Fukushima

The problem first became apparent in 1985. I was sitting on a porch in the mountains in Arizona reading a Scientific American article by one of the early researchers investigating the unlikely possibility that adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere might be a problem. Over the previous months there had been a number of similar pieces on things like the ozone layer and the decline in fisheries. Then a ‘eureka!’ (actually, a ‘holy shit’) moment. Clearly there was going to be serious trouble in maybe 20-30 years unless something changed. I tried hard and for a long time to help that change happen, because it sure didn’t look good, even back then.

Skip forward to now. The window of time during which our species could have changed course and averted this has slammed shut. The forces we blindly set in motion are far beyond our ability to control, despite the geoengineering fantasies of the technologists. Ever see The Sorcerers Apprentice?

There are several irreversible processes under way that would each, alone, be sufficient to kill off if not everything at least the upper part of the food chain, which now consists mostly of humans..Two of them are the release of the methane now beginning to boil out of the Arctic ocean and permafrost and ocean acidification.

These are disasters from which the living planet will not recover for perhaps millions of years, and the composition of the recovered biosphere will include few currently extant species. Cockroaches look good to go, primates not so much. But life has made it through these sorts of things before, these great extinctions, and probably would yet again recover and flourish although we will not be around to see it. The third problem is different, new to the world.

We have created astoundingly toxic substances which have not been present on the surface of this planet in billions of years; some have never been here before. All are made in nuclear reactors — they do not occur in nature. The particulars of this problem are well documented and need not be repeated here, except to note that earth’s living beings do not have eons of genetic adaptation to constant high radiation levels. All other problems allow some optimism about the long term prospect for recovery after the human rampage is over. This threat is different in kind from other environmental problems because radioactivity directly disrupts or destroys the ability of genes to accurately replicate. This is not repairable. We menace everything, not just ourselves.

For about seventy years, we’ve been building and operating reactors with design lives of maybe 40 years. There are roughly 450 operating civilian reactors, and a guesstimated 500+ military, research, and other reactors, all of which continue to produce radioisotopes with half-lives ranging from seconds to millions of years in containments designed as temporary until the waste problem is solved. Unfortunately, no solution has been found, and when the containments begin to fail significantly, all the garbage sitting in them will disperse into the environment. There is no other choice- remove this crap from the biosphere, or eat, breathe, and wear it, wash with it, walk on it and drink it when the containment fails.

We’re there.

You’re now looking down the barrel of the gun that is the likeliest of all to kill you, me and everyone we know. It’s not vague any longer. This is the specific problem that will end civilization and ruin the biosphere, with a specific mechanism of action and a very short time frame. Unless, of course, something can be done to secure those SFPs and reactors until a currently unknown technology can be invented capable of removing the spent fuel to another place before the earthquakes and entropy make the effort moot. Is it even possible?

Denial

Maybe, but we’re unlikely to ever find out. The first step in solving or mitigating a problem is to acknowledge it, all of it, and humans don’t if they can possibly avoid it.

When I was in my twenties and reading a lot of history, there were a couple of years where I got fascinated by the Holocaust, how that could have been, what people thought they were doing. One aspect in particular struck me; it was in a book whose title is long forgotten, about the response of the Jewish community in Germany to the rise of the Nazis. In a nutshell, denial.

Nobody in the Jewish community, especially the well-off, wanted to believe that the words they were hearing from the Nazis as they rose were serious. Respectable authorities, rabbinical celebrities reassured everyone that Hitler was just posturing, nothing would come of it. As the vise grew tighter, the denial grew more fervent. Those few who defied the consensus and insisted on the reality of the danger were admonished, ridiculed, and finally shunned, in the old-fashioned sense — nobody would have anything to do with them. Reality was just too damn uncomfortable, so they chose to die rather than face it. This is not uncommon; in fact, it is pretty normal behavior. People would often rather die than give up comfortable lives.

That is what we’re doing. For a minimum twenty years it has been clear to anyone who actually look that industrial civilization is a suicide machine based on a false premise; that the Earth offers both endless resources and a bottomless pit for waste. Wrong on both counts, obviously- but admitting that is to acknowledge the destruction we create merely by living in this briefly possible fashion, this remarkably comfortable suicidal fashion.

So you and me, naturally above average in awareness, intelligence, spiritual development, so hip and edgy that we read Nature Bats Last, been worried about this stuff for years, tsk tsk — we gonna give it all up and live on what can be had from the interaction of air, soil, sunlight, water and intelligence?

Do you sometimes drive for pleasure, say, out to eat and a movie? Been known to blast out a few Btu to get the hot tub ready? Get on an airplane? Buy convenient plastic items (gotta have music) that will still be leaking toxins in a millennia or two?

Me, too.

And there’s your answer: No.

Proposed solutions to any of this mess which require humans to behave better than we do are worthless, just another form of denial. Please consider the environment in which the creatures whose descendants we are, evolved. To be successful in evolutionary terms means only one thing, breeding.

The champion breeders (sorry, I can’t resist: did you know one sixth of the human population carries genes from the most successful breeder of all, Genghis Kahn?) in our line of descent were those who were best at acquiring food, water, shelter, and a mate- short term challenges. The critters who were best at short term challenges did well; there were no bonus points awarded for worrying about the ozone layer. As a result, we are hard wired for short term motivation, and long term problems are mostly invisible to our emotional perceptions (and it’s the emotional process that dictates our actions despite these fond illusions of intellectual rigor). We’re going to behave the way we’re wired to behave, with some rare exceptions. The wiring isn’t going to change quickly.

An aside, scientists are wired on the same plane as the rest of us. They are just as addicted to denial and comfort as anyone else, and as unwilling to look at harsh reality. I had a mentor in radiation monitoring for a while, a retired physicist with a background in that area. He was great as long as we were talking about equipment and procedures, but I made the mistake of telling him about Fukushima, and he declared himself too depressed to continue and cut off contact.

Another interesting thing this situation has turned up is the apparent inverse relationship between social rank and ability to grasp the consequences of the situation. Wealthy and powerful people rarely seem to understand that not all problems can be handled with spin, force or money. People who deal with physical reality for a living take a look at this information and quite often get it immediately.

So denial it is and will be, until the situation gets so immediately, undeniably awful that denial will no longer work, at which point everybody starts demanding immediate action; that usually occurs long after there is any effective response possible. We’re most likely there now — the time available to reinforce SFP 4 is melting away as the next earthquake approaches.

Plus there’s another problem that may make doing anything impossible. Tepco is almost out of workers. The experienced workers at all levels have far overstepped the radiation dosages which bar them from further work and must leave. There is no one to replace them, and it is getting extremely difficult to find anyone willing to go out there for any amount of money, as the ambient radiation hits higher and higher levels and continues to rise. Reactors 2 and 3 cannot even be approached anymore, and there appears to be an ongoing release of yellow, radioactive steam cracks in the ground. It seems likely that the plant will be abandoned soon, not by policy, but because anyone going there will die.

What to do?

In all likelihood, Fukushima is going to blow and the chain of dominos will fall; if some miracle occurs this time it won’t matter for long, because all commercial reactors are being run by for-profit companies under a de facto policy of “run to failure” — that’s how you maximize profits. And then there are those other lethal problems if we get past this one.

Why do anything?

The ethics of extinction

My ethics are personal and therefore subjective, as I think is ultimately true for everyone. So since I’m going to talk about ethics, I need to tell you a little about mine to keep things up front. My effort in life is to grow in kindness and integrity, which to me look like necessary components of each other. I don’t have a religion or gurus, but let me tell you about a story in the Los Angeles Times some years ago, when the newspaper were doing a series on the poorest of the poor.

The story was about a couple living in a hut with their child in a barren wasteland in Africa. Poor doesn’t begin to convey their situation. None of them had shoes or more than a rag or two. Every day the man went scrounging in this desolate, empty place for some way to get enough calories for another day of life. Because repeated failure would doom them all, he always had to eat first even when if child went hungry. The woman made her efforts closer to home. One day a near miracle occurred; out scavenging, she found five potatoes, which could be traded for nearly a week’s worth of millet, a huge windfall.

Walking home, she encountered a mother with a baby who hadn’t eaten in two days and whose milk had failed, who asked her for help. She thought about it for a moment, and then she gave the mother three of the five potatoes.

I think that this woman is a very advanced soul, and if I can make some progress towards her ethics then this life will have been a success.

To my subjective perception, service is the expression of kindness, and it seems incumbent upon me to try and do whatever I can to make things better for the beings around me.

So here are some personal, subjective reasons to keep trying, even in the face of human extinction:

We have just seen a sudden mass movement intentionally triggered by a small group — Occupy Wall Street — significantly change the political debate in this country overnight. It may be possible to do something similar regarding Fukushima. It won’t solve the problem, but it could be part, even an important part, of a larger effort which mitigates things a bit.

That’s about as much hope as the visible landscape will bear. It isn’t much, and granted, the likeliest outcome by far is the worst one.

If there was nothing at stake except our sorry selves, then maybe sinking back into the familiar numbness of inertia would be defensible. But that isn’t the case. There are uncountable numbers of living beings, some of them human and very small, who will suffer and die horribly and slowly when Fukushima blows. Almost all of them are innocent, and powerless to prevent this.

You and I are neither powerless nor innocent. We didn’t stop gobbling the world even when we knew that others will be paying for our little party with their futures, including our own children. We have failed as guardians of their future.

Our unbridled selfishness has ruined the ever-changing web of living interaction known as the biosphere. This has been called biocide, and if the worst happens with the worlds radioactive waste, that may become literally true. Our debt is very large indeed, and it is owed to our own victims. It is just possible that an enormous effort may help somewhat.

What kind of person am I if I will not try?

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Many of us have treasured deep connections to certain places (the deserts and mountains of Arizona, in my case) and done our best to keep them alive and vibrant, to leave hawk and juniper, and ponderosa, elk and wolf room to thrive, to push back against the death culture with every tool available. We failed, and for those who know what is now gone the loss is hard to bear.

Consider love of life as a reason to keep working, love for what was and the astounding grace of having known the beauty and intelligence of a flourishing living ecosystem before the chance was gone, and love manifested as a willingness to make it possible again. I will keep trying in gratitude, and in hope that possibly the recovery can be expedited in some small way by something I do.

That’s reason enough.

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Who will you chose to be now, in this painful, nightmare time? This is an existential crisis in the most literal sense. The future existence of our species, and likely everything above the cockroach level is seriously in question, and our individual lives and the lives of our children are immediately at risk from Fukushima. One quake, one lengthy glitch in the water flow to any spent fuel pool, and immense suffering ensues instantly.

The situation may still seem abstract and unreal on an emotional level because humans cannot perceive radiation directly, and usually only personal perception of danger registers. But this will change over time as the cover-up cracks, or immediately if a pool burns. At some point the denial will break, followed by much disorder as people try to make themselves and their loved ones safe when it is impossible to be safe.

In disasters people can both show great kindness and commit terrible crimes, but mostly there is fear and running, hiding and shocking, paralyzing confusion. Responding to this situation requires courage, not least the courage to look directly at the horror we are facing and still not be broken, to refuse to stay safely passive as our species kills itself and everything else.

I think that for myself, integrity requires I keep trying until I no longer have the ability.

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I adore little kids. A yard full of happy pre-schoolers is about as much fun as I know how to have. I am reading about what is happening to kids in Japan, and it breaks my heart and make me very sad and very angry- children dying of cardiac arrest in fifth grade, children forced to consume huge amounts of radiation to protect the reputation of Fukushima produce, refusal to test children for internal radiation. It goes on and on it is sickening and horrifying and as a human being I will not stand idly by while this happens there and spreads around the world, regardless of any other reason to try.

Fuck the murderous corporate scumbags doing this. I will fight them to my last breath. It is too late for Japan, but it may not be so everywhere. WE MUST NOT PASSIVELY LET THEM POISON MORE CHILDREN. And to those displaying a sophisticated, cynical superiority such that even this doesn’t signify a moral imperative to act: consider living with yourself when they start dying here. Is this who you chose to be? Is this really who you chose to see in the mirror every morning?

How much cowardice is currently showing?

Because this is really what it comes down to, isn’t it- taking full responsibility for who we are and what we do, and making and living that hard decision to always do the right thing. I am a fighter by nature and by path, and for me this is the essence of life for an honorable warrior. It’s only secondarily about fighting, although defending those who need it is certainly a necessity. The true essence is always doing the right thing regardless of personal consequences. Fear, and overcoming it, is just part of the work. There are many depending on us to do this, for they cannot help themselves and without our help they will die in great misery. For your sake as well as theirs, I hope you will undertake to become courageous and help them.

So there it is, one person’s reasons for trying regardless of whether or not it makes any difference, of whether or not the universe offers meaning beyond that which we construct, whether or not anyone else does anything. I will never stop trying to make things better, so long as I am able to choose. And sometimes there is a success.

It is enough.

SOMETHING, HOWEVER SMALL AND IMPERFECT, IS BETTER THAN NOTHING

But the form of the effort may change. No matter what we do, it may not be possible to avert biocide and our own extinction.

Then what?

There is a Zen monastery near Fukushima, currently a place of immense suffering. The citizens there have effectively been condemned to death by their government because admitting the truth and evacuating them would cause an intolerable loss of face. They are watching their children sicken and die, while the medical profession refuses to test for radiation and diagnoses the problems as “flu” and “stress” and “hysteria.” The area will not be habitable again for thousands of years; it is truly a lost cause helping them.

One of the insane things that is happening there is a truly bizarre and useless effort to decontaminate areas by digging up contaminated soil. The citizens have been told this will work and of course it doesn’t, but they are conditioned to believe what authority tells them and to obey. So this process generated many tons of highly contaminated soil in plastic bags, with no place to put it, and there were many anxious homeowners thinking that if only they could put this stuff someplace, their children would be helped. Where to put it?

The Abbott of the temple opened the gates and invited anyone who needed a place to dump, to bring the bags to the temple.

That is what to do: just give kindness. It’s the only thing you can always offer.

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That’s enough words for now. There are a few of us involved in a project to get the word out, and there are plans to set up radiation monitoring networks and a non-government controlled radiation measurement lab so people can see what their kids are eating, and more. If someone is interested in that, or if you’ve got a better idea contact me, or maybe we can have a discussion in the comments? I’ve never done this before and I don’t know how it works.

I hope someone finds this essay useful.

Kindness to all beings, as best I am capable of doing it. And best wishes to you.

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Please join me in supporting Mike Sosebee’s film. To learn more, click here.

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McPherson’s latest essay for Transition Voice appeared today. You can read it here<>.

During my final decade in the classroom, I pushed an integrative agenda. Attempting to bridge C. P. Snow’s eponymous “Two Cultures” in a manner consistent with Edward O. Wilson’s Consilience, I required every student in each of my science courses to complete a significant piece of art or literature as a major part of the final grade. Naturally, the students hated the exercise and despised me, until the projects were complete and shared with the entire class, at which point the students unanimously agreed it was the most important activity they’d ever conducted in college. University administrators uniformly detested the exercise and just about everything else that happened in my classrooms. And this was even before universities had become widely recognized as money-making scams reflective of this entire culture. From a personal perspective, as I’ve pointed out before, the process of classroom-based integration caused me to lose my reason-driven way and venture deep into the emotional abyss of feeling and understanding.

Therein lies the dilemma I face. Perhaps you face it, too. I know nary a scientist who actually understands and takes meaningful action on any of the following primary issues, much less all of them: human-population overshoot, destruction of non-industrial cultures, extinction of non-human species, peak oil, global climate change. I know plenty of scientists who teach some of these topics, I just don’t know any who understand and act on them.

Conversely, I know several artists who understand the whole enchilada. Most of these people are marginalized by society because they are mere artists, so they have no voice. I’m not suggesting scientists have sufficient power to alter policy, or that any of these topics have politically viable solutions, but scientists can and have used reasonable argumentation to alter the views of a few thoughtful citizens. In general, and with a few notable, high-profile exceptions, artists have been less effective.

But back to me — my favorite subject, after all — and my internal struggle. My heart keeps informing me, with its never-ending screams into my inner ears, that we must terminate this set of living arrangements before it kills us all. My brain, on the other hand, tells me it’s too late: Near-term extinction is locked in because of Fukushima (times 400 and change) and the climate-change result of exponential methane release in the Arctic. Both paths of horror indicate our species has a few decades at most, and they represent merely two of three paths to human extinction within a single human generation. Well, three I know about. There are doubtless others, including the deepening extinction crisis, but I’m trying to maintain my trademark optimism. And I’m certainly not depending on the people who claim to be in charge because I know they lost control years ago, even though they keep juggling chickens and chain saws in an effort to distract the masses.

In light of this overwhelming onslaught of horrifying information, my heart tells me to seize the day, go with the flow, and a few other tattered cliches. It tells me to breathe deeply and laugh often, to throw off the shackles of transitioning in place to more fully immerse myself in nature and humanity, even if it means going down with the ship of empire. Or maybe that’s the limbic part of my brain rising to the fore, not my heart. My obnoxiously contrarian brain — the cognitive part to which I’m particularly well tuned — chimes in with unwelcome advice aimed at convincing people of our dire straits, as if I’ve made even a minor difference, while of course trying to destroy this irredeemably corrupt system.

In addition to my overdeveloped science side, I’ve no doubt there are other contributors to my inability to lean toward heartfelt intuition. Five decades of cultural programming come immediately to mind.

Integrating these two disparate approaches seems impossible, although I didn’t see it that way when I was asking students to do it. On the other hand, I didn’t realize they were running around like blue arsed flies, an approach I’ve subsequently adopted (thanks to Sue from the U.K. for information about the blue arsed fly). Perhaps that’s why I can’t answer this question: How does does one simultaneously follow his heart and his brain when they point in opposite directions?

This internal struggle feels like a battle for my non-existent soul. That reason rules, for now, leaves my heart in shards. The inability to integrate myself, to become fully human, leaves me with heartache that is irreconcilable and perhaps even lethal. After all, human survival requires a heart and a brain.

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Please join me in supporting Mike Sosebee’s film. To learn more, click here.

As Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega summarized, it seems the USA was “isolated” — a regular persona non grata — at the Summit of the Americas last week in Columbia. Nor were our military and Secret Service ‘dicks’ very good sports themselves at the Pley Club there in Cartagena. It seems they wanted a reduction in the bill for services rendered. But that is not the only country in the Americas where the now globalized and increasingly rapacious tendencies of a dis-integrating Western curriculum are unwelcome.

A single superhighway built from Sao Paulo to Brasilia deprives an entire rain forest of its autonomy; [the beasts] killed or driven off and the natives coerced into compliance. The fact is, there remains little wilderness anywhere that does not have its resources scheduled on somebody’s industrial or real estate agenda… (Roszak, Wasteland, 16)

It was 1972 when Theodore Roszak wrote those words in his scathing critique of modern industrial society, Where the Wasteland Ends. He wrote this for a generation that was charged with overturning the applecart, halting the chaos, stopping the beast in its tracks. It was my generation, but I never fully understood the call back then. It is now forty years later and Roszak’s observations and prophetic words continue to ring true, finding validation after ugly validation. Now, for a larger part of humanity it has become a race against the illusion of time, driven by the self-propagating demands of an industrial civilization gone wild, and its underlying logic — the Curriculum of the West.

I do not know if we should call this is a foot race, a tractor-pull, or a Formula One Grand-Prix event. But what I do know is that this race to the end of the world — the one fixated on profits, progress, and predomination — is coldly, callously, and ravenously taking down every ecological niche, all biodiversity, and every alternative culture in its path. One of the more recent tragedies of this race is a small indigenous tribe occupying a humble but lush piece of rain forest along the banks of the Tabasara River in Panama — the Ngabe tribe. Glenn Elis, a filmmaker for Al Jazeera news, tells the story of this Central American people trying to save a small parcel of pristine nature, their home, in the face of new dam construction and a hydroelectric project that will serve principally to enrich wealthy Panamanian politicians and industrialists.

Here the Ngabe have carved out a little piece of paradise for themselves, and I saw at once why they are fighting so hard to protect it. There is an open air school where children are taught in the Ngabe language, which is vital if their unique culture is to survive. And I enjoyed a continuous stream of hospitality as we talked into the early hours under a night sky unblemished by light pollution.

The following morning Ricardo[my host] gave us a guided tour of the village, explaining the close bond between his people and nature. I was taken a short distance to the riverbank where a little girl showed us a colony of Tabasara Rain Frogs, one of the rarest species in the world, which are found nowhere else on the planet. If the government has its way, all this will be flooded and the frogs will disappear.

Yet a few miles downstream from Kia, the massive construction site of Barro Blanco [dam and hydroelectric facilities] is an ugly blot on the landscape. As the enormous dam takes shape, armed guards patrol the perimeter to keep the villagers away. When the dam is complete the village of Kia will be lost.

From Kia I travelled northwest to visit Ngabe villagers who had already lost their community. They had been made homeless by another hydroelectric project last year, when the mighty Changuinola River was dammed. Here I met Carolina. Her house had been built on higher ground than those of her neighbours in the village of Guiyaboa, but it was still not high enough. The village now lies deep underwater and all that can be seen is the roof of Carolina’s house, jutting out of the water like some incongruous monument. She told me that she and countless others had received no compensation for loss of their land, crops or housing.

I traveled on through Chiriqui province, the scene of the crackdown, and met and interviewed survivors and the relatives of those who had been killed by the police. I found it hard to understand why they had died. All the Ngabe had been asking for was an opportunity to talk to the government — a concession that the authorities had to make in the end anyway. It is not surprising that, away from the glitzy skyscrapers of the capital, a terrible sense of injustice and resentment is simmering below the surface.

Back in Panama City, Jorge Ricardo Fabrega, the country’s powerful minister of government, agreed to meet me and explain the government’s side. He admitted that things could have been handled better at Changuinola, but insisted that during the recent crackdowns the police had behaved very professionally. He was keen to underline the importance of hydroelectric energy for Panama’s booming economy and then stated categorically that nothing would be allowed to stop the Barro Blanco project going ahead.

“There’s one thing that I have to make clear,” he said. “We’re not going to cancel Barro Blanco. The Barro Blanco project is under construction and it will continue.” As I listened I thought of Ricardo and the other villagers whose future was being decided by the minister and his friends.

By now news had got around that a filmmaker from Al Jazeera was in the country and someone discreetly passed me a lengthy document detailing the government’s future hydroelectric plans. It was an eye-opener. The sheer number of the projects is startling; if they all go ahead they will surely produce far more electricity than Panama will ever need, no matter how dynamic or fast growing its economy. Which begs the obvious question: What will they do with all this power?

Alongside each project listed were the names of the company directors involved – a roll call of Panama’s wealthiest families. It was not difficult to put two and two together. Electricity is a commodity like anything else and if there is spare capacity it can be sold to energy-hungry consumers in neighbouring countries. Someone, it seemed, was going to get very rich. Unsurprisingly, that document has never been made public. (Panama: Village of the Damned, Al Jazeera)

Such stories are not new, but they seem to surface now with far greater frequency, as indigenous tribes or villages that have already been pushed to their limits desperately struggle for survival. Certainly, there have been centuries, even millennia of invasion, exploitation, and destruction of indigenous lands and peoples throughout the world. From Australia and New Guinea to Siberia, Africa, and the Americas, the heedless and blood-filled march of this warped civilization (even in its pre-industrial phase) has picked up its pace as essential natural resources continue to be depleted or poisoned. Yet, it is not only indigenous human communities that have suffered at the hands of colonizers, contractors, capitalists, and captains of industry alike; it is the sensitive ecosystems and biodiversity of the planet that suffers as well, impacting all life on earth. The bioregions which are home to native Americans, Australian aborigines, New Guinea Highlanders, and tribal peoples around the globe have experienced the heavy hand of our civilized and civilizing armies, our rapacious entrepreneurial businessmen, as well as other merchants of death, including our own imperialist settlers. Yet, we dare to call those indigenous populations the barbarians.

Look at the Khanty people of the northern Siberian taiga located in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous District of the Russian Federation. Originally persecuted under Stalin’s regime during the nineteen-thirties, this nomadic people’s very survival was again threatened in the earlier part of this century by large Russian corporations like LukOil, backed-up by federal legislative mandates. Oil exploitation on Khanty land subsequently polluted their forests and lakes, killed the reindeer herds and scared off other local game. The Khanty were forced to relocate to ‘National Villages,’ away from their sacred ancestral hunting grounds, becoming dependent upon the Federal administration and the very companies that exploited them. Not unlike the forced dislocations of Stalin’s regime. Yet, in fact, we have to look no further than what our settlers, governments, and armies did to the American Indian populations over the course of five hundred years.

Stories like these are repeated from the Ecuadorian rain forests to the Niger Delta, from tribal villages in West Papua, New Guinea, to the Dongria Kondh of Eastern India, and the Yanomami of Brazil.

This is happening in Russia, Canada, the Philippines, Cambodia, Mongolia, Nigeria, the Amazon, all over Latin America, Papua New Guinea and Africa. It is global … A battle is taking place for natural resources everywhere. Much of the world’s natural capital — oil, gas, timber, minerals — lies on or beneath lands occupied by indigenous people,” says Tauli-Corpus. (The Guardian, ‘We are fighting for our lives and our dignity’)

It is an all-out war for resources, and in large measure, nations and oligarchs are taking aim at lands still occupied by indigenous tribes that have already been pushed to the margins. This is exemplified, closer to home, in the Koch (brothers) Industries’ theft of oil on Native American lands in the 1980’s and 90’s, where we may see the uglier complexion of this rapacious beast. And such activities are only accelerating globally. We understand, of course, that such acceleration is a direct response to the rapid depletion of essential resources (e.g., oil, water, land) brought on by this culture’s unrelenting march of destruction, consumption and exploitation — a march only supercharged by industrialization and capitalism, the shining stars of the Western Curriculum.

The saddest part of this forced extinction event is that these very peoples — tribes whose ancestors survived over so many centuries and millennia — would still stand the greatest chance of survival after our civilization collapses, if we only allowed them the breathing space to live now. But, our political and business leaders are seeing to it that nothing living survives the unfolding holocaust as they themselves flail about recklessly in a rapidly vanishing environment — and most especially, not the natives.

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My monthly essay for Transition Voice was published today. It’s here. After the essay was submitted, new data appeared to substantiate that all life on Earth will be gone by mid-century: methane release will accelerate exponentially, release huge quantities of methane into the atmosphere and lead to the demise of all life on earth before the middle of this century. Carpe diem.
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A year ago, Guy invited me to write about my educational philosophy-in-progress and said he would post it on Nature Bats Last. I have been thinking about this invitation and dithering ever since (until now). The invitation gave me much to chew on: how exactly would I go about articulating such a complex thing? Why ARE we homeschooling? The dithering has happened, no doubt, out of fear of judgment and my own perfectionist tendencies.

I had the great pleasure of meeting Guy in person at the Village Church in Cummington, Massachusetts, where he gave a talk. It was bracing to go through the facts, once again, of our collective predicament (climate-wise, energy-wise, killing-the-planet-wise), and to circle around again to the same conclusions: We denizens of Civilization are in for a rough ride in short order. And those of other species, or humans not living in the heart of Empire, have already paid far too great a price for the depredations of Civilization’s greedy hands.

However, what struck me with particular force was not so much the content of Guy’s talk. It was his courage. In the face of being branded with all sorts of unpalatable names, he is willing to take a strong moral stand on behalf of his convictions and throw down a challenge to his readers and listeners: What will you do? How will you respond? How will you not respond?

I decided that the least I could do was make a firm commitment to writing about why we are homeschooling, in the hope that it might provide a speck of inspiration or assumption-questioning to others.

The more I think about why we’re homeschooling, the more I realize it’s tied to why we do anything at all. Underlying values and motivations are threaded through every realm of our lives, not just how one “schools” one’s children, so I hope that those who are not parents or whose children go to school will still have something to glean from this.

A brief caveat: I recognize that there are many different circumstances and beliefs that people are grappling with, and that questioning the architecture of how lives are organized tends to be a hot button issue. My intent is not to sit in judgment, but describe my own process of determining values, assessing our family’s circumstances, and acting accordingly.

I hope that this will be the first essay of several that I write on the topic.

Reason #1 I’m Homeschooling: Time with my kid.

When my daughter was born in 2007, I was a couple years past my “End of Suburbia” moment (as Rob Hopkins has put it) (also known as the crisis period of realizing, holy crap, peak oil is happening, climate catastrophe is happening, we are all screwed, head for the hills, etc.). I have had occasions to grapple with my own mortality, not only during full-on TEOTWAWKI freak-outs, but at various periods in my life. On top of that, my baby’s birth was terrifying and there was concern that she would not be born alive, so I was given a head-start on grappling with her mortality as well. The reality, of course, is that we all end up dead, and we often don’t know how much life we have left. So let’s just plunge into this topic with an existential crisis, shall we?

I believe that this degree of mortality consciousness can be a double-edged sword; in its darkest aspects, it can be wholly debilitating and lead straight to catatonic depression. On the other hand, it can be a huge gift, this knowing that death is coming: We had better make the most of the life we have.

So what does this have to do with homeschooling? A lot, in our family.

While I’m alive, what kind of person do I want to be? What kind of person do I want to encourage my child to be? I want us to be connected. I want us to give and receive love. I want us to show kindness and compassion. I want us to be curious, creative, resilient beings. There is so much I want for both of us.

Most of all, I want us to enjoy each other’s company, while we’re alive. We don’t know how long we have. If I’m attempting to be realistic, based on all the reading and critical thinking I’ve done, I know that the likelihood of us living “long” lives is low. I don’t even know how to define a “long” life at this point. How long is long enough? We don’t get to choose. We especially don’t get to choose when there are so many lethal forces that are out of our control. We can try to prepare durable living arrangements (to use Guy’s words) as much as possible, and we’re certainly in the midst of doing that. I hope we live long, happy lives. But my pragmatic self still insists, “Make life as good as possible, right now, because it could be short.” This doesn’t preclude preparing for a longer life, but it does maintain a constant awareness of mortality.

Enjoying each other’s company, while we’re alive, necessarily means spending time together. I don’t think I have to spend every waking moment with my child; in fact, I think having some space to be alone or with other people is very important. It’s a matter of degree. But the fact remains that if we want to enjoy our relationship, time is an essential ingredient. I’m not sure I really buy the concept of “quality time” — that is, that it’s only the quality of the time spent together, rather than the amount, that counts. That feels like a justification of the manic pace of industrial culture, an excuse on the part of the institutional overlords. I think quantity of time still counts, as well as quality. I don’t intend this to demean people who are enmeshed in the voracious demands of the current economy and culture, who might like to have more time with their kids but feel that they have little choice in the matter. Almost everyone I know is enmeshed in those demands.

By not sending my child to school, there is a lot more time for us to be together. There’s also a lot more opportunity for us to engage with one another and with friends and the community at large. There is time to go outside. There is time to cook together. There is plenty of time to focus on things we both love, like music and reading. There is time to go to the library. We still have ample time with friends of all ages. We have time to learn at a pace that feels comfortable. I get to witness all of this astonishing growth in my child. I feel so lucky that I get to be on this life adventure with one of my favorite people in the world. I feel lucky that in the face of a dire future, my daughter and I are solidifying our bond through shared learning and daily joy.

There is so much more to say on this topic, but I will end here for now.

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Jennifer Hartley is a homeschooling mother, radical homemaker, permaculturally-inspired gardener, and local food activist. She was a founding board member of the non-profit Grow Food Northampton, and lives on a budding, quarter-acre homestead with her family in western Massachusetts. She is also a former reference librarian and still gets excited about connecting people with resources and ideas, helping people evaluate information, and collecting scads of books. These days she and her daughter can be found biking around town, harvesting violets and sprinkling them on salads, reading like mad, inventing songs, attending skillshares at Owl and Raven, studying chicken coop designs, and finding learning opportunities under every rock (literally).

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And bending down beside the glowing bars
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
—Yeats, “When You are Old”

1.
When was it that reality, after enduring decades of chronic abuse by Americans, turned away and hid its face among the stars?

It’s not like reality has ever been the foundation for the United States of America. The fine, idealistic, abstract language of the Declaration of Independence and the preamble to the American Constitution came out of a tradition of British utopian fiction.

The Puritans wrote of a Shining City on a Hill, even when there was no city and no hill. Thomas More gave the world the ideal state, Utopia, which like a lot of ideal states, depended on slaves to do its dirty work. British colonists in America wrote of, and on, the blank parchment of a rich, unclaimed continent, even when they knew it would take a couple of centuries of genocide to scrape that parchment clean. Jonathan Swift gave the world the airy, arrogant, disconnected country of the smarter-than-human Houyhnhnms.

The slaveholders and oligarchs who wrote the American founding documents were good writers, but they used their skills to write exceptionalist, democratic, rights-of-man fantasy. That fantasy was a deliberately constructed alternative to the official reality of their day—the British Empire, its monarch, its well-drilled military and its machine-like factory workers—and they more or less made their dreams come true, if only on pieces of paper.

2.
Some Americans dabbled in non-fiction, even though their works are remembered as novels and poems and pastoral whimsy. Henry Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and Walt Whitman—the authors of the 19th Century American Literature canon, or at least a good part of it—all witnessed a reality that had little in common with advertised notions of American politics, religion, and power.

Hawthorne’s god-fearing Christians looked for betrayal in the dark woods outside their villages, and when they found it they found missing parts of themselves. Melville’s Ahab obsessively stalked the white whale, determined to kill it even after he saw his own image reflected in the whale’s forehead. Thoreau and Whitman spent their literary careers throwing words at a great, wild, beyond-human-scale reality, and hoping some of those words would stick.

These writers saw a nation whose good intentions were undercut by unconscious self-destruction, a nation that was at war with itself, sometimes literally. The most important thing they saw was that the United States was a nation determined to destroy the incomprehensible beauty and variety of the continent it had claimed and conquered.

Numerous foreign visitors, notably de Tocqueville, commented on the American obsession with becoming rich. But those tourists saw only the love of money and not the horror that the love of money gave rise to: the commodification of every natural thing.

Commodify a forest of oak trees or a herd of buffalo or an African tribe, and you have moved that oak forest and buffalo herd and tribe into a vast system of ledger sheets and tax receipts and market futures. What remains of the real is a stump farm or piles of bloody hides or the graves of slaves.

You’ve also done collateral damage to yourself when you use your imagination in this way. When, for example, you identify the foul stench of a giant dairy operation as the smell of money, you’ve destroyed your ability to experience reality through your nose and probably your other four senses. You also may find that your ability to convert sensory data into dollars increases with the distance you live upwind from the dairy, as reality can still show up in a world where even an ideally sealed window now and then springs a real leak.

To the extent that you can buy reality off—that you can use your wealth to move tens of miles upwind of a dairy, for example—you can say reality is for people who lack money. The real function of wealth in America is to give us the time, resources, and space to either construct an unreal world or have one constructed for us. Unreal worlds, for most of us, turn out to be better places to spend our time.

For most of American history, American leaders, even if they couldn’t articulate this vision of things, understood what was at stake. They knew there was a real world that needed to be kept at bay, because it could be lethal on occasion. So while George Armstrong Custer was unable to stop believing in his press releases, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Franklin Roosevelt were able to take action in the face of threats that would destroy the nation’s founding fantasies.

Lincoln, at least for a while, stopped the commodification of human beings, even if he did it in the name of an abstract Union. TR stopped, again for a while, the commodification of the remaining forests in the American West. FDR stopped the Nazis and the Japanese militarists, who were commodifying human beings in such brutal ways that it couldn’t be disguised as anything but murder. It took the incineration of whole civilian populations, but until the advent of flat-world globalization, FDR got the job done.

These three were great full-time presidents because they were at least part-time realists.

1948 was a high point of American realism. In that year, the famously realistic presidential advisor George F. Kennan pointed out that the American Empire had 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population, and that the country needed to devise a foreign policy that would forgo altruism. He said the United States of America should construct a network of alliances and understandings with the elites of lesser nations that would keep them elite while allowing America to maintain its percentage of the world’s wealth. Such alliances and understandings—the levers of empire—were necessary to counter the “envy and resentment” that our wealth would inspire in the poor people in the rest of the world.

Kennan suggested that we forego being a beacon of liberty and democracy and concentrate on using our military and economic might to keep ourselves rich.

Kennan’s ideas encouraged those in our government who saw popular governments in Iran, Guatemala, and Vietnam as threats to America and the corporations and open colonial markets it protected.

Kennan’s most powerful idea was the physical, political, and economic containment of the Soviet Union, and after 1950, China. He foresaw that communism wouldn’t survive its collision with human nature—that over generations, revolutionary fervor would fade, and those systems would fail due to the greed, laziness, corruption, and general incompetence of the people who ran them.

You can argue that Kennan’s brutal assessment of the Soviet system and its future prevented nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 60s. You can argue that any amount of realpolitik was worth that non-outcome, even if the policy of containment did give rise to the Shah of Iran, Henry Kissinger, Vietnam, the Cambodian genocide, various coups and proxy wars in Africa and Latin America, and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Kennan lived until 2005, a few years short of witnessing the failure of capitalism due to the greed, laziness, corruption, and general incompetence of the people who ran it.

3.
A couple of years before Kennan’s death, another American presidential advisor, Karl Rove, told a reporter that America had become an empire, and that empires create their own reality. He meant, in effect, that there was no longer any need for the concept of a real world at the high levels of American government. Rove saw that as a good thing. It wasn’t a good thing.

Once an imperial reality is created, real reality becomes sedition. Dissent—even the dissent of believing what you see rather than what you’re told—is suppressed, ridiculed, ignored, or violently eliminated.

You don’t have to have an empire to have an imperial reality. The same thing can happen within nations, cities, corporations, institutions, families, and individual psyches. One powerful idea can become the organizing principle of a consciousness. When that happens there is no outside experience that cannot be shaped to fit, no bit of data that cannot find its supporting role.

If you believe that, say, human-eating reptilian aliens are running the world from inside amazingly lifelike latex human suits, you can find plenty of evidence, including missing-persons reports and vice-presidential heart transplants, to support that view. You can also find perfectly good evidence that you’re Jesus Christ or Napoleon or Joan of Arc. People have believed those things successfully, and for decades at a time, even when they weren’t Jesus or Napoleon or Joan of Arc.

Somewhere between Nixon’s Christmas bombing of Hanoi and the Alzheimer’s-tinged valedictory speeches of Ronald Reagan, somewhere between TV screens showing the helicopter evacuation of the Saigon embassy and newer, bigger, squarer, flatter screens showing the video-game destruction of Iraqi bridges in the first Gulf War, somewhere between the Bretton Woods economic summit and George H. W. Bush’s refusal to eat broccoli, America made a fatal-for-sanity choice, and succumbed to the reality it wanted to have rather than the reality it had. Surface came to be valued over depth, the conceptual over the perceptual.

In more familiar terms, Americans chose not to believe their lying eyes, especially when those lying eyes told them they had lost a war, had become a nation of obese slugs, and had hocked their grandchildren for oil. Getting ready for the final break, Americans had rejected Jimmy Carter, who told them their dependence on oil imports would by definition end their independence, and embraced Reagan, who told them that it was morning in America.

In retrospect, the decision by the collective psyche to elect Reagan looks pretty stupid, but only in the sense that someone is stupid who believes he’s Napoleon when he’s not Napoleon. Batshit crazy is a better description.

4.
If there was one crystalline moment when reality well and truly abandoned the Empire, it came in the summer of 1990. That was when a working-class Idaho family received an out-of-court settlement from the Disney Corporation. The previous October, the family had been arrested — the whole family — in a gift shop at Disneyland. Their two-and-a-half-year-old daughter had been accused of shoplifting. Members of the family were taken to a back room of the shop until, a couple of hours later, it was discovered that the piggy bank the little girl was grasping in her stroller really had been paid for. Not only that, but the gift shop had overcharged the family $3 on their purchases. Given the circumstances, Disney had to be eager to settle out of court. It would be tough to find a jury unsympathetic to a two-and-a-half-year-old false arrest victim who had been overcharged for a piggy bank.

But the thrust of the lawsuit was not concerned with the arrest. When the family was taken to the back room, the couple’s older daughter, then four years old, observed a number of Disney characters — likely Mickey, Donald, and Goofy — walking down a back alley without their giant grinning heads on. Mickey, Donald, and Goofy were headless, and, no doubt, grinless. What had seemed like big friendly animals were really tired and sweaty human beings walking around inside amazingly lifelike cartoon suits.

Back home after their back-room ordeal, the family found itself in a world unblessed by illusion. The children began destroying their Disney toys by throwing them at their bedroom walls. Their parents tossed all Disney videos and other Disney-trademarked material in the trash. The formerly cheerful and enthusiastic four-year-old became withdrawn and refused to get out of bed or dress herself, and treatment by a psychiatrist became necessary.

Children pay attention to what’s going on around them. Much psychotherapy focuses on those years from one to four, where our minds are inscribed with simple axioms: people close to you can or cannot be trusted, your family is a place where you are safe or where you have to fight for your life, your perceptions are or aren’t able to apprehend reality.

It’s easy to understand how seeing a headless Goofy on the day your whole family got arrested for shoplifting could supply the wrong answers to these questions.

Had the case gone to trial, we might have heard a psychiatrist bear solemn witness to the awful damage reality can do to a child’s mind. One can imagine a diagnosis of trauma-induced retail phobia, a crippling condition rendering its victim an exile from those large regions of America covered by souvenir gift-shops, theme parks, and malls.

5.
A fundamental dishonesty marks the discourse of Empire, especially when it comes to picking leaders. It is no accident that five of our last five presidents have come from families containing an alcoholic. The method many such families use to make it through their dark nights of the soul is denial, which is to say, for example, that any pile of elephant shit on the living room carpet is immediately identified as a footstool brought back from last year’s vacation to Kenya, even when there was no Kenya and no vacation.

To belabor the point:
Ronald Reagan’s father was an alternately violent and sentimental alcoholic.
George H.W. Bush’s father was an alcoholic.
Bill Clinton’s stepfather was a violent alcoholic.
George W. Bush was an alcoholic. (I can’t find much evidence that he was a violent alcoholic, but he was certainly a violent president of the United States.)
Barack Obama’s father was an alcoholic.

Something is happening here. It’s not clear, exactly, what it is, probably because the people who make it to the top of our political system and therefore shape our public discourse are adept at the magical thought and the happy lie. These start out as survival strategies and then become the prime methods of dealing with other people. Lying is indulged in even when it would be easier and less complicated to tell the truth. Magical thinking is preferred to seeing things as they are even when it comes in the form of nightmare.

But you can say one true thing: alcoholic families have been fine training grounds for our current crop of politicians. From the time they were small political children, these politicians knew better than to look inward—in that direction lay madness, pain, and failure.

They learned how to scapegoat. They craved the unconditional approval of others, probably because unconditional approval is nonexistent in alcoholic families. They became adept at papering over the cracks of broken relationships, and if they grew up emotionally disengaged, even in their most intimate relationships, it’s because emotional disengagement allowed them to survive in a house with an addict.

Give them a chance, and they’ll try to fix the world, even if they’re not competent to do so. The broken vase can be glued back together and put on a high shelf, even if it no longer holds water. The crumpled and torn photos can be hidden or burned, the smashed mirror above the mantel replaced with a pastoral painting, the police can be assured that everything is under control and nobody did anything wrong. An adult persona can be constructed in a household with an addicted parent, but that persona hides an abandoned and emotionally hungry child still waiting for a happy birthday party, a child whose reality has to be constructed out of lies and hope every day. Telling the truth means going back to being that abandoned child, and too often that child has starved to death or gone mad.

Subjecting a politician to psychoanalysis isn’t a job for the squeamish. Sometimes it’s only ashes, bones, shards, and tear-soaked, kapok-hemorrhaging, eyeless teddy bears under the carefully-crafted surface.

It’s depressing to work through the fierce denials, violent rages, and tears, and the realization that here’s a person all too representative of the crazed people who elected him. No wonder he’s inadequate to the tasks of setting our energy policies, maintaining our social safety nets, regulating our corporations, and ending our wars.

6.
Perhaps Disneyland—where all the employees not in cartoon suits are required to smile and keep smiling, upon pain of dismissal—gives our culture’s malnourished inner children haven from a world where the leaders are addicts or the facilitators of addiction, if not to alcohol then to money or power or sex or antidepressants.

A carefully invented cartoon reality gives us respite from a world where the cartoon characters are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, where Tomorrowland is a place where the currency is worthless, the safety nets are torn and rotting, and poor old people steal cat food from employed people’s cats. It’s a place where the bad toys have all the batteries, where the rides are crawling commutes to and from mind-numbing jobs. Goofy’s big head is latex illusion, we know, but it is an illusion we accept with gratitude and relief.

Of course, that begs the question of what it’s like to be Goofy, to sweat all day inside of eighty pounds of Goofy suit, to wonder if your job has become your identity, to think that maybe after ten years or so of wandering around Disneyland and having your picture taken with three-year-olds, you’ll become Goofy, and you’ll forget where the exit from the Magic Kingdom is. You’ll forget you have a human family, and even when Mickey and Minnie and Donald crowd around and beg you to take your Goofy suit off, you won’t know what they’re talking about.

Anyone who has watched the debates during the presidential election season without realizing that the reptiles onstage are all sweating inside Goofy suits hasn’t been paying attention.

7.
Philosophers of science insist that the scientific method is the best way of apprehending reality the human mind has ever devised. But there is a gap between data and hypothesis, evidenced when the same data spawns competing narratives about, say, climate change, species preservation, energy technology or heart disease.

Hard data can show that the temperature of Venus is too hot for life as we know it, and that ten years of having rib steak and ice cream for dinner will cause a rise in cardiovascular disease in a population of highly-stressed, subliminally hostile middle-class white males. It can show that DNA can be damaged by the ionizing radiation from a reactor meltdown, and that the cheaply tapped deposits of petroleum are gone. It can show that many large, slow, and tasty animals disappeared from Australia and North America about the same time human beings appeared on those continents.

But you can’t say with certainty that increased greenhouse gas emissions from industrial civilization will result in a Venus-style runaway greenhouse effect here on earth, because scientists who get their grants from oil companies will come up with equally certain counter-narratives. You can’t say for certain that hunters and gatherers increase the extinction rate with their hunting and gathering, lest you run into lawyers for Native American tribes whose creation narratives have those tribes living in harmony with charismatic megafauna. Unless you want an argument, you can’t say that industrial civilization will decline in proportion to available petroleum, or that nuclear power is lethal over generations, or that if they want to live longer, all highly stressed, subliminally hostile middle-class white males should become vegetarian Buddhists.

The scientific method might be the best method of apprehending reality the human mind has ever devised, but it’s uncertain that the human mind can apprehend the scientific method. Besides the disconnect between data and hypothesis, there are also disconnects between data and future data, between present causes and future effects. Certainty is always subject to further research. It’s a phenomenon that many scientists have used to prolong their careers well past the rancid stage.

Open-ended data collection means that every scientific study will miss crucial variables, every set of study parameters will argue against extrapolation, and that future studies need to be designed and conducted.

In a scientific arena of any size—and it’s hard to imagine a scientific arena so small that a half-dozen quark-sized angels can’t be comfortably clubbing each other to death in it—any hypothesis will generate skeptical opposition. There is always room for another interpretation of the data, or more data, or denial of data, or another grant application. A flurry of hypotheses from skeptics—who tend to profit from the status quo—will generate policy inertia.

A hypothesis: you can’t use the scientific method to think your way out of a self-constructed reality.

8.
Some areas of policy inertia in the face of accelerating and lethal change:

–Climate
–Extinction rates
–Population
–Nuclear wastes and accidents
–Oceanic dead zones and plastic-filled gyres
–EROEI
–Financial derivatives
–Pesticides and herbicides
–Estrogen- and neurotransmitter-mimicking compounds in food
–Food
–Military/pharma/wildlife/geriatric industrial complexes

I could go on, but this list suggests why Disneyland — even if you’re working there as Goofy or Mickey or Donald — might be preferable to the here and now. Any of the available virtual realities — even the latest version of Grand Theft Auto — is preferable to growing up and facing the facts.

Happily for the Disney Corporation and for the American Empire, growing up has become optional, and plenty of people have decided not to. You can’t blame them. Growing up means looking at the hard data, constructing your own narrative from them, and leaving the secure future for the lethal present. As a scientist friend of mine says, “Those of us with children and grandchildren cannot go there.”

9.
There is no divine or human rule that says the human mind should be any good at apprehending unreality, or even most of reality.

Scientific instruments have extended our senses across the universe and into invisible wavelengths and subatomic dimensions and black-hole singularities, and we’re asked to believe in those things. We can’t, not without a leap of faith comparable to the ones that let us believe in triune gods or spirits in trees.

Derivative finances have abstracted wealth and its twin, debt, beyond any human event horizon. Advertising images target the areas of our brain that don’t have language and we react only on the level of fight or flight, good or evil, ecstasy or horror.

The planet’s atmosphere has thickened and darkened even as the sunlight hitting its surface has become more UV intense, but it’s hard to see that, even on a clear day. The weather has detached from history, but we still check the weather reports and ignore their subtexts of disbelief. Medicine has allowed aging humans to emotionally disconnect from the inevitability of death, changing the direction and intensity of our philosophical gaze, and the landscape of our bodies beyond recognition.

Contrast this environment to the environment of a group of humans in northern Africa 65,000 years ago, who were equipped to apprehend their horizons, their climate, their bodies, and their economies. They knew how to hunt and how to gather, and if they were hard on their environment, it’s instructive to remember that they drove fewer animals to extinction in their millennia than the American Empire has in its decades.

The paleolithic environment, even when it hasn’t been physically destroyed, is nonetheless obscured by issues of who owns what, what animals to legally protect, what politician to vote for, what game to put on the Wii, what plane to get on to interview for what job. Only with great effort can you see through the trademarked hallucination, the groomed surface, the pixels and mechanical actuators and the ones and zeroes in a server somewhere — to a distant future world where crystals in windblown bedrock glint in undimmed starlight. That world is certain. Not much else is.

10.
Yet uncertainty has a future. You cannot look at this world, even through hunter-gatherer eyes, and not come to the conclusions that industrial civilization is constructed of the too solid flesh of imagination, and that industrial-era humans are animal-imagination hybrids, the result of an unnatural selection taking place ever since humans started messing about with reality. The extent of that evolution can be seen, not just in the fantastical, anthropomorphized creatures running for president, but in the image of the human being that is reflected back from a blank computer screen.

Recent brain research has indicated that measurable physical changes result when people start spending five or six hours a day playing videogames or surfing the Internet. Parts of the brain shrink and other parts expand, and attention spans, relations with other people, need for stimulation, and language usage all change. It’s not hard to envision the computer screen as the narrow part of an hourglass, and as time passes, the reality of the Internet side of the screen sifts through to the brain of the computer user, creating a perfect replica of itself on the other side, in among the folds of the wetware.

So a symmetry emerges between realities, one that gives a bit of credence to those philosophers of idealism, who hold that all reality is the electrical charges that rocket from neuron to neuron in our skulls. That’s a dangerous position, one that supports magical thinking — if you believe, it will be so, in the Matrix — but consider that the process can go both ways, and what exists in the folds of the brain can, with enough thought and effort, be painstakingly created elsewhere. Something a lot like magical thinking has created the world of artifice and algorithms we live in, and there’s no going back to a world where imagination and its products don’t exist. Like it or not, we have to live in a world that imagination has created.

It doesn’t take a scientific study to know that humanity has fouled its nest by thinking the unthinkable into being.

But we still have a world to work with, however sullied, and for the moment let us imagine the one that would result if our hopes for posterity prevail: aside from a radically different climate and the occasional nuclear accident, gross national products will resume their rise, fueled by a boom in solar energy and green technology. There will be stunning advances in home entertainment systems, heroic medical achievements, ever more precise weapons — collateral damage and dissent may simultaneously become a thing of the past — and whole cities under glass, and franchise outlets for everything. Wilderness ecologies will be finally be assigned a cultural and economic value, as they will have to be painstakingly reconstructed inside ultraviolet- and acid rain-proof structures. Population growth will continue, helped along by advances in genetically-modified wheat and rice, macro-engineered algae farms, and new hive-like cities. Exponential efficiencies in resource and energy use and communication will put the lie to Jevons’ Paradox. Longevity drugs will allow Social Security recipients to get back to work as productive centenarians. A gentle inflation will erase all long-term debt.

Or not. Maybe we’ll end up turning the earth into George F. Kennan’s nightmare, a radioactive desert moonscape, one where starving humans are confined to caves and ruins and drink foul water and don’t look too closely at the meat they’re eating, and human knowledge and technology diminishes with each burned book and broken machine and dead battery.

Where can you go — even in your imagination — if you’ve got grandchildren in this world?

It’s a measure of human adaptability that should climate change and civilization’s collapse be spread over fifty or a hundred years, people will go about their daily routines without much awareness that their yesterdays were different than their todays. They may remember visiting the unshielded outside, but it won’t be home to them. Home will be the dark basement of an abandoned building when it isn’t a subway tunnel, but it will have its comforts. Lifespans will shorten and chromosomes will be ionized, but not so much that people won’t have the occasional normal child, and those children will have the occasional normal child.

Even were we to project the darkest trends forward to that day when the last band of humans is fighting the last band of cockroaches for the last cache of civil-defense crackers, I’d put my money on the humans. And I’d make a side bet that shortly thereafter, the cockroaches would be a domesticated food-source. And one last wager: I’d bet that the children of that last band, wandering with cockroach-breath through the dark underground corridors of a ruined city, will look up through holes in the concrete, see the too-bright glint of the morning sun, and will greet the new day with awe, and joy, and wonder at the miracle of their existence.

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If you missed the live version, you can listen to the podcast of my 15 April 2012 radio interview on The Lifeboat Hour with Michael C. Ruppert

There’s still time to support Mike Sosebee’s film. Click here.

My recent trip to the northeastern United States included 13 presentations. At least one was recorded. I presented on the topic of three paths to near-term human extinction to the New Roots Charter High School in Ithaca, New York on Tuesday, 3 April 2012. The incomplete video, in four parts, follows (big thanks to Wendy Bandurski-Miller for the venue and the video, and also big thanks to Vickey Kaiser for organizing the trip and hosting and to Karl Klein for hosting and loaning his vehicle to a stranger for nearly two weeks).

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I’ll be presenting on Saturday, 2 June 2012 at the Bueno Vista Audubon Nature Center, 2202 South Coast Highway, Oceanside, California. Topic is “The twin sides of the fossil-fuel coin: Prospects for humanity in light of global climate instability and energy decline.” I hope to see you there.

A BRIEF EXPLANATION

Six years ago I stopped at a Barnes and Noble bookstore to do a little browsing and kill some time. That was one of the biggest mistakes I’ve ever made. I picked up a copy of The Long Emergency. Up until that time I’d never heard of peak oil. James Howard Kunstler set the stage for what was to become a long, lonely and depressing weekend. I bought the book, went home and discovered the LATOC website (lifeaftertheoilcrash.net). My life divided itself into two parts that weekend: Before I Knew, and After I Found Out. I spent the next few years in a serious state of depression, wishing I could go back to the Before I Knew days. Two years ago I found Nature Bats Last. Guy’s “The End of Civilization and the Extinction of Humanity” was the first essay I read. I followed that little beauty with John Rember’s “A Few Rocks from the Box: A Meditation.” My world view shook with the revelation peak oil may be our only hope to save us from anthropogenic global warming.

What follows is common knowledge for most of you. It’s intended for those readers who have just started this mental roller coaster. Six years ago I wish I’d had someone to talk to, or at least reassurance that I was not alone in my deep despair. Many of the essays and comments on this website focus on what we should be doing to prepare for whatever is coming. I’ve tried to condense some of that. It’s not meant to be all encompassing, but I hope it may prove to be helpful as a starting point. Perhaps you’d like to share how you became aware, how you discovered this website, and advice you’d like to pass along to those just beginning this odyssey. I truly believe we are facing a long and difficult journey. Many paths beckon. The only path that makes sense to me is the one we travel together.

SO NOW WHAT DO YOU DO?

Okay. You’ve become aware that you live on a finite planet. You’ve tried to find a logical way out of peak oil, global warming, overpopulation and an economic system that requires infinite growth. But no luck. That sick feeling in the pit of your stomach means you’re beginning to understand the implications of the difficult journey you face. So now what do you do?

First: Remember you’re not alone. And what you are feeling is normal. Others have already started on this journey and will welcome you. Nature Bats Last is a good place to meet them. In the Archives Section you’ll find over 300 essays with attendant comments that have been written over the past six years. These essays and comments will serve you well, and you’ll come to regard the writers as a part of your family, only more so because, unlike most of the members of your own family, these people actually understand and have gone through what you are only beginning to experience. And there are countless website links and references sprinkled throughout that will add to and enrich your education.

Second: Think of this period in your life as the calm before the storm. You have the opportunity to do some things now that may help you and your family in the future, things that may not be possible later on. But there are a number of paths available. Which path makes the most sense? Only you can decide. Here are a few examples:

Business as usual has two paths:

Denial: Simply disbelieve, ignore or pretend you never heard about this. An easy path, but dangerous because you’re wasting the opportunity to make changes in your life now that may help you down the road, and you will likely regret that someday. And it will nag at you.

Acceptance/Resignation: You believe there is nothing you can do. Unfold the lawn chair, pop the popcorn, open a beer and enjoy the show. Live your life as you have been, for as long as you can, and don’t worry, be happy. This route is similar to denial: easy but dangerous.

Taking action has many paths:

Survivalist/Bunker Down: Move to a defensible position, keep a low profile and prep like crazy. Hope the chaos that comes from a breakdown in civil society does not touch you. Problem is, it’s hard to keep a secret, and every defense can be overcome, especially one with only a few defenders. Twenty-foot-thick castle walls built atop mountains or behind moats have been breached. Read your history.

Hit the Road/Become a Nomad: If you are a free spirit and like adventure, this may be for you. Discard all possessions you do not need, and start walking. This approach is flexible, with more options than staying in one place. But you will always travel with your back exposed. And you will find that some may welcome you but others may not.

Agrarian anarchy: Small, rural communities centered and focused around simple and unmechanized farming. “Anarchy assumes the absence of direct or coercive government as a political ideal, while proposing cooperative and voluntary association between individuals and groups as the principal mode for organizing society. This close-to-nature, close-to-our-neighbors approach was the Jeffersonian ideal for the United States, as evidenced by Monticello and the occasional one-liner from Thomas Jefferson. It was also the model promoted by Henry David Thoreau and, more recently, radical thinkers such as Wendell Berry (farmer, writer), Noam Chomsky (linguist, philosopher), Howard Zinn (recently deceased historian), and Tucson-based iconoclastic author Edward Abbey.” (Quoted from Guy McPherson’s “Toward an economy of earth” here.)

Transition Towns: Try to raise awareness and organize your community to help it become more resilient. Create a power down plan that will allow your town to thrive or at least cope with increasing energy costs, disruptions in social order, and climate chaos. Given the scale of what we face, this approach most likely won’t change the outcome but is doable and will give you some satisfaction and sense of accomplishment. This approach is, in some ways, an organized variation of agrarian anarchy. And you can combine either with Acceptance/Resignation. Do what you can but understand it won’t make much difference so you may as well enjoy the show.

Primitivism: Discard all personal possessions you do not need. Learn the skills of our ancestors from long ago. “The first two million years of the human experience, and the first few hundred thousand years for our own species, was spent with relatively small communities living close to the land that supported them. These humans knew each other and they knew the plants and animals with which they shared the area. They had minimal impact on the lands and waters that supported them. These humans spent a few hours each week doing what we call “work,” making sure the members of the community were well-hydrated, well-fed, and warm. This was a durable set of living arrangements, as characterized by its longevity and minimal impact on Earth.” (also from Guy McPherson’s essay “Towards an economy of earth”, NBL, Feb 2, 2012)

Fight to Change the World: If you believe our present industrial society is doing great harm to us, our children and our world, and if you believe it is possible to change it, then work to change it. It has happened before. Mahatma Gandhi, Susan B. Anthony and Dr. Martin Luther King are good examples. Public organization, politics and social activism. Civil disobedience. Environmental terrorism/freedom fighter. Read Endgame by Derrick Jensen, Walking Away from Empire: A Personal Journey by Guy McPherson and The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey. This will take great courage, fortitude and conviction, and may result in your imprisonment or worse. But some believe it may be the only path that leads to preserving this world and preventing our extinction.

And finally, Third: Try to make this as uplifting and satisfying an experience as you possibly can. Enjoy nature in all she has to offer. Enjoy each other’s company and all the other good things in your life. Take pleasure in your accomplishments. And remember: No one knows for sure how this will all play out, but no matter what happens you can’t go too far wrong in following the words of John Wesley, English religious leader (1703-1791): “Do all the good you can, By all the means you can, In all the ways you can, In all the places you can, At all the times you can, To all the people you can, As long as ever you can.

The trick will be in trying to figure out by what path can you do the most good

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