindu scriptures are, not sure there is certainty.
What is ‘the world’ ? Some construct in your head ? A cosmology ? a model of something called reality ? You could say that it is ALL mythology, in the sense that everything is stories we tell ourselves, neurological electrochemical activity in our brains, the whole thread is stories we are telling ourselves and each other.
However, the vital bit is the science. Scientific stories are not like other stories. They have to be linked to evidence, and it has to be evidence that can be measured and checked and confirmed independently by others. That’s what makes the NTE eschatology distinct. Scientist can go to the polar regions and observe the Arctic foxes and count them and see that they are retreating and they are being replaced by Red foxes, because the temperatures are rising. Stuff like that. Putting all the pieces of evidence together, everything that can be found, builds up a picture, which tells us that NTE is the likely outcome.
That’s my interpretation. Not everyone agrees. Obviously, most do not agree. But when you read or hear the reasons why they don’t agree, it’s basically beacue they don’t understand, or cannot understand, or refuse to look at the evidence, or whatever. As we here know all too well.
I’ve never been into the ‘save the world’ thing. I don’t really understand it. I want ‘save the biosphere’, that thin skin, which is mostly from a few feet down into the soil, up to the tree tops. Yes, it goes way up to the stratosphere and down to the ocean trenches. We need that too. I want it full of all the stuff that wants to be living in it, as complex and vibrant as possible, because seems to me, that’s how it’s meant to be. maximum biodiversity means maximum resilience against perturbations. Natural catastrophes have always occurred. Mudslides, floods, volcanoes, fires, tsunamis, etc, have always been part of the system. They are good. They are opportunities for pioneer species. Not so sure about the great mass extinctions. That’s somewhere between Lovelock and Peter Ward and what we are doing right now….
Seems to me, so much is just historical accident. This whole fuck up, is not some romantic drama, Sturm und Drang, it’s just pathetic pitiful stupidity, the karma left over from a dimwit third rate actor called Regan getting to be President, random shit like that. the economy is historical accident, it’s what we got because it serves the interests of a tiny minority if very rich people who got rich centuries ago, like Jardine and Mathiessen, selling opium to the Chinese, still selling gold,
the culture you got in America was random, because Quakers and Mennonites got persecuted in Europe. the philosophy, the morals, the technology, it all has the random element and it’s all lead to a terminal mess… it could easily have been different, the Taoists or the Kogi or the Bishnoi and you might have had something resembling Zanskar or Bhutan…
I mean, what was that insanity from the 1950s or 60′s in USA, a plan to blow up the Moon with nuclear weapons ?
They thought it would impress everyone else ? Hey, Mom, look what I can do ! Fucking weird… I mean, from the outside, it doesn’t look like ‘Wow, those guys, they are so smart and powerful’, it just looks like ‘Those guys ? They’re psychotic. What the hell is the matter with them ?’ Everyone else has been seeing the Moon as sublime, as a goddess, since forever….
And now, that psychosis, that lust for power, destruction and domination, greed and violence, whatever the fuck it is that is wrong with the culture, means that we all go extinct… even the gentle harmless ones, living innocent lives, even the horses, even the albatross and the whales and the penguins… the whole lot, because of some sicko lunatics with power and no wisdom…
We don’t need to be enlightened to ‘save the world’. We only needed to live in harmony with everything around us. It was possible. People did do it.
http://www.bishnoism.com/thefirst.php
December 7th, 2012 at 7:54 pm
depressive lucidity : Over the last 500 years we built an imperialistic killing machine and exported that model to the entire planet. The machine…
It’s roots go way back, Fredy Perlman sussed it out beautifully, and described it in some very fine writing…
http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/fredy-perlman-against-his-story-against-leviathan
December 7th, 2012 at 7:55 pm
I think it’s too easy to blame the culture of capitalism. I blame Prometheus. Probably the reason their have always been doomers – Cassandra and Malthus and so on – is because self-destruction is the only logical conclusion for our species. It’s only ever been a matter of time. There are no external limits on our expansion, and, collectively, we are incapable of exercising internal restraint.
Wish I had been able to be at the AGU and seen this presentation!
http://io9.com/5966689/after-extensive-mathematical-modeling-scientist-declares-earth-is-fucked
December 7th, 2012 at 8:20 pm
When I see statements like “it’s probably still worth saving the whales”, or when Guy mentions the 200 species a day that are being killed, I like to try to imagine what one of those species would think about the chances of being saved by humans, especially Americans. I picture myself as a polar bear taking a tour of America, with its several wars, massive prisons, and tens of millions of children living in poverty and hunger. Seeing that in our society it is completely acceptable to, starve, cast aside, use up, or destroy individuals, tribes, and even entire countries, children and all. After seeing how we treat our own kind, I think the polar bear would see her place on the hierarchy, right down at the bottom of a long list of other expendables, with the 99.9% of the ancient forests, with the bison, with the passenger pigeon, and with the Taínos indians of Hispaniola that Columbus met in 1492, and exterminated a few years later
December 7th, 2012 at 10:04 pm
ulvfugl
I agree with your analysis. I agree that we live in and through narratives and that it’s narratives all the way down. I agree that science touches on reality at a certain level. I’ve never subscribed to the postmodernist view that science is just another metanarrative.
Seems to me, so much is just historical accident. This whole fuck up, is not some romantic drama, Sturm und Drang, it’s just pathetic pitiful stupidity, the karma left over from a dimwit third rate actor called Regan getting to be President, random shit like that. the economy is historical accident, it’s what we got because it serves the interests of a tiny minority if very rich people who got rich centuries ago, like Jardine and Mathiessen, selling opium to the Chinese, still selling gold…
Yes! Although it is tempting to believe that some demonic puppet master is to blame, the truth is much more mundane and pathetic … human greed and stupidity brought us to this place.
I’ve noticed in your posts that you mention karma, the yugas … so perhaps there is something beyond the 6% of detectable matter (the 94% being dark matter/energy, of which we know nothing)?
My basic point is that there is a tendency to over-privilege science as the only epistemological access to the Real. If there are many other worlds/dimensions/multiverses (and I believe there are), and if those other Reals interact with our own univerese (and I believe they do), there is no guarantee that they function according to the rules of our own little space-time complex. In fact, there are indications that they function very differently than our own space-time complex.
I think that you would agree with me that there is a large body of evidence concerning paranormal phenomena (reincarnation, NDEs, UFOs, precognition, …) that undermine the materialist paradigm. IMHO it is too simplistic to write off religious perspectives as mere delusions. While there is much about religion that can be explained in anthropological, sociological and economic terms, I think there is a kernel of metaphysical, supernatural truth at the core of the great religions. My personal tendency is to try and incorporate a kind of gnostic theological perspective when thinking about NTE. E.g., what happens to the untold number of sentient beings who have been incarnating on this planet for thousands of years when the earth becomes uninhabitable? What is our karmic condition having participated in the Great Mother’s destruction? Are there higher intelligences who are unfriendly to our evolution who may benefit from NTE?
Derrik Jensen has recently started to ask similar questions in his new book, Dreams.
December 7th, 2012 at 10:17 pm
And now, that psychosis, that lust for power, destruction and domination, greed and violence, whatever the fuck it is that is wrong with the culture, means that we all go extinct… even the gentle harmless ones, living innocent lives, even the horses, even the albatross and the whales and the penguins… the whole lot, because of some sicko lunatics with power and no wisdom…
Beautifully stated!
And perhaps it is only folly on my part, but I am always compelled to look for an answer. Why do these psychopaths get to destroy the innocent? Why are the children of darkness allowed to enslave the children of light?
December 7th, 2012 at 10:55 pm
Seems to me, so much is just historical accident.
Although it is tempting to believe that some demonic puppet master is to blame, the truth is much more mundane and pathetic … human greed and stupidity brought us to this place.
ulvfugl / depressive lucidity
Maybe looking at some examples might help. For instance, the pre-Columbian natives of the Americas appear to have been living here for as long as 40,000 years. In the W. US, in all those years they managed to leave the massive forests completely intact, and there were millions of salmon in the rivers. We wiped all that out in less than 200 years. So, how did they manage to avoid our calamitous historical accident for that long? And being human, they must have had some greed and stupidity, so why didn’t it bring them to the same place it brought us?
December 7th, 2012 at 11:55 pm
One answer to why the Native Peoples (or simply, The People) thrived and everything around them thrived, is that they lived in small enough communities to identify and isolate the sociopaths/psychopaths among them early enough to keep them from doing harm. They gave them tasks and some protection but did not allow them to procreate or handle any kind of power.
Have you read “Political Ponerology’ about such sociopathy at play in large societies? In political strata? Or “Mask of Sanity” by H. Cleckley or “Without Conscience” by Robert Hare? All pretty thorough and scary accounts of the lives of psychopaths and the damage they do… many world leaders are obviously these kinds of people. They tend to ‘convert’ (in one way or another) many people to their side of the equation – money talks. So even people that are not born this way, will emulate the behavior. This underlying condition seems to be the thing that so many despotic leaders have in common (communist leaders as well as arch-enemy Hitler, pick-an-African dictator, some of our presidents) as well as many run-of-the mill-people.
December 8th, 2012 at 1:16 am
‘Only as I got further down the road myself did I realize what a responsibility we take on when we deliberately shift another’s consciousness.’ -paul chefurka
paul made an excellent point. anyone who succeeds at radically changing others’ convictions, particularly if it’s a sherson or sheeple with strong social ties that are largely based on the old views, is going to radically disrupt lives, marriages, families, careers, etc., creating potentially harmful blowback. so besides being incredibly difficult and frustrating, such endeavor is fraught with potential harms to others as well as to oneself.
damned if u do, and damned if u don’t. just plain damned, we are.
December 8th, 2012 at 2:01 am
carol from Sirius
Thanks for that, I heard something like that in a Derrick Jensen interview. When a sociopath/psychopath came along they didn’t stand by and do nothing, or try to emulate them, or give in to that type of behavior and just say that it can’t be helped because it’s human nature. They had a culture that was able to stop them before they turned their culture into one like ours, one that lets sociopaths/psychopaths rule. What’s truly remarkable, is that in most places, they were able to maintain this cultural attitude against letting those type individuals destroy their habitat, for tens of thousands of years.
To paraphrase what you said:
–They identified and isolated the sociopaths/psychopaths among them early enough to keep them from doing harm. They did not allow them to handle any kind of power.–
Another difference I can think of offhand, is that they didn’t have the Judeo-Christian god to emulate. This god’s behavior has been described as sociopathic/psychopathic. But, no doubt, there are many other factors.
December 8th, 2012 at 2:19 am
John wrote:
“For Christ’s sake, do you really want to be at work when the end comes?”
Worth a second read, on a couple of levels.
December 8th, 2012 at 5:04 am
depressive lucidity : I agree with your analysis. I agree that we live in and through narratives and that it’s narratives all the way down. I agree that science touches on reality at a certain level. I’ve never subscribed to the postmodernist view that science is just another metanarrative.
My starting point would be that it’s all stories that we tell ourselves and share with others, which are essentially brain cells twittering. We build imaginary mental models about things we call reality and the past and the future and the world and the Universe and life and death and soceity and so forth, and we juggle them around, and try to make some sense of it all.
That’s sort of where we live. Immersed in our stories. But then, if you analyse the stories, they are not all of the same quality. Gail mentioned Prometheus. Well, we can trace that story. We don’t know the author, but it has a clear genealogy, originating with the ancient Greeks, and carries a message, a warning. We can put into a category, rather like Linnaeus categorising the natural world, and go through all our other stories like that, and notice this fascinating division, that I call mythos and logos, because the ancient Greeks noticed it too and called it that, which appears to correspond to right brain hemisphere and left brain hemisphere, each of which has a very different way of looking at experience, beautifully explained by Iain McGilchrist
http://www.iainmcgilchrist.com/brief_description.asp
But it is important to understand, it’s not that one view is correct and the other wrong, it’s not an either/or dualism, we can’t help having both right and left hemispheres and we NEED both, but we need to understand that they are, to an extent, conflicted, and for some bizarre reason, incompatible. So we’re not all that happy in our heads. It’s just the way we are made. Nobody knows why. Left brain insists on hard logic and reason, right brain likes poetic imagery and fantasy. As individuals, we tend to be weighted one way, or the other, scientists left brain, musicians right brain, kinda thing.
I admit that there is a certain circularity in some of this, because if we didn’t have science I couldn’t be beginning from brain circuitry, but I can’t write a book here, I’m just trying to answer your comment. I do actually think that science is a metanarrative, but like law, science must be distinguished from other narratives, by that crucial linkage to testable evidence.
For all other stories, anything goes, Ygdrassil, the Ice Queen, Prometheus, Lilith, Superman, The Simpsons, nobody cares whether they are ‘real’, they have meaning, in terms of mythos. But science is logos. Unless the evidence is there, and can be measured, and a strong reasoned case can be made to support a position, it’s not science. Same in a court of law. The prosecution and defence, are supposed to tell stories that are supported by real evidence, not just make up any old crap that they imagine might have happened.
I’ve noticed in your posts that you mention karma, the yugas … so perhaps there is something beyond the 6% of detectable matter (the 94% being dark matter/energy, of which we know nothing)?
I only mentioned kali yuga because that’s another ancient apocalyptic vision, from another cultural tradition. I see it as mythos. If it appeals to you, go for it
I don’t think it helps to muddle logos and mythos together, it causes confusion. That said, there’s a proviso, science is supposed to be strictly logos, at the margins, String Theory, etc, it gets very close to mythos, IMO. Quantum weirdness is so weird that it pretty much defies comprehension entirely. The way I understand karma is pretty much like cause and effect. Both in the physical world and in the psychological and emotional and spiritual domains.
My basic point is that there is a tendency to over-privilege science as the only epistemological access to the Real. If there are many other worlds/dimensions/multiverses (and I believe there are), and if those other Reals interact with our own univerese (and I believe they do), there is no guarantee that they function according to the rules of our own little space-time complex. In fact, there are indications that they function very differently than our own space-time complex.
That may well be the truth. But then, being pragmatic, concerning this little planet and it’s biosphere and ecology… we do actually know enough already to have a good understanding of what we’ve done wrong… like, if you’re very ill, the doctor may not know everything, but do you refuse the advice he gives on those grounds ?
I think that you would agree with me that there is a large body of evidence concerning paranormal phenomena (reincarnation, NDEs, UFOs, precognition, …) that undermine the materialist paradigm. IMHO it is too simplistic to write off religious perspectives as mere delusions. While there is much about religion that can be explained in anthropological, sociological and economic terms, I think there is a kernel of metaphysical, supernatural truth at the core of the great religions. My personal tendency is to try and incorporate a kind of gnostic theological perspective when thinking about NTE. E.g., what happens to the untold number of sentient beings who have been incarnating on this planet for thousands of years when the earth becomes uninhabitable? What is our karmic condition having participated in the Great Mother’s destruction? Are there higher intelligences who are unfriendly to our evolution who may benefit from NTE?
I do agree with all of that, except the last two lines…. I really don’t have an answer to that. I know where you’re at, in the sense of the ancient war between the good and evil forces battling away in the invisible realm, which has been a popular conception, possibly beginning with Zarathustra ? But my personal spiritual thing, derived from buddhism/taoism via zen, is so simple, it just sort of rises up a level, doesn’t need to be involved with that ‘noise’ so to speak…. so i can’t really answer your question adequately…
Derrik Jensen has recently started to ask similar questions in his new book, Dreams.
That’s very interesting, I’d like to know what he thinks.
December 8th, 2012 at 6:03 am
depressive lucidity : And perhaps it is only folly on my part, but I am always compelled to look for an answer. Why do these psychopaths get to destroy the innocent? Why are the children of darkness allowed to enslave the children of light?
Which is a question that has been asked surely since humans first evolved the ability to pose a question…. you know, ‘Why has my baby died ?’ I have seen grief and loss expressed by many animals… when the lambs and calves are taken to market, all night the mothers call out their anguish…
Perhaps one answer is ‘Because we let them’, as in Goodness’s comment, ‘There’s nothing you can do, so just accept the situation’. But then if you put me on the spot, and ask how we stop them, you know, do we throw our bodies onto the railway track until the pile is so big that it forces the train to stop, like ants, or like the zombies in the War Z clip… well, I don’t even know where the damn railway line is…
Kathy C.’s mention of the film ( which I didn’t not watch, I really can’t cope with heavy stuff like that ) about the concentration camp guys helping to put their fellows into gas ovens, so they can live a little longer… well, fuck that. I know we have a strong inherent will to survive, but there’s something about the quality of existence, and the degree to which one collaborates with one’s enemy.
In this cold climate, clothing is essential, so just by wearing clothes one collaborates, because unless you make them yourself, or get them from someone who makes them by hand from natural fibres from crops they grow or animals they raise, anything synthetic or imported is a product of the megamachine. Just wearing clothes is collaboration. I try to minimise my collaboration, on ethical grounds, not because it makes any difference. The megamachine doesn’t notice. It doesn’t even notice Occupy, does it. It absorbs everything.
Remember when the two Steve’s were rebellious hippies working from a garage to change the world, and the Apple tv ad to smash the Big Brother tyranny of IBM ? and now Apple is the Big Brother tyranny of IBM, only more so… just ask the guys at Foxconn, they can’t even express their rage by jumping off the roof to commit suicide, because the nets will catch them, just like a prison, it is a prison really, and they have to pay for their accommodation.
December 8th, 2012 at 6:30 am
Everyday Romm and Climate Progress get a little closer to being right where we are now:
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/12/07/1299681/what-are-the-near-term-climate-pearl-harbors-what-will-take-us-from-procrastination-to-action/#comment-602701
They’re at the “what’ll we do” and “when” stages, and looking at the comments (i left a couple near the end, crossposting the math model/earth is fucked link there), many think as we do that it’s too late, while others (not quite there yet) debate which metaphor is better to illustrate our predicament and inaction.
ulvfugl: Hell, even flush toilets are a “collaboration” problem! We’re so immersed that Guy’s phrase of “born into captivity” rings loud and clear here. There is no “getting out” at this point.
December 8th, 2012 at 6:33 am
Oh, and i found this, which pertains to the essay here:
http://www.doomsteaddiner.org/blog/2012/05/02/how-to-fight-the-corporations/
enjoy!
December 8th, 2012 at 7:10 am
Ulvfugl,
I agree that as a species we’ve made awful choices that have led us to this point and place in time. In that respect we’ve certainly had control over the situation.
What I was referring to was from this point on. It seems clear from all the evidence from climate scientists that there is nothing we can do to change the outcome now. We’ve passed the tipping points and the opportunity we had to fix our damaging ways (if we ever had such a chance) has now past.
December 8th, 2012 at 7:14 am
Terry says we are damned if we do
That puts us in quite a stew
Caused we’re damned if we don’t
So clearly we won’t
Fix it, we don’t have a clue.
But leave it to the guys at AMEG to try to figure out how to fix the climate
AMEG Strategic Plan
This strategic plan was prepared by the independent policy group, AMEG (the Arctic Methane Emergency Group), comprising a multidisciplinary team of leading scientific experts, system engineers, communicators and concerned citizens.
rest at http://arctic-news.blogspot.co.nz/2012/12/ameg-strategic-plan.html
At least they know how dire the problem is.
December 8th, 2012 at 7:25 am
Ulvfugl,
Just wearing clothes is collaboration.
Yes.
We can’t pick and choose if we want the tertiary economy to collapse (thank you Robin for explaining the differences so well).
Any participation in anything other than living entirely off the land is a vote of confidence in the current system. (I realize my own hypocrisy in this.)
December 8th, 2012 at 7:46 am
Tom, I believe it was you who asked for thoughts on the possible timeline of coming events.
I’m horrible at prognostication, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have my own theories.
Unfortunately, the system is so complex that I doubt anyone can pull in all the various inputs to come up with a reasonable estimate of how all this will unfold. Perhaps one day we’ll find out the answer is simply: 42.
So, here I go:
I’m pretty sure that this next year we will see lots of unrest with respect to food shortages. Some of those will be felt even here in the U.S., at least insofar as the price of food continues to rise.
The globally dispersed drought will intensify, worsening food production and water scarcity.
I think we’ve entered the “hockey stick” phase of global temperatures. It’s going to get very hot, very quickly.
War and social unrest will be the rule for the next few years.
I can’t see how the financial system holds up for much longer. I won’t be at all surprised if it comes tumbling down in 2013 but certainly by 2015. Most likely due to a collapse in the quadrillion dollar derivatives Ponzi scheme.
Once the financial system collapses and lines of credit and other instruments of the global market evaporate, then all hell breaks loose on the local level. When food and other supplies stop flowing in the industrialized world, that’s when things get real ugly.
With the collapse of the financial world, the real world systems won’t be far behind. Motor fuel will stop first. Even if someone had cash or property to use for trade, with credit gone, the distributors won’t be able to buy it to distribute it.
Electricity will follow shortly after. With no credit, suppliers won’t be able to operate for long. With electricity off, all the conveniences of modern life will disappear like so much smoke in the air.
Once the power goes out, civic water supplies dry up. Then, it’s only a matter of days for almost anyone living in a city.
With no power and no fuel, nuclear reactors begin to melt down.
The timing for all this is predicated on the timing and extent of the financial system collapse. I think that’s why TPTB are scared shitless to let the banks fail.
So many variables and so many other things that I didn’t even mention. But, that’s one way this could all unfold.
December 8th, 2012 at 7:53 am
A self-diagnostic clue
To doom and what’s inside of you:
If it looks like you aim
To find someone to blame
You might be in anger Stage 2.
December 8th, 2012 at 8:08 am
Exxon hates your chidren
http://youtu.be/uXV6FW9Vg0I
December 8th, 2012 at 8:22 am
Why are we going to die?
It’s because of some other guy!
He’d rather be rich
(That son of a bitch),
Than poor (though in truth, so would I).
December 8th, 2012 at 8:29 am
Ulvfugl “Kathy C.’s mention of the film ( which I didn’t not watch, I really can’t cope with heavy stuff like that ) about the concentration camp guys helping to put their fellows into gas ovens, so they can live a little longer… well, fuck that. I know we have a strong inherent will to survive, but there’s something about the quality of existence, and the degree to which one collaborates with one’s enemy.”
Well there is much more to the story than that (plot spoilers follow) In an early scene a man (one of the sonderkommandos) has taken drugs to commit suicide. Some of the others get the Dr. who administers something to counteract the drug and “save” the old man. Another objects saying he has the right to die and then takes a pillow and smothers him. No one stops him. Whose actions were moral? We later learn that that day when putting corposes into the oven he had to put his own now deceased wife in.
A little later, after gassing a room of people, the sonderkommandos pull the bodies out. Under the pile they find a girl, about 12 years old who has still lived. Some say let her die and others feel they have to somehow “save” her. This however puts their plot at risk and there is much controversy on what is the right thing to do. For the moment her life is extended and the prisoners have to work hard to hide her. What is moral, sacrificing one life to hopefully save others by destroying the crematorium (killing lots of people wasn’t so hard, disposing the bodies was the big problem for the Nazis)
The women in the factory that is at Auschwicz are smuggling gunpowder to the men. The Nazi’s get wind of it. They torture the woman they think is the ringleader. No one tells. So they line all the women up and tell her they are going to start shooting them until she tells. After several women are shot, this one tears herself away from the guard and throws herself against the fence which is electric and kills her.
It is a complex story and those are just some of the highlights. Given what we are likely to face I think facing first on a movie screen might better prepare us than avoiding how evil people can act in this world. Most of us if we live long enough will have to cope with really heavy stuff, like this or similar.
The sonderkommandos all know they only buy a few months by serving the Nazis, but this group decides with those few months attempt to use the months they have bought to give others more time.
December 8th, 2012 at 8:41 am
Okay, Kathy, I can see it’s very complicated and demanding. I still don’t think I want to watch it though. I can’t see how I’d be able to collaborate and assist people who are doing that, willingly, under any circumstances. But, of course, how can I possibly decide, in the comfort and security of my living room.
Here’s one for you in return, re your own entrenched views…
The upshot of this conference was that a paradigm shift seems to be occurring in how people view reality, including medical professionals and psychologists. New, expanded models of reality have followed in the wake of discoveries in quantum physics, genetics, and phenomenology that suggest the world may be quite different from how our senses perceive it (Richards 2012). As a human being embedded in a vividly real physical world, I found many of the ideas presented at this conference challenging, even preposterous at times… but by the second day of the conference, I’d realized something: that’s exactly the point. The presenters were trying to shake up the audience, to get us to rethink our comfortable — or at least well-worn — assumptions about reality and our place within it, to get us to reconsider the possibility that reality may be more than matter, and consciousness more than just the physical brain. And that’s an idea that could change everything.
http://entheology.com/news-articles/a-new-perspective-on-death-and-life-an-overview-of-the-2012-bioethics-conference-final-passages-near-death-and-the-experience-of-dying/
December 8th, 2012 at 8:44 am
“Geologist Gary Hecox: Nobody in the world has ever faced a situation like this [...] We have a large area of gas accumulation [...] It’s very difficult right now to determine the gas production horizons that are feeding the gas problem we’ve got. In addition based on the geology it may not be just the Big Hum, there may be deeper horizons that are contributing gas.”
snippet above is from the clip at
http://enenews.com/geologist-deeper-oil-and-gas-deposits-may-be-surfacing-from-below-big-hum-reservoir-nobody-in-the-world-has-ever-faced-a-situation-like-this-video
December 8th, 2012 at 8:44 am
drawing of the Big Hum
http://dnr.louisiana.gov/assets/OC/Public_Briefing_2012_10_23_letter.pdf
December 8th, 2012 at 8:53 am
Isn’t all the agonizing over what culture or trait or economic system to blame just a human conceit? …As though we are different from animals and can deny our genetic heritage, which is that of a voracious and ruthless top predator. Does anyone blame the tiger for ripping the baby goat to shreds and consuming it? For walking away without looking back?
In the movie of the Life of Pi, the little boy tries to hand the tiger some raw meat. His terrified father rescues him in the nick of time. Pi says, I do not think the tiger would harm me. I looked into his eyes and saw his soul.
His father screams at him furiously, The tiger has no soul! That was the reflection of your own emotions you saw in his eyes!
In the end of course it turns out the Pi is the tiger, and the tiger is Pi.
I think we are seeing the reflections of our own emotions. We have no souls. We don’t want to accept that, because we still like to think we are superior to animals. But now that a few of us know we are causing the destruction of most if not all life on the earth – even though the evidence should be obvious to all – reality has caught up with our dreams, so shouldn’t we stop pretending that we are exceptional or special or spiritual or immortal…only very clever?
December 8th, 2012 at 8:54 am
Ulvfugl, at that conference did they deal with climate change and the coming destruction of life on earth? Did they deal with the problem of sexual slavery of young children. Did they deal with starvation, torture, nuclear war? Sounds like escapism to me. What people needed to be shaken up about is the loss of Habeaus Corpus, the NDAA, the wars in Iraq and Guantanamo, Gitmo, over population, climate disaster. Too late so I guess they might as well “reconsider the possibility that reality may be more than matter, and consciousness more than just the physical brain.” But they think “that’s an idea that could change everything.” Everything? That idea will prevent the extinction of all or almost all life on earth????
However you want to cloak it, it is a belief that some part of us is immortal and I guess if that is so the fate of the planet doesn’t matter.
December 8th, 2012 at 8:54 am
Now this is interesting. Re Tom’s link to how to fight the corporations ( most of which I already know and do as do many people I know, and it doesn’t really bother them, fleas to elephants, kinda thing ) it mentions using small local banks ( which don’t really exist in UK ) and Credit Unions ( which do ) to get free from the tyranny of the megabanks, and as I’ve mentioned before, there is bitcoin, which is a virtual currency, not controlled by any nation or central bank, and which has just got a license that puts it in the same league as Paypal, which is a huge step forward.
What this means is that you can trade with anyone, anywhere, cutting out the banking system altogether.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/12/08/0931247/bitcoins-join-global-bank-network
December 8th, 2012 at 9:39 am
At the moment, it is the bankers who have all the power, more than governments, more than corporations. One line of attack is via bitcoin. They can’t control that. I’m not saying it’s the answer, or that they won’t find a defence, but it does scare the shit out of them, a report was leaked that said so. If a lot of people adopt it, it could change a lot of things, for everybody. Who needs the almighty imperial dollar, or the pound sterling ? They only have value if someone values them, or if they don’t have any choice but to use them. LETS for the local economy, and Bitcoin for the international economy, and the people get some freedom…
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-11-29/dollar-less-iranians-discover-virtual-currency#r=shared
December 8th, 2012 at 9:44 am
Crikey, Kathy C. It was a conference about ‘Near Death and the Experience of Dying’…
why the heck would they be discussing climate change and all the other things you mentioned ? Perhaps they did, in the breaks, I wasn’t there, I don’t know…
December 8th, 2012 at 10:49 am
Regarding action to bring down the economy… it would be nice if there could be action to bring down just one piece of it, successfully. Just doesn’t seem to happen. If ever there was a corporation that deserved to vanish off the face of the Earth, it’s got to be Monsanto. From it’s beginnings in the slave trade, to Agent Orange in Viet Nam, up to it’s present appalling conduct, it’s shown itself to be utterly evil, but despite all the protests, it’s still around, still got Bill Gates investing in it, still ruining the lives of farmers. If we can’t even get rid of that one, how we gonna kill the rest ?
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/12/201212575935285501.html
December 8th, 2012 at 10:55 am
Gail Says: …As though we are different from animals and can deny our genetic heritage, which is that of a voracious and ruthless top predator….
==
For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.
— Psalm 8:5
Little lower than angels or junkie:
Defining us tends to get funky;
But if understood
Without bad or good,
We’re just one more myopic monkey.
December 8th, 2012 at 12:20 pm
Crickey Ulvfugl, how much CO2 was added to the atmosphere to go to a conference on near death experiences when they could go to any nearby church, synagog or mosque and be told not only that they persist after death but also how to be sure they persist in a good place not a bad place. Seems to me if you want a continued existence you would want to make sure it is a good one. Seems like just a bunch of mental contortions to deny mortality. Never works very well, people still cling to life and don’t act at all like they are assured that they continue on.
Back in my religious days I read several of Raymond Moodys books about NDE’s. I never really wanted an afterlife, and certainly didn’t believe in a hell, but I found his books of interest until I read his book Elvis After Life: Unusual psychic experiences surrounding the death of a superstar That was fun, but made me question all his other stuff. Since then I have learned of other explanations of these experiences and they are good enough for me.
Hope you get whatever continuation you want. Hope I go into nothingness.
December 8th, 2012 at 1:06 pm
There really is no life after death – for the so-called “enlightened”. And as all sentient beings are destined (doomed?) to “enlightenment”, there is, in effect, no afterlife.
December 8th, 2012 at 1:42 pm
So anybody here had a Near Death Experience? An Out of Body experience? There is most definitely something after this physical existence. I don’t claim to describe it but after experiencing it, I can’t deny it. Electricity is forever.
December 8th, 2012 at 1:47 pm
WWF statement on COP 18
Basically, a total waste of everyone’s time. USA and Canada being chiefly responsible for that.
http://youtu.be/94E53VQF2Ms
December 8th, 2012 at 1:53 pm
Yes, Carol from S., both. Don’t know about the electricity bit though
December 8th, 2012 at 2:01 pm
More innocent ones who will get dragged into oblivion, truly wonderful, the nomadic Nenets of Northern Siberia
December 8th, 2012 at 2:59 pm
Remember Meadows, “Limits to Growth”? Even he doesn’t get some of it.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/limits-to-growth-author-dennis-meadows-says-that-crisis-is-approaching-a-871570.html
December 8th, 2012 at 3:43 pm
Slavery to the growthist economic system is the most obvious, most ubiquitous and yet the most unvocalized form of modern slavery. We can never be certain that human species will become extinct with the way things are going in the forseeable future, we can only attempt to improve the chances that it will be able to navigate though the crises it created with less physical and mental pain by simply doing things that make common sense [which isn't that common unfortunately]. The chances are better if a clear goal is set to transition to a steady state economic system (which would require an initial period of sustained recession in consumption and population) and a transition plan laid out and implemented globally. Most debates and arguments currently are ultimately traceable to the current unsustainable fake economic system and so most of these debates (e.g jobs vs environment) are unnecessary artifacts of the fake system.
December 8th, 2012 at 4:23 pm
Plyush : We can never be certain that human species will become extinct with the way things are going in the forseeable future..
I’d say it’s a safe bet now.
…transition to a steady state economic system (which would require an initial period of sustained recession in consumption and population) and a transition plan laid out and implemented globally..
And what are the odds of that happening ? You’ve got to dismantle capitalism, because the accounting system that companies are built upon requires that they MUST grow. Any business or corporation that stands still is not competitive, receives no investment, because it offers no lucrative returns. You’d have to abolish usury and fractional reserve banking. I know people like Herman Daly and others have been working on steady state economics for years and years, but its never really got anywhere. You’d have to change the whole international financial and business systems completely, in a period of about five years, which is what is required to decarbonise and avoid extinction. There’s no incentive for any powerful industrialised country to do it. What’s in it for them ? They’d lose power and competitive advantage. It’s like asking the very wealthy, Gates and Koch Bros and Rockefeller and Rothschilds etc to give all their money to the poor. Nice idea. Nasty people. If they weren’t they’d have done it already. The present economic system has taken centuries to evolve. It’s immensely complex. Yeah, if it implodes, great. There’d be a chance to build something sane, maybe. But we saw what happened in 2008, when it nearly imploded. They’ll sacrifice just about anything to keep it going. Like the European bankers have sacrificed the Greeks. We’ve just seen what’s happened at Doha. The fuckers who benefit from the status quo are not going to change it just because it makes sense, or because people ask nicely, or for the sake or jobs, or the environment, or the future, or anything like that. Goldman Sachs rules the world. There is no time left. All the talk about transition is illusion, IMO. What are you going to transition to ? A world that’s 4, 5, 6 deg C. hotter and mostly uninhabitable.
December 8th, 2012 at 5:33 pm
Kathy C:
“how much CO2 was added to the atmosphere to go to a conference on near death experiences when they could go to any nearby church, synagog or mosque and be told not only that they persist after death but also how to be sure they persist in a good place not a bad place.”
If we are going to put as much carbon as we possibly can into the air one way or another anyway, and the end is already in sight, why proscribe or disdain any activity whatsoever – especially if it’s undertaken in good faith (!)
Surely the amount of CO2 spent going to a conference isn’t enough to make a damn bit of difference to the general outcome, while attending it may make a big personal difference to someone. You don’t like the topic? Fine – go to a conference on a topic you DO resonate with. What is gained by dismissing others’ choices at this stage of the game?
If we’re all going poof shortly, why object to anything that others do, as long as it’s not directly harmful to other life forms?
December 8th, 2012 at 5:44 pm
Paul, I didn’t start it, ulvfugl did when he wrote “Here’s one for you in return, re your own entrenched views…” and then posted the stuff on the conference. I made the mistake of biting on his bating.
December 8th, 2012 at 5:59 pm
Kathy, I’m proposing a bigger question that just about your views on spirituality and carbon dioxide. It’s more like, “Does being this close to The End put a different spin on the universal human tendency to judge? Does it change one’s perspective on morality? Does it give us an opportunity to “let it be”?”
These days I often draw a breath for an outburst of objection, only to find myself thinking, “You know, at this point does it really matter if they’re wrong? And then I let my breath back out without saying anything. Life seems to go on with less disturbance, somehow.
December 8th, 2012 at 6:27 pm
Piyush,
We can never be certain that human species will become extinct with the way things are going in the forseeable future, we can only attempt to improve the chances that it will be able to navigate though the crises it created with less physical and mental pain by simply doing things that make common sense [which isn't that common unfortunately].
IMO one of the most misunderstood and ignored phenomenon is overpopulation. Even if we suddenly figured out how to reverse climate change, with 7 billion plus humans (increasing by 200 every minute of every hour of every day), what good would it do? An increasing population requires ever more food, ever more water, ever more energy . . . on and on it goes. In short, no matter what problem you find a solution for, because our population is in overshoot, there will be another extinction level problem lurking just around the corner.
It’s a fact that something must give sooner or later. Infinite growth is impossible in a finite system. Unfortunately for most of us humans, the only solution to overpopulation is less population. As Kathy C has shared several times, reducing population by any number sufficient to address our problems in a timeframe that will offer any meaningful solution is not possible.
December 8th, 2012 at 7:46 pm
‘i don’t share my dark thoughts with anyone other than strangers who start conversations with me, but rather spend my remaining time with my kin enjoying what we’re doing (even though it’s pointless). i try to encourage their wonder and growth instead of filling them with doom and gloom’ -tom
if that’s so, then i guess that makes i and everyone else who has read some of your dark cyberspace musings ‘strangers who like to start conversations’. well, i guess there’s worse things to be! lol
i find it troubling that u feel compelled to hide what must by now be such an integral part of your psyche, from everyone u know.
quite arguably, these ‘dark thoughts’ are a curse. too much knowledge/awareness is a curse. however, given the severity of this knowledge i would think a part of your complex mind is itching to spill the beans, to share the bad news, because of it’s significance. and because social animals like us i suspect crave surreal intimacy in our most significant relationships based on trust, not fear.
so now i’ve gone and done it. i’ve maybe fucked with your life, tom, because of a flaw i perceived in it which i just shared with u and everyone else reading this. i must admit i’m biased by the perception that i’ve brought great pain upon myself in the past by rationalizing concealing some of my ‘darkest’ thoughts from a beloved. chances are, sooner or later, this lack of sharing will starve a relationship, accomplishing precisely what u seek to avoid… or maybe not!
damned if u do, and damned if u don’t, imo. i surreally wish u the best, tom. i wouldn’t want to be in your shoes, but then, i can’t think of anyone’s shoes i’d like to fill at this time, except maybe a dead man’s. or maybe some rich fortunate fool who is still loving life. but for how long can this fool’s paradise last?
full disclosure: quite often, i’m still a rich (by global standards) fortunate fool who loves life, despite it’s obvious imperfections and perils. there’s no accounting for this absurd surreality, no explaining or justifying it. it just is, until it isn’t anymore.
i think it wise to prepare for one’s demise. or maybe not! maybe some fools’ luck never runs out! maybe santa claus is coming to town!
maybe denial is the best choice. everyone must make the choice for themselves how much surreality can be embraced, should be embraced (that is, if free will actually existed). whatever floats your boat. enjoy it while it still floats, i say.
December 8th, 2012 at 8:35 pm
Sayurday’s Sydney Morning Herald….
‘Six degrees of devastation’
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/six-degrees-of-devastation-20121207-2b1d5.html
If you read carefully there is still a lot of obfuscation in the silly forcasting scenario. All 2100 still, not much clarity there.
Still, it is there, but with minimal alarm to wakey wakey many up.
I think it will probably be ‘ n my backyard’ syndrome with all this. TPTB and the inertia of ‘complex living arrangment’ for most will keep people occupied.
There is definitly many eople who could engage and the absence of leadership is what slows that engagement IMO.
A quote:
“The problem we have is that, even if our best estimate is 4 degrees of warming this century, that is a global average and most of the globe is water,” he says. “Four degrees on average means probably 3 degrees over the oceans, and 5 or 6 degrees on average over the land.”
There is also the ery nieve presumption in the piece that industrial civilisation will get to 2100 without major killer blows to it.
‘Waking up is hard to do!’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOrjcLJ2IE0
” If I wake I’m going to sue,
‘cos waking up is hard to do…
…now I think I’ll throw up on you,
‘cos waking up is hard to do”
Some light relief…
December 8th, 2012 at 8:57 pm
Does it bring any Relief?
December 8th, 2012 at 8:59 pm
Anyone:
Is there any data on temps this southern summer in the Antarctic? I guess there is nowhere near as much Methane accumulating in the Southern pole, or not?
December 8th, 2012 at 9:47 pm
Gail Says:
Isn’t all the agonizing over what culture or trait or economic system to blame just a human conceit? …As though we are different from animals and can deny our genetic heritage, which is that of a voracious and ruthless top predator.
A brilliant summation of Judeo-Christian original sin theology, which has been pounded into all our minds since we were tiny tots. The BP CEO and ulvfugl’s “innocent Nenet nomadic ones who will get dragged into oblivion” are equally to blame…this means we should be making trips to Siberia to monkey-wrench the Nenet, not Monsanto. And Guy should replace the suburban sprawl slide in his presentation, with one of the Nenet nomads. Every human culture that ever existed is as guilty as Dick Cheney.
December 8th, 2012 at 9:51 pm
.
With doom, there’s no one to blame:
We evolved into what we became;
Of course, you can bitch
If you don’t like your niche,
But the end will remain just the same.
December 8th, 2012 at 10:06 pm
A brilliant summation of Judeo-Christian original sin theology (!)
I’m sorry that seems a little garbled.
I was brought up to be an atheist. I think it is fulfilling and perfectly justifiable to heap more blame on, say, the Koch brothers, than say, Aldo Leopold.
That doesn’t change the fact that, AS A SPECIES, we exhibit no signs of having the capability of exercising self-control and typically, when presented the opportunity to gorge, only the rare individual abstains (see The Queen of Versailles for a hugely funny documentary on this!).
So it seems to me, such a view is the furthest thing from any “sin” at all – and you can’t get much further from Judeo-Christian theology than to say humans have no soul other than the reflections of their emotions (synapses firing in between brain cells). Can you?
December 8th, 2012 at 10:30 pm
Just one aspect of Mindful Speaking:
Always speak the truth, always speak kindly, but never speak the truth unkindly – Upanishads
December 8th, 2012 at 10:37 pm
Gail Says:
perfectly justifiable to heap more blame on, say, the Koch brothers, than say, Aldo Leopold. That doesn’t change the fact that, AS A SPECIES, we exhibit no signs of having the capability of exercising self-control and typically
You can’t say we exhibit no signs of self-control and then bring up examples of people and cultures that have exhibited those signs, can you?
December 8th, 2012 at 10:51 pm
A brilliant summation of Judeo-Christian original sin theology
Not Judeo. In the Judaic tradition man was created in the image of G_d. When G_d breathed the Spirit into the clay image to animate it as Adam, that Spirit never separated from its Source. That is why the Yechidah (the purest essence of the soul) is indistinguishable from Ein Sof (the purest essence of G_d).
December 8th, 2012 at 11:01 pm
Robin Datta Says:
December 8th, 2012 at 10:51 pm
A brilliant summation of Judeo-Christian original sin theology
Not Judeo. In the Judaic tradition man was created in the image of G_d. When G_d breathed the Spirit into the clay image to animate it as Adam, that Spirit never separated from its Source. That is why the Yechidah (the purest essence of the soul) is indistinguishable from Ein Sof (the purest essence of G_d).
Yes, that sounds right, original sin is more of a Christian formulation.
December 8th, 2012 at 11:24 pm
For anyone with 88 min to spare, this podcast, or video if you choose, concerns some of the historically cumulative aspects of violence in relation to climate change(ove at least a generation or 30 years or so).
‘Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence’
http://www2.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/videoAndAudio/channels/publicLecturesAndEvents/player.aspx?id=1615
The talk is based on his recent book by Professor Christian Parenti. Of particular interst IMO is the wide ranging discussion in the 20 or so minutes of Q&A at the end, which details some of the local and state examples of things that others believe will mitigate and help climate change.
Many actually do not get that the world economic machine will eventually catch up with any mitigation, and just fill up the carbon dioxide, methane and other GHG suitcase at some point in the future.
In line with the essay topic, it will probably only be End-Ind-Civ that could ‘do’ anything, but I hear that old song from the 60′s…
“… stab it with thier steely knives,
they just can’t kill the Beast”
“Eagles – Hotel California – Live ’76″
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXT1h3Ags94
“You can check out any time you like,
but you can never leave..”
At the same time advocating reincarnation, and denying the release from it is possible…? Ah those were the days..!
December 8th, 2012 at 11:26 pm
Correction from the 70′s…
December 8th, 2012 at 11:38 pm
Just commenting to say: I have attempted to catch up on reading comments here while exhausted, and so many great thoughts were expressed, and I can’t possibly muster up the brainpower at the moment to respond the way I would like. Much of my energy has been diverted elsewhere, like writing on my blog. Also crying a lot.
Daniel: I’m so looking forward to your essay.
December 9th, 2012 at 12:30 am
The collapse, that we all sense is coming soon, is going to be BIG. It is going to affect 7 billion people, killing most of them, and it is going to play out over generations to come. The particular actions of individuals will not affect the broad sweep of the future, so …
Rule #1: Don’t beat yourself up over what the best action to take might be. Enjoy your life for at least some of each day, smell the flowers, pat a dog, stroke a cat, because if you don’t, that way lies insanity. But at the same time, don’t do nothing.
Spreading the meme
It is hard to talk to family, especially children, about such a gloomy subject, but the internet allows you to talk to complete strangers, many of whom are on the point of grasping the reality of what is happening. Occupiers, peak oilers, rainforest campaigners, endangered species groups, anti-fracking groups, anti-war groups, anti-surveillance groups, human rights groups, political groups (especially Greens) will all benefit from being exposed to this meme, not just once, but many times and from many different people, each with their own way of putting it.
Don’t expect to make converts overnight, in fact don’t expect to make converts at all – but spread the meme for when the next pension fund crashes, taking with it the life savings of a lot of nice people who have done the right thing and worked hard all their lives, only to have it all evaporate overnight. Then when they wonder “why?”, the meme will already be there.
I don’t actually believe in human extinction. We are, after all, warm-blooded adaptable omnivores who have shown they can live almost anywhere – think of the ancient city of Timbuktu, still surviving in the middle of the Sahara Desert, think of the rainforest hunter-gatherers of the Amazon and Arunachal-Pradesh who have never bought gasoline or owned a mobile phone, think of the eskimos and the Saami reindeer herders who have only very recently become slightly mechanised.
No doubt the extra pressure put on the remaining healthy eco-systems by desperate survivors will cause the carrying capacity of the planet without fossil fuels to fall below the ~1 billion level it had 300 years ago, but some will survive and gradually establish some kind of balance with the new environment.
Even if I’m wrong, and it becomes an extinction event, I really don’t see the need to express the problem in those terms. If you can convince someone of the likelihood of a 90% reduction in human population, the final step to 100% is obviously understood as a possibility.
Right Action
The sun still shines, the rain still falls, and given a lot of back-breaking labour, food will grow without fossil fuels. But it is MUCH harder to set up a Permaculture farm than inherit it from your parents, so it makes sense to start as soon as possible and at least get some experience, and have a stock of trees in the ground and seeds that work, while the going is good. Somebody will benefit from it even if you don’t.
Personally, I live in a tropical rainforest in Australia, and am learning to recognise every species, and what it can be used for. When civilisation collapses, I will have 15,000 hectares of crocodile-infested swamp (currently National Park) to live off, and a million hectares of rainforest to range in.
Earlier in this long thread someone asked what do we need modern medicine for. A couple of weeks ago I was bitten by a tick, nothing new there, but the tick was carrying a spirochaete bacteria and by the time I realised what was happening and got myself to hospital, I was told if I didn’t have intravenous anti-biotics straight away, I would be dead in a day from toxic shock. I have a multi-lethal dose of Prothiaden tablets (central nervous system suppressant) in my fridge, so I had a choice. What would you do? I rolled up my sleeve.
Resistance
TPTB know the situation (probably better than we do) and are clearly worried about dissent. So dissent. Back in the 60s the culture-jamming movement bought newspapers and stuffed them into the public mailboxes to clog up the mail system. I guess the modern equivalent would be to email the biggest possible file to the biggest list of recipients, over and over again to jam up the mail servers. Google gives you 10+ gigabytes of email storage – test the limit. Electronic graffiti.
So long as the financial system hasn’t crashed, the system lurches on as normal, so crash the financial system. Start a rumour about BoA running out of cash at a certain branch and start a bank run. Be creative.
Or you could just sit and think.
December 9th, 2012 at 1:40 am
Robin, Ein Sof, linguistically, although probably not theologically, equals Uno Sophia, One Wisdom ?
And the equivalent terms in the other traditions, e.g. Vedanta, Taoism, Buddhism, Jainism etc, are ? Perhaps you can remind me ? You are usually good at this stuff.
December 9th, 2012 at 1:49 am
Palloy, good thinking…
I guess the spirochaetes and the crocodiles will outlast us then
Or you could just sit and think.
Or, just sit and not think. As in zazen.
Which is, of course, not the same as sitting and trying not to think.
December 9th, 2012 at 2:16 am
In a sense, the Gvts. of Poland, Russia, Canada, the USA and Japan ( rather than the people of those countries ) by blocking all progress at Doha, have stated that they don’t give a shit about what happens to the rest of the world’s population, re sea level rise, re droughts and famines, re hurricanes and typhoons, re ocean acidification, re prospects for future generations, and all the rest….
Which is really a declaration of war, because a hell of a lot of people are going to die as a result of the decision… Mostly poor people. It’s not a declaration in the traditional explicit formal sense where some guy comes on tv and makes a statement and the tanks and bombers start to roll…
Those cold, dead, steely eyes. It’s like a fire crew, they have all the gear to do the job, but they stand and watch the building burn, the children leaping from the windows, the screams for help, because they’re on their fucking tea break, and rules is rules…
December 9th, 2012 at 2:33 am
I have a question. Let’s say that all production of oxygen stopped today, how long would the oxygen in the atmosphere support those of us who need it? Days, months, years? I hear 6% is the minimum level needed. How well would we do with say 15%? It’s the oxygen, not the heat that will wipe us out. Vegetation doesn’t need oxygen so some would continue to be produced using that “wonderful plant food, CO2″ along with all that nice heat. Growth rate doubles for each 10 degrees warmer…up to a point.
December 9th, 2012 at 2:52 am
Vegetation does need oxygen. Look up plant metabolism or photosynthesis on wiki, there is much to much to explain here.
Growth rate doesn’t double for each 10 deg warmer. Plants require a whole lot of inputs, which vary for species. Whichever is in least supply governs growth rate.
December 9th, 2012 at 2:59 am
OK. Stop beating around the bush. How long?
December 9th, 2012 at 3:05 am
Growth rate doubles for each 10 degrees warmer…
Is that Fahrenheit or Celsius ? Whichever, it sounds simplistic to the point of insanity to me. 90% of plants, trees, in natural ecosystems have complex relationships with soil fungi, mycorrhiza, and if the temperature, changes by 10 deg, very likely the whole character of the soil gets changed, all the bacteria and other microrganisms, will be altered, so probably, the whole ecosystem changes, so rather than doubling growth, the whole lot dies and gets replaced by a totally different set of vegetation.
It’s not just the soil either. The flowering will be triggered by temperature, and the pollination by insects will be linked to temperature, so you change it by just a couple of degrees and you’ve wrecked that relationship too.
December 9th, 2012 at 3:06 am
How long what ?
December 9th, 2012 at 3:23 am
You mean, how long before we are wearing aqualung cylinders on our backs and masks, just to be able to walk about outside ? Or gasping for breath as if we were halfway up Everest ?
I really don’t know, David. The experiment is still running. You’ll probably get you’re answer when the final results are in, and the papers get published in Nature, maybe around 2030. All depends upon how fast the phytoplankton die. I believe they have a life cycle of about two weeks. Dropped by 40% already. And how fast the forests get destroyed, by cutting and by fires, and by climate change, beetles, etc. That’s going on apace.
I don’t think there’s any marked drop in 02 levels yet. But judging by how dumb the scientists have been re methane and permafrost and ocean acidification etc. ( or maybe it’s just that nobody will fund the research ? ) it wouldn’t surprise me if nobody has bothered to check.
December 9th, 2012 at 3:31 am
If we imagine the atmosphere as an oxygen cylinder on our backs, how long will it last? Like asking how long will the oil reserves last. I start with the assumption that no more is produced so no one needs to use differential equations. We know how much oil we use per day. How much O2 do we use. I just wondered if anyone had any idea at all.
December 9th, 2012 at 3:39 am
Paul, “Kathy, I’m proposing a bigger question that just about your views on spirituality and carbon dioxide. It’s more like, “Does being this close to The End put a different spin on the universal human tendency to judge? Does it change one’s perspective on morality? Does it give us an opportunity to “let it be”?”
Yes of course, but we are humans, and the hook in ulvfugl’s post to me was “your entrenched views”. He was IMO hooking me away from a subject he didn’t want to discuss, the possibility that we might land in similar situations as the jews and other folks the Nazi’s imprisioned, where we would have to decide what is moral at the risk of our lives. It is altogher possible that the FEMA camps will fill up before the end and as Millgram Experiment showed, as the clips of TSA folks, and clips of police with their tasers show, people are easily turned into monsters. We may well face some monsters before climate change does us in. My discussion of the Grey Zone was uncomfortable and thus Ulvfugl chose to divert me with a subject and a hook. I fell for it. It was exactly the position on morality in difficult times that I started out discussing when I got distracted.
So Paul, have you seen the Grey Zone. Do you think the prisoners that got the Dr. to save the man who committed suicide acted morally. Do you believe that the prisoner who suffocated the man to fulfill his wish to die acted morally. Was it moral to save the girl who survived the gas chambers and risk the plot that might save many more people by blowing up the crematorium? How should we act if we get incarcerated in the hands of TPTB.
December 9th, 2012 at 3:45 am
Not a particularly good article, but fwiw :
Total loss since start of industrial revolution
O2 depletion from fossil-fuel burning through 2004: 35.2 Pmol
CO2 depletion from fossil-fuel burning through 2004: 26.3 Pmol
Estimated O2 content of preindustrial atmosphere: 37050 Pmol
1 Pmol = 10^15 mol
“So the total estimated industrial O2 depletion on Jan 1, 2005 would have been (35.3)/(37050)x100 = 0.095% of the preindustrial amount.”
“For the past 15 years, we have direct measurements of the decrease. But the observations before 1990 aren’t good enough to draw inferences. Hence the estimate based on industrial emissions is about the best we can come up with.”
Think about that. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution we have removed .095% of the oxygen in our atmosphere. True, that is only a tenth of one percent of the total supply, but oxygen makes up only 20% of the atmosphere. I looked up safety rules regarding oxygen concentrations and according to OSHA rules on atmospheres in closed environments, “if the oxygen level in such an environment falls below 19.5% it is oxygen deficient, putting occupants of the confined space at risk of losing consciousness and death.” What happens if the world’s atmospheric levels of oxygen fall to 19.5% or lower? Are we all going to have to carry little blue oxygen tanks with us to survive? Not a pleasant possibility.
http://blogcritics.org/scitech/article/atmospheric-oxygen-levels-fall-as-carbon/
December 9th, 2012 at 4:11 am
Kathy C. ulvfugl’s post to me was “your entrenched views”. He was IMO hooking me away from a subject he didn’t want to discuss..
That’s just your interpretation, Kathy. As I said, it’s ludicrous to discuss extreme situations, like imagining myself finding a live little girl under a heap of dead bodies in a gas chamber in a concentration camp where I have volunteered to help people who are willingly murdering innocent victims…. whilst I’m sitting here, in security and comfort… it’s head-wanking, totally absurd. Nobody ever knows how they will react under such terrible stress until they find themselves actually there. You cannot decide before hand and make a plan, this is what I’d do. It’s fantasy land, for people that watch too much tv.
As for your ‘entrenched views’. You previously held different ( Christian ) entrenched views. Then you changed them. Now you hold others. Who knows, you might change them again. In there, there is always that possibility.
You said Hope you get whatever continuation you want. Hope I go into nothingness.
I am quite happy to get whatever comes my way. I more or less expect something like the Tibetan Book if the Dead, but if it’s not like that, that’s fine too, I’ll deal with it at the time, nothingness will do fine. I live with nothingness now. You also said something about not needing to go to a conference, because any synagogue, church or mosque would do. But, despite my best efforts, that shows you never even understood the simplest rudiments of what I attempted to explain to you in that long exchange. None of those people have a clue. All they can do is recount their orthodox dogma. they don’t actually know how to DO the stuff in a practical sense. To learn that is hard, it’s rare, you have to seek out esoteric schools and work at it. It’s not book learning or conforming to a teaching, it’s a skill, like doing the high wire at a circus. But there we are. Just because you have no idea what i am talking about does not mean it cannot be done or does not exist, it just means it is beyond the scope of your understanding. I’m not baiting you, btw. I really don’t care if you agree or not. I just happened to discover this stuff a long time ago, and it is incredibly interesting and, for some people, seems important too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subtle_body
December 9th, 2012 at 5:21 am
Was it Michael that was asking for practical things to do ? Here’s an example for you Americanos and others to follow, from some European anarcho-pirates, become an unmonk and set up an unmonastery, become a virus, infect your locality…
http://piratepad.net/TcBA3qtpVE
December 9th, 2012 at 6:56 am
tvt: i appreciate the criticism. Everyone i know has heard my doom and gloom predictions of planetary degradation and human population collapse due to our surreal living arrangements. i no longer state the obvious because it’s time for them to come around to their own take on things without my badgering, fact spouting, report quoting rationalizations and especially my timetable predictions (which of course are no more valid than a wild guess). i’m at the point now where i’m enjoying my remaining time without trying to “save the world” (as my wife puts it). i still go to rallies and protests against the tar sands and fracking, write my corporatist legislators (both state and federal), and keep active in anti-nuke, anti-coal and anti-mountaintop coal mining but it hasn’t done any good (not that i’m giving up, just observing reality).
i went to a Big 5 basketball game last night at the Palestra with a lifelong friend (VU vs Penn). Looking at all those kids (and their families and friends) having fun and completely enthralled in the game, seemingly oblivious of what’s coming down on us all before they reach 40 (according to my internal opinion) – the rich Penn campus all around with a huge complex of well-lit tennis courts and soccer fields that one walks beside on the way to the venue from the parking area, their own power plant in the background, the city vibrant and alive all around them – they’re distracted from the coming reality by the unsustainable current one surrounding them. i wonder when they’ll realize what we here “know?” i almost hope they’re oblivious until the end and just enjoy themselves all along the way (out). They come from wealthy families and have only local concerns of grades (finals), self-development and some nebulous future of jobs (which, for many of them, will be a fine position in the family business or for a thriving business with someone “connected” to their family – nepotism), the search and development of a significant other and holiday doings. They aren’t interested. Life’s too much fun and they were born to advantage.
So, in conclusion, you’re correct in that holding back can be detrimental, but i’ve already spoken my dire predictions and now it’s time to let them discover the truth of the world on their own. Should anyone seek my advice or want to delve further into it, i’ll send them the links i’ve travelled down and let them connect the dots and we can converse after they’ve read the underlying material. Otherwise, i’m done talking about it except for here. Thanks for listening.
(from Collapse of Industrial Civilization blog an article from Business Insider)
“Google TV, Microsoft, Comcast, and now Verizon have all submitted patent applications to create televisions and DVRs that will watch you as you watch TV…”
(from Climate Progress)
Deadlock In Doha: Is Qatar Going To Be The Place Where International Agreements Go To Die?
“This year’s UN climate negotiations have once again deadlocked. Negotiators and observers in the hall are concerned that this meeting could end with no outcome, much like the long-stalled Doha trade negotiations.”
(and finally from Dutchsinse)
Microwave/Frequency Warfare – Dr. Barrie Trower (13 part video interview)
and we thought nuclear radiation, HAARP and chemtrails were the only big problems – listen to this (it’s been going on since the 1960′s right under our noses, and now up against our ears with cell phones)!
December 9th, 2012 at 7:11 am
Ulvfugl I would suggest that one is better prepared to act under situations of stress if they think about what others have done and think about what they would want to do. Given the site we are posting on, it increases our liklihood of being rounded up and stuck in Fema camps don’t you think. But of course the questions about morality asked in the film don’t just pertain to those instances. For instance with the girl, the larger question is if to save many people you have to sacrifice one, what should you do. You might phrase that this way, if ending the economy causes a huge dieoff but saves humans from extinction, what is the moral thing to do? Specific instances in extreme situations can be used to illuminate larger situations.
My earlier views on religion were indoctrinated into me from birth. I started questioning them early on. The part I held firmly to was the ethics of Jesus, the rest I increasingly rejected. What I believe now based on my personal studies is in no way analagous to my religious beliefs. Yet the fact that it was at the core the values (or most of them) that Jesus taught that kept me in the fold is consistent with my current beliefs and does not represent some huge turn a round in my world view.
December 9th, 2012 at 7:54 am
ulvfugl, I read recently that global O2 is now 19%, 17% over some large cities, and 6% is the end of life that uses O2. Seems to me that if we have increased the level of CO2, we should have decreased the level of O2 but the answer may not be that simple.
Let’s take a hypothetical example: phytoplankton produce half the O2, burning fossil fuels useses half the O2, if industrial economy were to stop right now and all phytoplankton dies, the O2 level would stay steady. But with global warming, existing plants would grow faster and new plant growth would take place in northern regions. Hense, more O2 than we had before the collapse.
I have learned that photosynthesis stops at 50F, starts above 50F to 60F, and doubles at 70F and doubles again at 80F but past 85F starts to slow down as temp. rises more. Looks like a bell curve.
Speaking for myself, I would like to get to the bottom of this. Anyone else interested?
December 9th, 2012 at 8:21 am
Ein Sof is Hebrew for Eternal Void. Since It is without any identifying characteristics, (in Buddhist tradition without name & form) it cannot be said to exist in like manner to any object or concept of mental comprehension. Hence from the viewpoint of ordinary mental comprehension, it may seem non-existent. It is the Sunyata (Void – Emptiness) of Buddhism. Just as Yechidah is indistinguishable from Ein Sof, so too Atman (the purest essence of one’s self) is indistinguishable from Brahman (the Self of all selves).
December 9th, 2012 at 8:22 am
Regarding oxygen in the atmosphere, the comments section adds much more information…and a lot of bullshit. I don’t know what to conclude.
http://blogcritics.org/scitech/article/atmospheric-oxygen-levels-fall-as-carbon/
December 9th, 2012 at 8:30 am
“Cables were unplugged, pressure temporarily went out of control after M7.3″
Posted by Mochizuki on December 9th, 2012 ·
http://fukushima-diary.com/2012/12/express-cables-were-unplugged-pressure-temporarily-went-out-of-control-after-m7-3/
(An anonymous source from the inside of the government)
At this moment, none of the emergency was reported due to the M7.3 at this moment. However, they reported to us the troubles such as cables were unplugged or pressure went out of control etc..While those troubles were reported to us, Tepco and the government officially announced there was no problem at the plant. The world really felt scary to me.
December 9th, 2012 at 8:31 am
Photographer “Reactor4 looked like it was about to fall down”
Posted by Mochizuki on December 9th, 2012 ·
A friend of mine heard from a photographer who was sent to take pictures of reactor4 that it looked like it was about to fall down.
Fukushima workers tell it to each other “Come back safe” when they go to reactor4 they say. It scared me.
http://fukushima-diary.com/2012/12/express-photographer-reactor4-looked-like-it-was-about-to-fall-down/
December 9th, 2012 at 8:45 am
Dave thanks for the article. I have printed it so I can read it with more attention
. It does rather seem like the anoxia question is important since it is one of the ways we can go extinct. Of course what the US is going to do in Syria and Iran and how China and Russia will react is important too. But it would seem like the oxygen question would be easier to answer….
This was a recent surprise
Phytoplankton Population Drops 40 Percent Since 1950
Researchers find trouble among phytoplankton, the base of the food chain, which has implications for the marine food web and the world’s carbon cycle
By Lauren Morello and ClimateWire
Overview
Tiny Organisms Provide Power To Move Oceans
The microscopic plants that form the foundation of the ocean’s food web are declining, reports a study published July 29 in Nature.
The tiny organisms, known as phytoplankton, also gobble up carbon dioxide to produce half the world’s oxygen output—equaling that of trees and plants on land.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=phytoplankton-population
December 9th, 2012 at 9:09 am
Ripley,
“You can’t say we exhibit no signs of self-control and then bring up examples of people and cultures that have exhibited those signs, can you?”
You lost me. When did I bring up examples of cultures that have exhibited signs [of self control]? Remember I was talking about our collective behavior, as a species, not outliers who were born mutants without the denier gene like, probably, just about anyone who reads NBL.
Kathy C, thank you for the link to the Grey Zone. I intend to watch it, but I have to work up to it. I think it was learning about WWII when I was about 11 yrs old that I began to ask the questions you have raised (what would I do?) – and, how can people be so depraved…(have you seen Sarah’s Key? It was criticized as being “yet another movie that exploits the Holocaust” but I thought it was not much shy of profound).
ulvfugl and dairymandave: ” …the whole lot dies and gets replaced by a totally different set of vegetation.”
I don’t expect that to happen, ultimately. For one thing, SLR will take away quite a bit of land, eventually – for another, climate change is going to cause widespread desertification.
Even before that though, pollution is already killing plants and leaving nothing in their place but mud. Nature abhors a vacuum, so when there are empty places, something is terribly wrong. Ulvfugl is very correct that you have to take into account all of the complexities of organisms that live in soils and pollinate and so forth, relationships that are already being disrupted by climate change and pollution. (skip the intro and listen to the ecological consequences merely from early snow melt: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6m7z5bgG1vs)
I have been watching the trees and understory of the woods disappear for several years now, and they aren’t being replaced or if so, only temporarily. I can see through the forests for half a mile where it used to be impenetrable beyond a few feet, even in winter with leaves down. When I pick my way through, over fallen trunks and branches, there are now many places devoid of any plants, which used to be unthinkable except perhaps on well-beaten paths. The mushrooms I picked that came up reliably every year – morels in April, and chanterelles in early July – disappeared around 2009.
Still, my understanding is we will die off first from other causes than lack of oxygen – famine, lack of fresh water, pandemics, violent extreme floods and droughts, and war …and then, the problem will be not lack of oxygen, but production of hydrogen sulphide into the atmosphere, which is poisonous (see Under a Green Sky).
December 9th, 2012 at 9:10 am
David, as far as I can tell, O2 level in the atmosphere is not a problem at the moment, and unlikely to become a problem in the next decade or two anyway. Considering we have so many others, I don’t give it a very high priority, myself. In the longer term, it could very well be a dramatic problem, depending upon what happens to forests and phytoplankton.
I think your example re photosynthesis doubling probably only exists as a laboratory experiment. Also the idea that there will be increased O2 from faster plant growth and expanded plant growth areas in the N. Hemisphere is dubious. There is far more to it than temperature. Day length for photosynthesis is much shorter, moving north. There has to be the right soil, and the right amount of water. These thing cannot just be assumed.
For example, say Alaska becomes so warm that temperate trees can grow there. Okay, so for five years, there’s birch and aspens and so forth, all pumping out O2, but then another five years, it’s so warm and dry that it doesn’t suit them any more, and they all die, and release their Co2… then what grows ? some other species, and so on…. that’s the trouble with extremely rapid climate change, all ecosystems collapse, there’s no time to evolve or adjust, there’s just continual chaos… the stability we had for the last few thousand years is gone.
December 9th, 2012 at 9:10 am
Tom, So, in conclusion, you’re correct in that holding back can be detrimental, but i’ve already spoken my dire predictions and now it’s time to let them discover the truth of the world on their own. Should anyone seek my advice or want to delve further into it, i’ll send them the links i’ve travelled down and let them connect the dots and we can converse after they’ve read the underlying material. Otherwise, i’m done talking about it except for here. Thanks for listening.
Well said and pretty much the approach I’ve been taking.
December 9th, 2012 at 9:30 am
DairymanDave, the question of O2 is important, I agree. Likely more important in the short term for those who already have trouble breathing. For example, someone with COPD who is just barely getting enough oxygen through normal inspiration will likely need supplemental oxygen as atmospheric O2 goes down. Once supplemental oxygen is no longer available, then those folks die off fairly quickly. (Along with the others already using supplemental oxygen.) There are worse ways to die, but not many.
As to increased plant growth in the northern hemisphere, Ulvfugl’s observation about decreased sunlight is pertinent. It’s true that during summer, the amount of sunlight is greater, and thus, intuitively, it would seem that plants would thrive. However, during the winter the reduced amount of sunlight could be quite detrimental to plants that are not accustomed to such reduced hours of light. As several have noted, it’s definitely a complicated proposition.
My take on it is that phytoplankton is the key. I just don’t think there’s a way for us to replace the O2 from phytoplankton using land-based techniques.
December 9th, 2012 at 9:31 am
Ulvfugl, I really like the idea of being an “unmonk”. Maybe that’s what I’ll “do”. (As long as I don’t have to be celibate!)
December 9th, 2012 at 9:50 am
Gail Says:
December 8th, 2012 at 8:53 am
Isn’t all the agonizing over what culture or trait or economic system to blame just a human conceit? …As though we are different from animals and can deny our genetic heritage, which is that of a voracious and ruthless top predator. Does anyone blame the tiger for ripping the baby goat to shreds
Gail Says:
December 9th, 2012 at 9:09 am
Ripley,
“You can’t say we exhibit no signs of self-control and then bring up examples of people and cultures that have exhibited those signs, can you?”
You lost me. When did I bring up examples of cultures that have exhibited signs [of self control]? Remember I was talking about our collective behavior, as a species, not outliers who were born mutants without the denier gene like, probably, just about anyone who reads NBL.
Actually, I think your ideas about human nature and human behavior have been the most interesting topic anyone has talked about so far on this thread. I think it’s a very important topic. I’m certainly no expert. But what you seem to be saying is that the behavior of voracious and ruthless top predators like the Nazis is natural and normal and those that frown upon it are conceited genetic mutants. If what you say is true, why bother watching movies critical of Nazis?
December 9th, 2012 at 10:16 am
Oxygen cycle
Table 1: Major reservoirs involved in the oxygen cycle
Reservoir Flux In/Out Residence
Capacity. (kg O2 Time
(kg O2). per year). (years)
Atmosphere 1.4 * 1018 30,000 * 10^10 4,500
Biosphere 1.6 * 1016 30,000 * 10^10 50
Lithosphere 2.9 * 1020 60 * 10^10 500,000,000
December 9th, 2012 at 10:16 am
Gail, Netflix keeps telling me to watch Sarah’s Key, and sometimes I feel like I have watched all the holocaust movies I want to watch given the holocaust Israel is perpetrating on the Palestinians. But add your recommendation and it is in the Queue
Here is one you might find interesting – it deals with Lebanon and educated me on that as well as telling a searching story about humans and how they act in dire situations – it is Incendies – if you decide to watch it you might want to read up on the Lebanese Civil War – wiki lists about 20 armed groups that were operating during that time! In the end it is about revenge and forgiveness or maybe just understanding and being understood, or just trying to make an upside down world right. Hard to really put in a few words, but a very thought provoking movie. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebanese_civil_war
December 9th, 2012 at 10:35 am
Corrigendum:
Table 1: Major reservoirs involved in the oxygen cycle
Reservoir || Flux In/Out || Residence
Capacity || (kg O2 || Time
(kg O2). || per year) || (years)
Atmosphere 1.4 * 1018 30,000 * 10^10 4,500
Biosphere 1.6 * 1016 30,000 * 10^10 50
Lithosphere 2.9 * 1020 60 * 10^10 500,000,000
December 9th, 2012 at 10:52 am
Table 1: Major reservoirs involved in the oxygen cycle
Reservoir {Flux In/Out} [Residence Time]
Capacity. {kg O2}
_kg O2_ {per year}. [years]
Atmosphere 1.4 * 10^18 {30,000 * 10^10} [4,500]
Biosphere 1.6 * 10^16 {30,000 * 10^10} [50]
Lithosphere 2.9 * 10^20 {60 * 10^10} [500,000,000]
December 9th, 2012 at 11:42 am
Thanks Kathy C. I will look that up. You won’t be sorry after watching Sarah’s Key, it is elegiacally beautiful. That is the dichotomy of humanity.
Ripley, those are kind words. Let me answer your question with a different story.
For several years I worked for a very wealthy couple who had adopted a baby. After about six months I realized the mother was extremely disturbed, in fact I don’t think calling her schizophrenic would consitute hyperbole – but all the money helped to cover it up. Eventually I learned that she had been sexually and violently abused as a child, and had developed basically two personalities. One (fast fading) was super efficient, capable and charming, and the other was petrified of everything from germs to water to flowers, and contained barely concealed, uncontrollable rage.
It was a very bizarre and disturbing period in my life to learn all the dark skeletons in the closet, to try to help in a situation that was hopeless as her symptoms became progressively worse and she was unwittingly infecting her child with her neurosis. I read many books about the personality disorders that result from prolonged and intensive childhood abuse, and it was awful learning about it. Once when I was discussing it with my daughter she said:
“Mom, don’t get so upset. It’s so common it ought to be considered normal.”
I get upset anyway.
December 9th, 2012 at 11:57 am
ulvfugl: Thanks for the comments, mostly agree with your response. Even with the odds as great as you mention, there is still the possibility of transitioning to a steady state system. Essentially what this complex thing we have is what was going on when the earth was empty, where humankind was able to expand. Now we are at a threshold where the world is full and we can see this clearly [with internet more and more people are able to see this]. It is obvious that it will collapse, so there will be some threshold at which it is entirely possible that governments and/or military will decide to take control of this headless monster and initiate a transition. The devil is only in the details of how this transition will hapen (how bloody or not bloody it will be for example), not that it cannot be started. Governments have taken over the economic system before.
Even rich people [Jeremy Grantham] and well known economists [Jeff Rubin] have started talking about end of growth and more will join the fray, this is inevitable given the certainty of an expansive economy hitting the limits of resources and sinks. I think it is naive to assume that somehow a few rich people will be able to continue to retain control over their wealth (they need a lot of 99 % to maintain the supply chains) until the planet and people suffer massively, there are just too many of the 99 % on the planet [many of the 99 % are in the military] to allow this to happen for too long.
December 9th, 2012 at 12:56 pm
A steady-state is not possible in overshoot. A dieBACK or dieOFF is in the cards. Government takeovers are a continuation of hierarchy, a psychopathic construct with its unidirectional wealth and resource pump.
December 9th, 2012 at 1:01 pm
Gail, oh then you have to watch The Secret Life of Words. It is the best Tim Robbins movie I have seen but Sarah Polley is the real star and portrays the woman of the story excellently. It is about a damaged woman and how she copes and how she heals and a damaged man and how they heal together. Its also about the horror of the wars in Yugoslavia. It borrows from real events in the war.
I used to feel sorry for myself because my childhood was so messed up. Upon moving to a new neighborhood I met a woman who I thought was really flaky. Upon learning her story I decided she had a right to be. She was put in a foster home with her sister at age 6 because her mother couldn’t afford to raise her. From then until age 16 she was raped by her foster mother’s brother. She married and lost her first child to crib death. I decided it was time I stopped feeling sorry for myself.
Sometimes when I think of these things I think it is best that our species is slated for extinction.
December 9th, 2012 at 1:20 pm
Gail : ” …the whole lot dies and gets replaced by a totally different set of vegetation.”
I don’t expect that to happen, ultimately. For one thing, SLR will take away quite a bit of land, eventually – for another, climate change is going to cause widespread desertification.
Even before that though, pollution is already killing plants and leaving nothing in their place but mud. Nature abhors a vacuum, so when there are empty places, something is terribly wrong. Ulvfugl is very correct that you have to take into account all of the complexities of organisms that live in soils and pollinate and so forth, relationships that are already being disrupted by climate change and pollution. (skip the intro and listen to the ecological consequences merely from early snow melt: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6m7z5bgG1vs)
Thanks for that link, Gail. Yes, If that happens a few years in a row, I don’t think there’ll be anything to replace that vegetation that is so specialised. What a horrible tragedy. And that sort of thing is going to be happening all around the world and in the oceans too. We are going to lose it all….
But I think stuff will regrow. Nature is incredibly tough. You know, volcanic eruptions arise out of the sea, and in weeks there’s small living things already establishing themselves. Just that they are no use to us and it takes thousands of years before a full ecosystem develops.
December 9th, 2012 at 1:32 pm
Gail, I hadn’t heard about the hydrogen sulfide story. There is a difference between die-off and extinction. Die-off goes on all the time with all species except ours. Our time is due. Some survive. Extinction is an entirely different event. None survive.
So where did that date, 2031, come from? Total extinction based on what if not O2? Even the Fukes radiation don’t cause death immediately.
December 9th, 2012 at 2:26 pm
While it is true that once life established itself on this planet it has been resilient. However all the other planets in our solar system do not have life that we know of. Of course a planet once full of life can become lifeless, since the conditions for life to arise seem not to be fulfilled on any of the other planets in our solar system. To assert that our planet could not become lifeless seems to ignore all the planets that are lifeless and the fact that earth began lifeless.
Suppose we lost our atmosphere? Could life survive that
Earth Losing Atmosphere Faster than Venus, Mars
Irene Klotz, Discovery News
June 2, 2009 — Researchers were stunned to discover recently that Earth is losing more of its atmosphere than Venus and Mars, which have negligible magnetic fields.
This may mean our planet’s magnetic shield may not be as solid a protective screen as once believed when it comes to guarding the atmosphere from an assault from the sun.
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/06/02/solar-wind-atmosphere.html
The proposition that life will always recover is baseless. The question of what conditions could extinct everything cannot be answered by assertions about the hardiness of life but could be answered by looking at what conditions prevail on lifeless planets and if those conditions could ever occur on earth and what might cause that.
December 9th, 2012 at 2:29 pm
Gail,
Thanks for that beautiful story. My mother also had similar problems later in her life, although in retrospect there were some problems when I was a child, though it wasn’t directed towards us as children. I’m sure the disappointments of her life contributed to it. I guess where we may differ is that I don’t attribute all the bad behavior to genetic heritage that forces us to behave like predators, or all the good behavior to some random mutation that counters this dominant bad behavior. I especially find it difficult to explain the good behavior with that method. To use your example of the tiger, they have yet to find a tiger that won’t rip the baby goat to shreds, but we do find there are lot of people who haven’t behaved like the Nazis.
December 9th, 2012 at 2:34 pm
On the O2 question.
If we lose 50% of it when the oceans die at 6C warming, wouldn’t we probably lose the other 50% in the massive forest fires that would occur on the way to 6C?
December 9th, 2012 at 2:54 pm
Ripley : If we lose 50% of it when the oceans die at 6C warming, wouldn’t we probably lose the other 50% in the massive forest fires that would occur on the way to 6C?
I think the oceans die from acidification, as well as warming, and changed ocean currents, and over-fishing, and pollution, all of which collapse the marine ecology, whilst yes, simultaneously, the forests are burning, dying from climate change, and so forth. If the two major sources of O2 are reduced significantly, logic says we can expect to be into big trouble.
I’m not qualified to know, and don’t have access to the data, but if phytoplankton have declined by 40% over the last half century, surely that must have effected something ? Or maybe that includes phytoplankton and zooplankton ? I’m not sure.
December 9th, 2012 at 3:09 pm
It seems that more scientists are coming around to similar viewpoints:
http://io9.com/5966689/after-extensive-mathematical-modeling-scientist-declares-earth-is-fucked
December 9th, 2012 at 3:31 pm
“…there are lot of people who haven’t behaved like the Nazis.”
Well, it’s possible that is primarily because they weren’t Aryans living in Germany in 1941. One of the most famously sinister facets of that unspeakably dark period is that “ordinary” “nice” “respectable” people participated – and not just in Germany but all over Europe and the Soviet Union, as recounted by Donald Bloxham in The Final Solution: a Genocide, reviewed with other recent scholarly works by Timothy Snyder in the 20th Dec. issue of the New York Review of Books.
One excerpt:
“Peasants in the countryside, as Engelking and Grabowski demonstrate, were unconcerned with protecting the reputation of the Polish nation (with which they likely did not identify), but obsessed with their position relative to their neighbors. Peasants figure in all of these books as competitive, jealous, and concerned above all with property. Under German occupation, peasants regularly denounced one another to the Germans on all conceivable pretexts. This “epidemic of denunciations,” as Grabowski puts it, made the prospect of rescuing a Jew from the German policy of destruction extremely difficult. Peasants noticed when a neighboring family was collecting more food, keeping different hours, or even bringing home a newspaper. All of these were signs that a Jew was being hidden, and led to denunciations which had overlapping motives: desire for the property of the Jews and those hiding them, and fear of collective German reprisals.”
Of course there were exceptions.
There was at least one psychological experiment wherein the people put into the role of guards – with very few restrictions on their behaviour – swiftly became nothing short of brutally sadistic, to the extent where the experiment had to be halted. I think it was mentioned further upthread but maybe that was a different one.
I refer you to Ioneso’s Rhinoceros for an exploration of the few individuals who retain compassion and independence in the face of an imperative for coerced conformity – and also, a quote which I think explains a lot, from the 22 Nov. issue of the NYRB about Tom Wolfe’s new novel, “Things You Never Thought Possible” in which it is said of one of the characters:
“…he delivers a defense of his voyeurism that also articulates the novel’s great theme. ‘If you keep your eyes open’ says Dr. Lewis,
you will witness things you never thought possible. You will have a picture of mankind with all the rules removed. You will see Man’s behavior at the level of bonobos and baboons. And that’s where Man is headed! You will see the future out here in the middle of nowhere! You will have an extraordinary preview of the looming un-human, thoroughly animal, fate of Man!’”
The reviewer soon mentions: “These Miamians are motivated by the same thing that drives the denizens of every Tom Wolfe novel: status anxiety”.
I have been pondering these articles for several days and am coming around to the idea that status anxiety, and not the urge to reproduce (although they are intimately connected because the latter underlies and motivates the former) is the best explanation for our malicious and ruthless desire to be seen as “special” at the expense of each other and the rest of the species with which we reluctantly “share” the planet.
It make for a lot of terrific literature and art, too.
December 9th, 2012 at 3:46 pm
oxygen:
I asked a scientist this question a couple of years ago because of my concern about trees and his answer was that any loss of oxygen to the extent it will affect our ability to breathe is a long off, because there is a huge amount in the atmosphere.
In other words, CO2 and other greenhouse gases that we are emitting are critically important initial forcings to change the climate however, they are known as “trace” gases because that’s all they are – tiny compared to nitrogen and oxygen. from wiki: Dry air contains roughly (by volume) 78.09% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen, 0.93% argon, 0.039% carbon dioxide, and small amounts of other gases. There’s also water vapor.
So right now CO2 is at around 390 ppb, which used to be 280 ppb, and that increase is enough to change the climate – but it’s still only 0.039% compared to 20.95% of oxygen.
There are worse things to worry about, he told me.
December 9th, 2012 at 4:46 pm
With an atmospheric residence time of 4,500 years, if repletion of atmospheric oxygen ceased while depletion continued at the same rate, the atmosphere would be depleted of oxygen in 4,500 years.
Also,
dieBACK = bottleneck event
dieOFF = extinction event
December 9th, 2012 at 4:58 pm
This paper is five years old and this info already well known to some here, but maybe new to others, so some quotes. You see, it’s not like we have one simple problem facing us, that, if we all pull together we can address and solve. It’s not just that we’ve wrecked the climate, and the Earth’s atmosphere is warming. We’ve got a whole bunch of problems all running concurrently, each of which is enough to wipe us out and each of which seems intractable, from the pollution we cause, the over-population, war, etc, etc… I noticed on another forum today, someone mentioned human extinction and they were accused of ridiculous hyperbole…. sigh… anyway, this study concerns only ocean acidification…
This study concludes that acidification has the potential to trigger a sixth mass extinction event and to do so independently of anthropogenic extinctions that are currently taking place.
Although acidification may be difficult to initiate because of ocean buffers, once achieved it will persist as long as atmospheric CO2 remains high. Furthermore, the oceans would remain acidified for tens of thousand years after CO2 levels had declined, that being the time required for normal alkalinity to be restored.
If acidification was in fact a major cause of mass extinctions and reef gaps as the above discussion suggests, prospects for the future are frightening, not because of any immediate impact on corals, but because of commitment. Commitment embodies the concept of unstoppable inevitability, according to which the nature and health of future environments will be determined, not by our actions at some future date but by what is happening now. The oceans, including the ocean depths, respond slowly to atmospheric conditions, whether a temperature increase or a CO2 build-up, which means that the full effects of acidification will take decades to centuries to develop. Nevertheless, this is only a delay: the factors causing acidification will have irretrievably committed the Earth to the process long before its effects become anywhere near as obvious as those of mass bleaching today.
If we continue to produce CO2 at the present rate, we can expect the atmosphere to retain significant effects from it for between 30,000 and 35,000 years, which, when modelled, means that 17–33% of the excess CO2 currently in the atmosphere will still be there a thousand years from now. The acidification effect caused by increasing atmospheric CO2 will initially be buffered by bicarbonate-carbonate ion exchange, but once the buffers are over-whelmed (depending on as yet unpredicted depth effects) it will change relatively abruptly. Unlike enhanced green-house temperature increase, the acidification effect of CO2 will not bounce back to a benign level if atmospheric CO2 returns to normal; the oceans will remain acidified until they are neutralised by the dissolving of marine carbonate rocks and the weathering of rocks on land, a hugely protracted process.
ftp://ftp.gfdl.noaa.gov/pub/mbw/Ocean_Acidification_Papers/Veron_2008.pdf
December 9th, 2012 at 5:13 pm
Regarding various speculation as to what TPTB may be thinking, as to how they will survive, maybe by depopulating the unwanted excess 99% whatever… like Koch and his plan for underground cities where everyone is bent double…
If so, strikes me that they have not really thought it through. All that money. Dead planet…. eh ? Not so smart, after all…
Because, if the oceans are indeed already committed to becoming acidic dead zones, then that seals their fate, the 1%’s, along with everyone and everything else’s… except for stuff that doesn’t mind an anoxic environment, like jellyfish, etc.
December 9th, 2012 at 6:50 pm
Thanks everyone for the information. I conclude that we have enough facts to state that this event will happen but only theory as to how it will play out.
As to how special we are, this is a good reminder:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Geologic_Clock_with_events_and_periods.svg
December 9th, 2012 at 7:06 pm
Great links folks! I intend to borrow liberally from them…and a belated thanks to you John Duffy for initiating this thoughtful (and civil! whoot whoot!) discussion here at NBL with your excellent essay.
December 9th, 2012 at 8:56 pm
Robin Datta Says: …hierarchy, a psychopathic construct….
Sorry dude, must disagree:
As we go up the animal tree,
We find natural hierarchy;
Even with you and me,
Equality
Is consensus trance fantasy.
December 9th, 2012 at 9:05 pm
The REAL Dr. House
Try being ‘uncelebate’.
December 9th, 2012 at 9:30 pm
Kathy C
Are you posing that there was a Magnitude 7.3 near Fukushima on Decenber 9th 2012, and it has been not reported worldwide? I guess you are, …not even newsworthy eh….arseholes!!! (..er.. not you Kathy C, I’m referring to TPTB.)
Here is more: worrying in the extreme.
“WARNING! KNOWN ACTIVE FAULTS UNDER NUCLEAR REACTOR = BOOM!”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rzQYh_EgKc
The added crazy bits are apt and funny….WTFuk!!!
Especially at 03:59 seconds in….
December 9th, 2012 at 10:06 pm
Dedicated to the Proposition
All people equal and free
Is consensus trance fantasy;
Lincoln’s Gettysburg cites
We should have equal rights,
But that’s something that we’ll never see.
December 9th, 2012 at 10:15 pm
.
In life, we get unequal perks,
And status supports the worst jerks;
Behind dominant smirks
Inequality lurks,
And seems to be how the world works.
December 9th, 2012 at 10:21 pm
ulvfugl, TPTB already have undergound nuclear bunkers with everything they need to survive for a few years at least, paid for with 99%-ers’ taxes. They have also conducted extensive research on space-capsules, hydroponic gardens, moon bases, stem-cell-to-beefsteak technology, and a bunch of other crazy stuff with no practical application for the masses. Imagine what the multi-billionaires have been doing on their own account in secret.
I reckon Koch has an underground mansion in mind, not underground cities full of real people – they would just be a nuisance, and expensive. Oceans ? Who cares about oceans ? Nasty wet places that you can’t build real estate on. Fish ? Get the experts working on stem-cells-to-fish – solved.
They are definitely not stupid. They are pulling the biggest scam in history and getting away with it. GWB got a bit tongue-tied when he had to tell complex lies, but he wasn’t really in charge anyway – just a frontman in the charade called Democracy who was automatically pensioned off after 8 years.
We’ve been aware of all these problems since Limits to Growth, if not before, so there has been plenty of time to solve the problems of keeping the 1% alive and comfortable. The game is to see how much richer they can get before the 99% recognise what dupes they’ve been, then we’ll have WW3 and move into bunker-mode.
December 9th, 2012 at 10:34 pm
Gail Says:
December 9th, 2012 at 3:31 pm
Tom Wolfe’s new novel, “Things You Never Thought Possible” ‘If you keep your eyes open’ says Dr. Lewis, you will witness things you never thought possible. You will have a picture of mankind with all the rules removed. You will see Man’s behavior at the level of bonobos and baboons. And that’s where Man is headed! You will see the future out here in the middle of nowhere! You will have an extraordinary preview of the looming un-human, thoroughly animal, fate of Man!’”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonobo
Check out the link or just read these quotes and learn that Tom Wolfe is basically full of shit.
“Most studies indicate that females have a higher social status in bonobo society. Aggressive encounters between males and females are rare, and males are tolerant of infants and juveniles. In fact, the Japanese scientists who have spent the most time working with wild bonobos describe the species as extraordinarily peaceful.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Chambon-sur-Lignon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rescue_of_the_Danish_Jews
http://50italians.com/treatment.html
I still don’t get it, why so many examples of people not giving into “our genetic heritage, which is that of a voracious and ruthless top predator?”
December 9th, 2012 at 11:28 pm
The reviewer soon mentions: “These Miamians are motivated by the same thing that drives the denizens of every Tom Wolfe novel: status anxiety”.
I have been pondering these articles for several days and am coming around to the idea that status anxiety, and not the urge to reproduce (although they are intimately connected because the latter underlies and motivates the former) is the best explanation for our malicious and ruthless desire to be seen as “special” at the expense of each other and the rest of the species with which we reluctantly “share” the planet.
Gail, as a Cuban Miamian I can confirm that “status anxiety” is exactly what drives my fellow apes here in the humid south. Your observation really struck a chord with me, as I have to navigate in the same waters as these ego-centric pods every day. It used to make me angry and depressed at the same time, until I finally gave up caring and now try to practice “detachment”.
I have learned one thing, the “status anxiety” driven pods are utterly unreachable through reason, evidence, spirituality, egalitarian ethics … they can only hear themselves and all their FOX news gibberish.
December 9th, 2012 at 11:46 pm
Palloy, I have considered similar sci-fi survival plans by TPTB. The problem I have with these scenarios (in addition to assigning more power and intelligence to these people than they probably have) is that when the system crashes, their money will be worthless and their elite status will vanish. Why would anyone obey Koch and his ilk once the bases for their power and privilege are gone? Besides, even if they successfully moved into their underground world, how long can they sustain it on a dead planet?
As Kathy C and others have stated on this blog, it’s more likely that they are as trapped in this death machine as everyone else; many of them are in denial, the others have resigned themselves to the realization that they are going to have to ride it out like the rest of us. I don’t think any individual, or group of elites has the power to stop the global machine, or to survive long term after it disintegrates.
December 10th, 2012 at 12:04 am
I should clarify, Wolfe, right about Miamians and Americans, wrong about Bonobos, he didn’t seem to know they are superior to both.
December 10th, 2012 at 12:09 am
In a community there will be differences of ability and skills, but the interactions are horizontal, non-hierarchical, and voluntary. In a society the interactions are vertical, structured as a hierarchy, and backed by the threat of coercive violence.
Even in primate groups, the alpha individuals are recognised by consensus as to their greater abilities; a shift in consensus may bring violence in an attempt to reassert that status, but it is not a coercive hierarchy structure with abilities and skills subordinated to hierarchical status.
The option to initiate coercive violence against peaceful non-compliers is an intrinsic feature of institutionalised hierarchy, and requires a lack of empathy, albeit in the narrow sector pertinent to the hierarchy.
December 10th, 2012 at 12:17 am
“it is not a coercive hierarchy structured with abilities and skills subordinated to hierarchical status.”
December 10th, 2012 at 2:47 am
Palloy : TPTB already have undergound nuclear bunkers with everything they need to survive for a few years at least, paid for with 99%-ers’ taxes. They have also conducted extensive research on space-capsules, hydroponic gardens, moon bases, stem-cell-to-beefsteak technology, and a bunch of other crazy stuff with no practical application for the masses. Imagine what the multi-billionaires have been doing on their own account in secret.
I don’t doubt that they have their retreats to escape to, but I do not think that viable units, independent of Earth, for the long term, are possible. Remember Biosphere 2 ? It was a total disaster. Possibly there’s been improved versions in secret since then.
Dead oceans means, to all intents and purposes, as far as humans are concerned, a dead planet. Personally, I don’t think it will be possible to extinguish all organisms. But it will not be like TPTB will be able to emerge from their bunkers and find air to breath and someone to make them a cup of coffee….
It’s not easy for me to put myself inside the psychopathic megalomaniac mindset, but who would voluntarily want to spend thousands of years locked inside some sort of sealed unit, generation after generation, with nowhere else to go, and no point or purpose ? It might work in scifi fiction, but who is going to fix their robots and their energy sources and sort out their babies and all that shit for them ? Even given infinite money and technology, it isn’t possible to create anything that comes anywhere near what we already have here on Earth, for free, and which is, or was, a self-sustaining system.
Any manmade replica has to be based on high tech, and that stuff always breaks, and always needs someone who understands it to fix it, and it needs an energy source and so on. You’d be talking teams of highly trained specialists, being bred and educated for generations, solely to keep the thing going… to what end ?
It’s not even like a space journey where they arrive at a destination, it could be ten million years before Earth re-establishes some sort of equilibrium, anybody’s guess what that might be like….
The underground cities thing, btw, was a reference to the permanent climate exhibit at the Smithsonian, paid for by Koch Bros, as denialist propaganda, an indication of their level of intelligence I suspect, which states that global warming may mean that in the future we may be inhabiting underground cities, but not to worry, because we will adapt, because we will evolve to have a bent posture with curved spines so that we can move about easily in confined spaces….
December 10th, 2012 at 3:24 am
OZ man the mainline press did report the 7.3 briefly – if you google 7.3 earthquake Japan Fukushima you get a smattering of stories such as
Reuters) – A strong quake centered off northeastern Japan shook buildings as far away as Tokyo on Friday and triggered a one-meter tsunami in an area devastated by last year’s Fukushima disaster, but there were no reports of deaths or serious damage.
I was posting from Fukushima Diary to see if the no damage was true. You can trust the mainline news, or you can trust his reporting of tweets from workers.
What the press hasn’t reported is below by Fukushima Diary
32 quakes in 48 hours after M7.3 of 12/7/2012, it was 38 after 3/9/2011 “39th quake was 311″
Posted by Mochizuki on December 9th, 2012 · No Comments
So far, 32 earthquakes occurred within 48 hours after the M7.3 of 12/7/2012.
After M7.3 of 3/9/2011, 38 quakes occurred within 48 hours. After the quakes stopped for 7 hours, 311 happened. 311 was the 39th quake.
http://fukushima-diary.com/2012/12/32-quakes-in-48-hours-after-m7-3-of-1272012-it-was-38-after-392011-39th-quake-was-311/
at the link at the bottom under the map you can click on his sources 1 and 2 for confirmation of his reporting
I just googled more earthquakes japan fukushima and didn’t find any mainline news reporting this. Perhaps a better search query would find it but…..
As far as I can tell the fukushima diary guy is genuine and always says when his info is from tweets or anonymous correspondence, and always backs up his other sources, but sometimes unless you read Japanese you just have to trust his translation.
December 10th, 2012 at 3:33 am
As proof that highly intelligent people can have blindspots, Steven Hawkings thinks the solution to our problem of life on earth becoming unlivable is to go to another planet.
http://bigthink.com/dangerous-ideas/5-stephen-hawkings-warning-abandon-earth-or-face-extinction
Presumably he never heard about peak oil
But from the article here are some of the ways all life on earth could have ended had we not done it to ourselves already
Even if humans manage to avoid a nuclear stand-off over the next thousand years, our fate on this planet is still pretty much certain. University of Sussex astrophysicist Dr. Robert Smith says eventually the aging Sun will accelerate global warming to a point where all of Earth’s water will simply evaporate.
“Life on Earth will have disappeared long before 7.6 billion years,” says Smith, “Scientists have shown that the Sun’s slow expansion will cause the temperature at the surface of the Earth to rise. Oceans will evaporate, and the atmosphere will become laden with water vapor, which (like carbon dioxide) is a very effective greenhouse gas. Eventually, the oceans will boil dry and the water vapor will escape into space. In a billion years from now the Earth will be a very hot, dry and uninhabitable ball.”
Finally, between the next thousand years or so that Hawking says it will take man to make the planet uninhabitable and the billion years it will take for the sun to turn our planet into an arid wasteland, there is always the chance that a nearby supernova, an asteroid, or a quick and painless black hole could do us in.
December 10th, 2012 at 3:44 am
But hey it is almost Christmas so here is a bit of holiday cheer
OIL TO THE WORLD – a versusplus holiday carol
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=JgzMZSmCDfs
OTOH it is almost Dec. 21, 2012. Anyone know if the Mayan calendar predicts what time of day the end of the world is supposed to happen. Maybe at the time of the solstice 11:12 (UTC) We could all get online at the same time and watch it pass or go out together?
December 10th, 2012 at 4:58 am
Words of sanity, coming from Bolivia…
The planet and humanity are in serious danger of extinction. The forests are in danger, biodiversity is in danger, the rivers and the oceans are in danger, the earth is in danger. This beautiful human community inhabiting our Mother Earth is in danger due to the climate crisis.The causes of the climate crisis are directly related to the accumulation and concentration of wealth in few countries and in small social groups, excessive and wasteful mass consumption, under the belief that having more is living better, polluting production and disposable goods to enrich wealth increasing the ecological footprint, as well as the excessive and unsustainable use of renewable and non-renewable natural resources at a high environmental cost for extractive activities for production.
A wasteful, consumerist, exclusionary, greedy civilization generating wealth in some hands and poverty everywhere, has produced pollution and climate crisis. We did not come here to negotiate climate. We did not come here to turn the climate into a business, or to protect businesses of them who want to continue aggravating the climate crisis, destroying Mother Earth. We have come with concrete solutions.
The climate is not for sale, ladies and gentlemen.
http://climateandcapitalism.com/2012/12/10/bolivia-at-un-talksclimate-is-not-for-sa
December 10th, 2012 at 6:17 am
Hi Robin!
I’m sorry, this is nothing personal, but you reminded me of a chronic gripe I have—which, oddly enough, is relevant to the subject of this thread!
I guess we disagree that the same heirarchy of herds, troops, and packs is also in human families (cf., e.g., R.D. Laing), tribes, and larger social groups. But then, I think we disagree about other things too, like whether matter or consciousness is primary. And from your last post above, I’m not sure you’re a determinist either!
FWIW, I think that political power always comes from the barrel of a gun—or a fist.
==
Hierarchy sometimes seems strange,
But it’s structure we can’t rearrange;
The world getting tropic
Is a separate topic—
Something else we’re unable to change.
MHO
December 10th, 2012 at 7:18 am
With thanks to John Duffy for his thoughtful, evocative essay, I’ve posted anew. The post contains video from my recent trip to Massachusetts, and it’s here.
December 10th, 2012 at 7:49 am
ulvfugl, the Bolivians’ declaration is wonderful. Unfortunately, the big boys (international corporate psychopaths) believe that Capitalism can commodify anything, including the atmosphere. They are expecting to have a global carbon trading market up an running by 2015. The insanity will not stop until they are all dead!
http://www.carbonpositive.net/industry-updates/565-cautious-optimism-for-carbon-emissions-trading-schemes.html
December 10th, 2012 at 8:40 am
Kathy C, your comment about us getting together online on Dec.21 reminded me of another idea that floated through my brain recently.
The big ranches in Australia used to have radios for emergencies, etc.
Once we lose the internet, we could stay in touch that way.
December 10th, 2012 at 5:34 pm
depressive, ulvfugl – you both talk of a dead planet, and maybe you are right, but in that case TPTB will survive until they can’t any more. Much more likely though is a seriously damaged planet, only fit for a small number of people living a poor life. More likely again is a slightly damaged planet capable of supporting low densities of hunter-gatherers. As the scenarios get less extreme, the probabilities of those scenarios occurring start to fall again, until you get to the BAU scenario with a probability of zero.
I don’t think it is possible to assign values to those probabilities, or even to say which scenario has the highest probability, but I haven’t read anything here that attempts to explain why the probability of a dead planet is 1, and 0 for everything else.
I firmly believe in the mechanics of global warming, but the 40 IPCC scenarios are all based on assumptions about the rates of burning of fossil fuels which are much too high. They are derived from forecasts by IEA, but the IEA is in denial about peak oil, coal and gas for political reasons (to protect Exxon’s share price) so when you plug peakists’ numbers into the climate model you get a peak temperature of +1.4°C in 2045, and falling slowly after that as the oceans take up more CO2 and heat.
Now the models could be inaccurate, and +1.4°C could turn out to be more than we can handle, certainly it will cause humanity a lot of problems, but the point is these predictions of +6°C are not based on realistic assumptions about how much fossil fuels we will burn, they are based on various BAU scenarios.
More good news is that even the peakists’ view of fossil production rates assumes that the globalised economy continues to maximise production even as we slide down the decline side of the Hubbert Curve. I believe that this is unlikely, as the complex web of interdependencies that is the globalised economy will quickly fall apart, leaving us without electricity, TV, telephones, internet, banking, water and sewerage services, and the ability to drill/mine for more oil, gas and coal.
The best recent thing I have read on this is a paper by David Korowicz, “Trade Off: Financial system supply chain cross contagion – a study in global systemic collapse” http://www.feasta.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Trade-Off1.pdf It describes how once you have a big enough shock to the system, various “deadly embrace” feedback loops emerge, where (to simplify) you can’t fix A because B is broken, and you can’t fix B because A is broken.
In practical terms, you can’t order the parts you need to get the electricity going again because with the electricity down the banks can’t open and move those electronic blips from one account to another to pay for the parts. Even the Potus can’t order it to be done, because the generators that power his communications network have run out of gas, and the gas deliveries have stopped because Exxon has gone into receivership due to the banking sector going down due to the electricity going down.
Under this type of a collapse we end up still surrounded with plenty of resources, but no way to access them because The System is down.
The food delivery system to the cities will cease within a week, and food looting and riots will have petered out within a month as everyone still alive has left. As the survivors arrive in farming country, they will form marauding bands and fight it out with the bands of farmers intent on protecting their farms until the bullets run out. Livestock will be slaughtered on the spot and eaten raw, with a lot of waste. Crops will be picked early by hand, again with a lot of waste, and no thought given to next years’ seeds. Then they will start on eating the wildlife, and chopping the trees down for fuel. In a year or two the US will look a lot like Afghanistan does now. But still people survive.
Meanwhile Koch will be living in his bunker-mansion in Costa Rica, powered by a miniature nuclear plant, and with all mod cons for himself and his family, with lesser mod cons for his army and maintenance engineers. When he emerges 2 years later, the smell of death will have cleared, and he can then start to establish the new world order of King Koch the first. His dynasty is assured because he has a thousand clones of himself in the freezer. His pharmaceutically dumbed down soldiers obey his orders without question. His frozen seed bank will be ready for planting, and his million tonnes of fertiliser will last a decade or two, more than enough time for his genetically modifed slave class embryos to come out of the freezer and grow up to contentedly work the fields.
If I can imagine this scenario, I’m sure somebody somewhere has had the same idea and has the money to implement it.
December 10th, 2012 at 7:35 pm
“Check out the link or just read these quotes and learn that Tom Wolfe is basically full of shit.”
He’s an artist! He’s not writing as an anthropologist, or a biologist, or a social scientist. It’s called poetic license. It’s like calling someone a pig, or a dog, or a shark or a cat – all having negative traits associated with them that aren’t necessarily true to the species.
December 11th, 2012 at 6:39 am
Palloy, thank you for your thoughtful response. Whether NTE is inevitable, or if some intervening set of events (like sudden collapse of industrial civilization) will prevent it is the BIG question and one can only speculate at this point. Although I do not have time at the moment to offer a more detailed response to the points you made in your post, it seems to me that the IPCC model cannot be used as a reliable basis for future projections because it posits linear climate change and omits any of the known feedback mechanisms.
I don’t think it is possible to assign values to those probabilities, or even to say which scenario has the highest probability,
I agree. As I understand it, Guy’s NTE theory is predicated on the notion that once we hit 2 C, so many feedback loops will have been triggered that we will then quickly ramp up to 6 C and beyond.
As far as peak oil saving us from runaway climate change, Bill McKibben wrote a very good article a few months ago which indicates that there are too many carbon reserves still in the ground to prevent a catastrophe.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719
December 11th, 2012 at 11:33 am
depressive – a couple of things there. The IPCC climate model certainly does have a lot of feedback mechanisms in it, all the feedbacks that scientists agree on in Assessment Report 4 (2007) were in there, and AR5 (expected in 2014) will no doubt refine that, especially in the area of the Arctic where the temperature rise (predicted and actual) is highest.
The model accepts plug-ins so that any competent programmer can write there own particular feedback modelling formula and plug it into the main program to produce their own version of the standard model. The tricky part is then to convince everybody else of the correctness of the new model, but if you can, then it will be adopted in AR5.
Peak Oil is about RATE of oil production, not about the reserves. Peak Oil happens when roughly half of the reserves have been consumed, at which time the reserves are still enormous, and the rate of bringing on new oilfields is at its highest. Unfortunately the rate of drying up of old oilfields matches it and then surpasses it, producing a peak in production followed by a long decline until eventually (at least 80 years, in theory) the oil finally runs out.
But there is no way the globalised economy can function healthily with a decreasing rate of oil production. Following the 1973 and 1979 oil shocks, reduced supply caused price spikes that crippled the global economy. The third oil shock wasn’t so sudden, because it was caused by geological rather than political factors. In December 2003 the oil price broke out of the $22-28 per barrel range agreed between OPEC and OECD and has never looked back.
Between then and the fateful day of 11 July 2008 when it hit $147 /b, nearly $2 trillion EXTRA dollars were sucked out of the US economy for oil. And it would have gone higher still, but at close of business in New York, it was announced that Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac were talking to FDIC about insolvency, and the mood of the markets changed as “irrational exuberance” gave way to fear.
Bill McKibben’s article says “In fact, study after study predicts that carbon emissions will keep growing by roughly three percent a year” but those studies are all put out by organisations that NEED energy generation to keep growing, and TPTB endorse them, but it is still all lies.
Oil production will never grow at 3% per year ever again. The global economy will never be healthy ever again. Any local winners will be at the expense of losers elsewhere, and the pie is getting smaller all the time. The lies that TPTB are having to tell are getting bigger and bigger and soon confidence in TPTB will evaporate.
December 12th, 2012 at 2:02 am
Palloy, just a quick reply to acknowledge the effort you put in, which I do appreciate.
Yes, your King Koch in the Bunker,is a plausible story. Perhaps that’s what those kind of people have in their heads. Perhaps it could turn out that way. I don’t think it is possible to make predictions with precision, because there are too many variables. For example, just today, some new SARS type virus that infect pigs, bats and humans. These things pop ups all the time. A really big pandemic that knocked off a substantial number of humans quickly changes the picture. Another variable is the advance of new techno wizardry which gets announced daily, and God only knows what the USA, Russia and China develop secretly.
But I don’t base my Dead Planet scenario on that particular sequence that you depict. IMO, all the IPPC stuff is obsolete. We’re locked in to the permafrost melting and other feedbacks that will get us to 4 and then 6 degrees quite soon, decades. And the ocean acidification. That extinguishes us, independently of the warming. That’s what makes the dead planet. Seed banks will be of no avail.
Anyway, although it’s interesting to speculate, it’s not worth arguing, we’ll all find out soon enough, and one thing is for sure, most of what we have now, is going, and going fast, and there’s nothing we can do to stop that…. what we have now is the result of emissions 30 years ago, and they have risen constantly ever since, so we know what we have to look forward too, even if we managed to slow emissions somewhat, which appears very unlikely…
December 12th, 2012 at 2:09 am
Gail : He’s an artist! He’s not writing as an anthropologist, or a biologist, or a social scientist. It’s called poetic license.
Naah, I’m with Ripley, there’s good artists and bad artists, he’s full of shit, he could at least have done a bit of research and used chimpanzees instead of bonobos.