An achieved goal of capitalist industrial civilization was the systematic reduction of nature to a simple component of the economy. Landscapes of rivers, lakes, forests, and meadows were replaced by the concrete, steel, and asphalt of cityscapes. The build-up of toxic wastes and byproducts of industrial civilization were seen merely as external problems to be solved via engineering and technology. In the grand narrative of material progress, industrial man put himself at the center of the universe, the lead actor and hero who would always survive and triumph. He saw no problem with the complete subjugation of the wilderness, taking more from the land than was given back, and reducing biodiversity to a shell of its former self in the name of economic growth. The dominant mindset was summed up thusly…
“…nature is a malignant force with useful aspects that must be harnessed, and useless, harmful ones that must be shorn of their power. They spend their energy adapting nature to their purposes, instead of themselves to her demands. They destroy pests of crops and men, they build dykes and great dams to avert floods, and they level hills in one spot and pile them up in another. Their premise is that nature will destroy them unless they prevent it…” ~ Clyde Kluckhohn
In the collective consciousness of industrial civilization, man was exempt from falling victim to the 6th mass extinction. The future narrative of people in the modern age never included:
…that they would be among the last humans to walk the Earth.
…that their children would not live long enough to grow old.
…that all cultural, artistic, and scientific achievements of the human species would soon be forgotten in time, no longer practiced and appreciated.
Cocooned away from the elements as they were, few city dwellers noticed the creeping deterioration of the planet’s biosphere. Their artificial world, filled with the digital screens of computers, televisions, electronic billboards, and sundry other micro-computer devices, kept the public preoccupied with a constant stream of infotainment, celebrity gossip, sports, and political spectacles. The popular line of thought was that the natural world was too resilient to collapse from man’s activities; periodic efforts of environmental remediation would be all that was needed to keep business-as-usual afloat. Generational amnesia cast a false sense of security over the unwashed masses. Rivers and streams, once teeming with fish and aquatic life, were now laden with toxins, heavy metals, and plastics. Moose and bison no longer roamed the fragmented wilderness; the remaining few were set aside for bioengineering experiments in a last-ditch effort to save them. The whole web of life with all its keystone species from microbes and insects to large terrestrial and aquatic mammals was unravelling. Pests, viruses, and pathogens ran rampant in the new disorder of the planet. Scientists talked of tipping points, but no one really knew when such red lines in biospheric stability would be crossed or if they had already been breached. Like a runaway freight train, industrial civilization had indeed passed many tipping points long ago. Few thought there would be such an abrupt downward spiral, seemingly without warning. The first law of thermodynamics was being realized on a system-wide scale.
Modern man was thought to have been infinitely adaptive and clever, but the linear-thinking that dominated the culture was riddled with too many blind-spots to prevent its inevitable downfall. As long as the same economic system and mode of living persisted, no amount of new technology would solve the root problems. Since the mid 1970’s, the industrialized world had been living beyond the total carrying capacity of the Earth for decades and even created a day to recognize the transgression which would arrive a few days earlier each year. Various reports of imminent catastrophe were published, but to no avail. Everyone had their mental crutch to fool themselves into believing that the day of reckoning would never come. Some, like the fanatical zealots of religion, rejoiced that the end was upon us while others were paralyzed with fear and despair. The all-pervasive mainstream cult of money worship, consumption, and economic growth gave rise to other doomsday cults who heralded the end of time.
Mother nature took no prisoners; there was no escaping her ironclad laws. Mass starvation, war, and pestilence rapidly whittled the human population down to small pockets of survivors, but then even those few post-apocalyptic tribes soon declined and disappeared until the day arrived that only one human walked the Earth. One lone human survivor out of the billions that once were.
He survived the pandemic that wiped out roughly three-quarters of the global population. He survived the nuclear meltdown and craziness of the food wars and nuclear terrorism. And thus far he survived climate chaos by constantly moving. MRE’s were mass-produced for the general public and stored in most cities when the agricultural system started to show signs of imminent collapse. Even after all these years, the last human still found these warehouses of preserved food to be an invaluable source of sustenance, supplementing his diet with the occasional cockroach, rat, or wild pig.
How did the last man on Earth spend his time when not scavenging for food, water, and other essentials? He was on a search to find other humans of course. How could he have known that he was the sole survivor? Without electricity, there no longer existed any sort of global communication system. The one solar-powered/hand crank shortwave radio he had in his backpack had yet to pick up any signals, but he would religiously take it out every night to scan the frequencies for an hour or two. To break the deathly silence of the world, he would occasionally play the assorted music files that were on his wind-up mp3 player. He especially loved their sound inside the expansive corridors of old libraries he visited during his trek across the continent. With his life always in jeopardy, he found that a good book was the best form of escapism; compromising his health and safety with mind/mood-altering drugs was not an option in a world devoid of hospitals and medicine. And sex? Well, you’ll have to use your imagination for that. He certainly did. Such solitude, a prison cell of solitary confinement spanning the entire planet, would have driven most to madness and suicide, but he handled the loneliness day by day and with stoicism.
In his early years, he experienced a taste of working at a 9-5 job, driving a car and flying on jumbo jets, but he didn’t miss any of it really. He had been one of those who had read extensively about the unsustainability of the global economy and about the nature of ecological overshoot and collapse, and he had prepared for it. He held no illusions of a new civilization being reborn out of the ashes of capitalist industrial civilization. Capitalism, he knew, held too tight of a grip on modern man, and the psychological barriers of the masses prevented them from seeing the end of everything concerning the human experience …forever. As the weeks, months, and years passed by and he grew older, he began to reconcile with the idea that he was very likely the last person left alive. No need to leave any more messages on roof tops, in vacant parking lots, or over the empty airwaves. No one was listening. No one was coming. There really was no prospect of growing old gracefully in this new reality. He had yet to find some small pocket of unpolluted land that did not register on his Geiger counter. So he made a pact with himself and the pistol he carried that when his health and strength no longer allowed him to eke out an existence, he would not be alive when the wild dogs came for him.
Over at Nature Bats Last, my favourite virtual park bench to watch the virtual pigeons, the talk is of hospice. Life is a terminal disease.
I suppose there’s not a lot of difference between hospice and death row.
Degrees of freedom. How big is your prison cell ?
What’s the company like ? Do you get any choice ? What about the visitors ? Are they friends, priests, nurses, jailers, torturers ?
I have to say, for a man of my disposition, my own cell, here, is perfection.
Long ago and far away, in another lifetime, I did a course in kitchen design.
I found it fascinating and enjoyed it very much. Efficient use of work space. Sink. Work top. Storage. Things you use most often, nearest.
Later, I discovered Permaculture. Much the same idea, really, but working with the natural physical environment.
Design your prison cell. Oh, but you cannot, because you have no freedom to choose, because it’s not yours, you don’t own it… Ha !
That’s a problem isn’t it. Property and ownership. On a crowded island, a crowded continent, a crowded planet.
“The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had some one pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: “Do not listen to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!”
~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and The Discourses
Freedom to choose. Property. These barriers that we collide with when we desire to design our lives, the space between birth and death.
Used to be, long ago, you could just walk off into the desert, or into the forest, or into the mountains, and get away from it all, and find a place where you could settle yourself down and be undisturbed. But that’s not so easy anymore, at least, not where I live, and then what do you eat ?
When I was 20 I had a vision, with my wife, to find a ruin, some abandoned old farm in the mountains, where I could set up some home and make an anarchist commune. I found a couple with two kids, beatniks, about 15 years older; they were right into the idea. We had a good try but it didn’t work out.
We learned some of the reasons why it is hard to succeed.
Took me a lot of trying and a lot of failing to get what I got. The perfect prison cell.
People think I’m crazy. They are right. Depends what you mean by ‘crazy’, of course. You have to be crazy. You see, most people try things, twice or ten times, and fail, and give up, and say it’s impossible. But some things aren’t like that. You have to try 999 times and fail every time. And then the 1000th time, you make it. And only a crazy person discovers that, because everybody who wasn’t crazy gave up long ago.
But, you see, it really might be impossible. What if you have to try all your life to find that it was impossible ??
That’s circus people. They have to be crazy. Special sort of ambition to do something really peculiar. I knew some once. Not a proper circus, a really silly circus. All they had was a lama, and a sheep and a goat. And the guy could walk along a tightrope. A low one, about six foot off the ground. But if you can do it, doesn’t really matter about the height. It’s about the falling off.
So they were determined to have a circus for a livelihood. With one fucking lama that they decorated. And a sheep and a goat that they trained to go around in circles in a tent. And the guy walked along the tightrope. And twenty people would pay and wonder why these crazy people were doing this.
Point is, they were designing their own lives. They were AMAZING. You just wanted to help them because they were crazy. The crazy was contagious. In a good way. Two girls were identical twins, impossible to tell which was which; that was crazy in itself.
So, you find a place. Like designing a kitchen, the sleeping place is the centre. Or maybe, if you’re into Bodhidharma, your meditation place. Then comes the things you use and need most often, nearest. Then, like a spider in the middle of its web, you need strands that connect out into the world.
People are very different. Depends upon what your personality is like, what your desires are, what you require to be satisfied. Design the structure around you; design yourself to fit the structure. Build in the right habits, the rituals, the efficient and effective functioning. Remember, its death row. Nobody gets out alive. What’s worth caring about, what’s not ? Music !
I have a field which I’ve left for the grass to grow long. This is so it can be a refuge for the linnets. They are just small brownish song birds. They are somewhat endangered but not dramatically so; average little birds, so to speak, nothing spectacular or flamboyant, not the ‘most’ anything; finch family, thought to originate some time in the Middle Miocene, 10 to 20 million years ago. From what I gather, skeletons of these small song birds are rarely well-preserved in the fossil record, so it’s a patchy picture and much is guesswork.
The linnets are some of the company I have here, in my cell on death row.
In 1963, someone called Robert F. Stroud died. He had spent 54 years in solitary confinement in a prison cell. It states on the cover of the book he wrote that no man in the history of the world spent more time alone. I don’t know if his record has been broken since then. America seems so perverse and sadistic these days, it wouldn’t surprise me.
Anyway, Stroud spent his time researching bird diseases and became one of the world’s greatest bird pathologists. See. You’ve got to be crazy. He couldn’t design his cell at all. It was not his property. He had no freedom. But he could design himself. He wrote this incredible book Stroud’s Digest on the Diseases of Birds. Made a life for himself. Didn’t let the fuckers destroy him.
I think most people have got more options, bigger cells.
If you look at the previous mass extinction events, a few species made it through. My thinking is, try to save something for as long as possible.
Could be the linnets, this time. Who knows ? Nobody else seems to care.
But it’s just my version of the crazy circus…
Birds are much smarter than most people realise or appreciate:
“Birds appear to offer, in their behavior, neurophysiology, and neuroanatomy a striking case of parallel evolution of consciousness. Evidence of near human-like levels of consciousness has been most dramatically observed in African grey parrots. Mammalian and avian emotional networks and cognitive microcircuitries appear to be far more homologous than previously thought. Moreover, certain species of birds have been found to exhibit neural sleep patterns similar to those of mammals, including REM sleep and, as was demonstrated in zebra finches, neurophysiological patterns, previously thought to require a mammalian neocortex. Magpies in particular have been shown to exhibit striking similarities to humans, great apes, dolphins, and elephants in studies of mirror self-recognition.” http://fcmconference.org/img/CambridgeDeclarationOnConsciousness.pdf
So, as far as I am concerned, on any sane scale of values, those circus people and the linnets are worth more than all the wankers on Wall Street and in the City of London put together. Because when it really comes down to it, freedom has, as Stroud discovered, to do with what’s inside you, not what’s outside.
Be realistic. Demand the impossible. Insist that you get it.
I haven’t kept up much on Fukushima because I find it too horrifying to contemplate; one quick look into this subject is enough to ruin your day. In a future of cascading failure, conceivably hundreds of nuclear meltdowns are in danger of being set off. The last breath of human life on Earth could be extinguished from such a toxic brew of radioactive isotopes. Thirty-one months after the nuclear catastrophe called Fukushima, this festering wound persists with hundreds of tons of radioactive water uncontrollably leaking into the Pacific each day and thousands of exposed fuel rods threatening to make Japan uninhabitable. In light of this ongoing manmade fiasco, I find it morbidly humorous that Japan has been chosen to host the 2020 Summer Olympics. It’s like planning a house party while the roof is ablaze and a sinkhole is opening up under the home’s foundation. But this seems to be par for the course for a species that has come to rely on technology as its steadfast savior. Only as this century draws to a close and the polar regions are seen as the last refuge for a depopulated planet will humans have finally realized that their precious technology served to extend human overshoot only for a brief time… and at the expense of making the inevitable crash that much worse.
There is no better way in determining the worth of a society than the kind of future it leaves for its children and future generations. As Mahatma Gandhi said, “You can judge a society by how they treat their weakest members.” Are not the unborn generations of our descendants the most helpless of all, voiceless and invisible to those making the reckless choices of today? By this measure, modern capitalist industrial civilization, notwithstanding its technological marvels and humanitarian achievements, would have to rank quite low when we look at the silent, lifeless wasteland that our present way of life is creating. The specter of climate change has replaced the Cold War psychic burden of a nuclear winter. The children of the Atomic Age had the naive “duck and cover” plan to escape that monster, but what plan do the kids have today for the horror of runaway climate change? As the Energy Skeptic recently discussed, climate change has destroyed many civilizations in the past and our globalized one will undoubtedly be no different. A doomsday date of 2047 was recently set for the cities of today’s world:
Hiroshima and Nagasaki suffered the barbarity of nuclear bombs, but these decimated cities were rebuilt. Climate Change will in time make all cities uninhabitable through flood, drought, scorching heat, fire, sea level rise, and continent-sized Frankentorms. There will be no rebuilding of such uninsurable cities. They’ll be left to wither away like the deindustrialzed and bankrupted city of Detroit. The lights will go out and stay out permanently in these ghost towns and ghost cities ravaged by an unstable biosphere. Climate refugees will strain the resources of countries and cause social unrest which may lead to more wars in the future. The response of our leaders at the helm of modern civilization is to build levees and dikes, geoengineer the planet, and bioengineer the food supply. None of these are adequate responses in the long run and only eat up finite resources that could go towards building a whole new way of life that is not under the dictate of Wall Street and disaster capitalism. Such solutions, however, are pipe dreams in a world so thoroughly controlled by the concentrated wealth of multinational corporations which are today’s feudal lords, their armed henchmen in the police state, and the insidious manipulation of public sentiment and behavior by corporate media and the security and surveillance state. I took it as ‘divine retribution’ when I read that the NSA has had a rash of electrical problems at its yet-to-be-completed data collection spy center.
So if the kids are feeling unmotivated and adrift in such a world, can they be blamed for wanting to drop out? Attention-deficit disorder and the epidemic of other behavioral problems that afflict the youth of today along with society’s knee-jerk response of medicating the misfits may just be another sign that things are far from alright in the world. Judging from the craziness of the people running the show, I’d say that capitalist industrial civilization has become one big insane asylum with the governments around the world acting as Nurse Ratched of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”. Everyone must acquiesce to the rules of the corporate state:
1. Keep the masses distracted via internationalised sport, celebrity gossip and ‘news’ about mating success of caged animals and dogs that can ride surfboards.
2. Keep creating money out of thin air, lending it as zero interest to members of the club, and charging everyone else significant interest. Dilute the purchasing power of money on a continuous basis and call that process inflation.
3. Manipulate or fabricate economic data to create the illusion that everything is just fine.
4. Ensure that official planning (at least that which is public) ignores everything that will actually determine the future.
5. Conduct wars or covert operation as necessary to maintain the flow of resources from poor nations to rich nations.
6. Ensure wealth continues to be transferred from the less wealthy to the ultra-wealthy.”
~ Kevin Moore
“The best thing we can do is go on with our daily routine.” ~ Nurse Ratched
The scientists and health officials had been saying for years that the world was due for another pandemic, but none were prepared for the one that hit the world in 2029 and lasted for two years. A warming planet had been doing strange things to the life cycle and spread of viruses and pathogens while industrial civilization had slowly been losing ground with the efficacy of its antibiotics and drugs. And it didn’t help that in a capitalist world, Big Pharma was more interested in the large pay-off of a drug like viagra than in the investment and development of the next generation of antibiotics. Rampant overuse and abuse of such medicines in the medical and agricultural fields had allowed pathogens to mutate and overcome man’s pharmaceutical weapons, jumping from the animal population to the human world.
With the unraveling of the industrial world already well underway at the time due to peak oil, massive unemployment, and bankrupt governments, conspiracy theories ran rampant about the source of this deadly pandemic that at its height would kill tens of millions per day. Once the total numbers were tallied, nearly two-thirds of the global human population were found to have been wiped out. Some thought it was a genetically engineered disease released by a rogue government scientist, or perhaps a germ weapon research project gone awry, while others thought it was a State sponsored terrorist act. Few accepted the fact that this plague was simply the disastrous outcome of our blind faith in technology as well as Nature’s inevitable push-back from centuries of human assault and incursion. Ironically, it was not specifically peak oil or climate change or financial ruin that quickly brought down the globalized hi-tech world, but the microbial world unseen by the naked eye. The meek had indeed inherited the Earth. With 5 billion people dead and the economy in disarray, greenhouse gases plummeted, but too little too late to stop all the positive climatic feedback loops that had long since been set into motion. Of course nearly all of the global elite managed to cocoon themselves from the general population, avoiding the lethal airborne virus. Mother Nature had finally pulled an ace out of her sleeve for which there was no available antidote. The initial symptoms of the virus were flu-like, but quickly lead to bleeding from every orifice and a rapid filling of the lungs with fluid, suffocating its victims. Young and old were affected equally. Hospitals, overwhelmed by the number of victims, became more like morgues. Centers were set up to incinerate the mountains of bodies piling up throughout the cities.
The African Flu Pandemic of 2029, which is believed to have originated in the war-torn jungles of the Congo, became better known as “The First Great Culling”. Proper sanitation and medical services never fully returned in any country, and a large migration of survivors away from cities ensued in subsequent years. This was really the watershed moment in modern times where myths of eternal progress, the superiority of mega-cities, and the triumph of man over nature were shattered. The desperate extraction of the most dirty and dangerous sources of fossil fuel came to an abrupt end. Regional differences and conflicts temporarily disappeared while teetering governments, too traumatized to think about anything other than their own internal problems, administered triage to their surviving population. Industrial civilization had suffered a major heart attack. This mass die-off was only the first wave of catastrophes that would befall the world. Weapons of mass destruction would soon be used again as the Earth’s remnant human population fought to gain control of the remaining habitable areas in the polar regions.
Rhetoric about ‘civil society’ and ‘global cooperation’ were quaint ideas of a bygone era, now horribly out-of-date in these post-apocalyptic days of struggling to eke out an existence in inhospitable, resource-depleted places. The global elite simply became more cutthroat in the face of this brutal reality. Technology came to be used more and more as a tool of control and oppression over the lower class who were more than willing to be slaves if it meant a full stomach and a place to sleep in one of the underground sanctuaries built to escape climate chaos. Vast geoengineering projects became mankind’s primary endeavor as he vainly attempted to restore what he had so thoughtlessly and methodically destroyed.
Because we have created our own processed environment of roads, cars, industry, buildings, malls, homes; because we live in a world designed by capitalism, a world of incessant advertising, sales and the desperate, frantic pursuit of material things; we rarely, if ever, experience an intimate connection with the natural world we are hoping to save.
On my downtime right now and trying to recoup from doomer fatigue, but the following story simply reinforces my belief that industrial civilization will die at its own hands while taking the rest of the living planet with it in a manmade greenhouse extinction event. Capitalism gives humans the perverse incentive to value death and artificial wealth over life and nature’s wealth. Note to self – must read everything by Peter Ward.
Those who have read my thoughts, sprinkled hither and thither around the internet, will perhaps be aware that I gave up, about one and a half years ago, when I realised that whatever mighty efforts activists might make, it was going to be impossible to save the biosphere. Daniel Drumright was about three months ahead of me.
Nobody who hasn’t fully encountered and absorbed that experience for themselves, in its true horror, has any idea what it really means, and for those who have yet to face it, you have my deepest compassion and sympathy.
There’s no point in going over the technical reasoning in detail. People either get it or they don’t. They can find all the information quite easily.
There are three big, obvious factors that most people do not understand; those are, first, the irreversible self-reinforcing positive feedbacks that Guy McPherson is listing, and second, the time lag, that what we have now is the result of what we did forty or so years ago, and what we get in the future will be the effects of what we have been doing ever since. The third is the astounding rate at which all the changes are happening, when compared with all previous similar or comparable events in Earth’s history. Whatever it is, it is ULTRA DRAMATIC on the geological time scale.
The doom scenario has been, and is being, comprehensively documented by xraymike on this blog. The trickle of folk who are going through the process of coming to terms with this hellish awakening has already grown into a cascade and will soon be millions, and I really have nothing to say to them, because I do not know what to say to them.
Once you get the insight regarding the Mass Extinction Event, it’s a bit like the Buddha’s Enlightenment Experience under the Bodhi Tree, only in reverse, so to speak.
Gautama pondered whether to keep his insight to himself and spend the rest of his days in bliss, or whether to teach others what he now knew, and he chose, out of compassion, to spend the remainder of his life wandering through India teaching his message.
But how do you teach how to cope with doom ? There’s nothing optimistic or pleasing or life-enhancing or joyful about imminent apocalypse. There’s just the anguish and distress involved with the demanding process of navigating your own psychology and emotional responses toward an impossible future.
Each individual IS an individual, as we see on NBL, with their own version of the mixture of belief and disbelief and their own political and philosophical and religious outlooks, and some have children and grandchildren and some are thinking of survival chances, some of suicide, some of resistance, and so on.
I have had more than a year to dwell upon my own position, and to watch the responses in my own being, and in the people whom I like and respect, and the voices I admire, who also grasp the profound and terrible tragedy facing us all. For a long time, there was commiseration, but then what ? Commiseration fatigue ? How can anyone commiserate with anonymous thousands, let alone millions ?
Again, there’s lots of speculation as to the detail of how the crash will play out and how societies will respond as they collapse. I’m not going to add much to that here, it’s all available elsewhere. We either get a die back, and a bottle neck, with a few survivors, or a complete die off and total extinction event. I think we get the latter, but even if it is the former, none of us are going to know any of those people, as to who they will be, or where or what becomes of them, so why does it matter ? And why would anyone choose to have to live through whatever horrendous circumstances they will have to endure, following the trauma of the ending of civilisation ? Perhaps some people will just happen to find themselves in such a situation. Who knows ?
Meanwhile, here we are. Peak just about everything, where we start the big slide down into the abysmal depths of whatever awaits us all… the biggest crisis that the human species has ever faced, 7 point something billion of us, with millions more arriving here every month. There is no discernible global leadership of any kind that comprehends our dire situation, only madmen and corruption and people locked in to dead cultural paradigms.
What does a dead cultural paradigm look like ?
Well, we’ve got Joseph Tainter to give us some clues from the historical record and maybe Heathcote Williams to bring us up to date with the contemporary scene
From what I understand of history, we can expect a hard swing toward fascist dystopia, as regimes try desperately to exert total control over everything, and hard swings from repressed populations and factions which reciprocate with resistance.
The future will be whatever it will be. Every day I walk up and down the Beach of Doom and kick at pieces of poisonous plastic flotsam and miscellaneous cosmic debris left by the virtual tide, and gaze at the orange purple bruises on the tangerine sky and sometimes I bicker and haggle with someone.
Yesterday it was Lidia at NBL to whom I am grateful for an insight into something or other.
You see, people can be very roughly divided into two groups. Those who primarily hold a religious, or spiritual, or romantic, or mythical world view. And those who primarily hold a scientific, or materialist, or rationalist world view.
Of course, this is a crude over-simplification, and speaking to any individual, you’ll soon find they hold all kinds of contradictory beliefs. But roughly, it’s Mythos and Logos, or Iain McGilchrist’s Right and Left Hemispheres.
So, Lidia was kind enough to describe her worldview, her welt anschauung, her cosmology, her mental conception of how reality is structured, her epistemology, her way of ‘knowing your place in the Universe’.
I hope she will forgive my using her as an example, and the exchange several days ago was only a brief re-run of a much longer version we had on the now defunct NTE ning, some months ago, so I think I do have a fairly full idea as to her thinking, but so as not to risk any personal offence, I’ll take the illustration away from Lidia, and apply it to any generic physicist or scientist or person with a similar belief system, of whom I have met very, very many. This will allow me some poetic license possibly, avoiding danger of maligning the good Lidia, I hope.
You see, according to this paradigm of reality, there is only physics. Everything is physics.
That means that everything is explained by physics. That means no mystery, because even if there is mystery, that’s only due to physics not yet explaining it. And once mystery is killed off, it’s relatives, cousins – things like awe, wonder, sanctity, sacredness, the numinous – easily shrivel and die too.
So, that reality ‘out there’, and this reality ‘in here’, is all meaningless, because it only means something if we impose some wishful magical thinking onto the physics, which, as objective scientists, we are not allowed to do.
And that reality ‘out there’ is just ‘stuff’, and it interacts with this reality ‘in here’, the brain, which again is just ‘stuff’. It’s all physics, it’s all physical stuff, and even though we don’t understand all of it – even don’t understand most of it, or, if pressed, hardly ANY of it, hahaha – in theory, physics can, and will, explain all of it, one day, so no problem.
So, it’s quite interesting to trace back where this story, this Logos story, comes from, and it’s quite easy to do, because it’s well documented and researched, and it goes back to Descartes and his radical scepticism, and the ideas given to him by an angel (Mythos) and his struggle to find anything, something, that he could not undermine by radical doubt, and his arrival at ‘I think, therefore I am’ and then the beginnings of modern science.
Given that the Church of Rome was the dominant power in Europe at the time, an accommodation had to be made between the rising power of science and the prevailing authority, and thus we got an expedient result, the division which gave the material world to the scientists and the spiritual world to the priests. That’s why there’s no God or spirits involved in physics. Which, you may say, is an excellent thing. But let us call it, for the moment, ‘a mixed blessing’.
Because, you see, if you follow the epistemology carefully, and look at it very closely, something absolutely amazing emerges.
Einstein said that our ordinary common senses give us ‘naive realism’. That is, grass is green, rocks are hard, and snow is cold. But physics, if it is true, tells us that this naive realism is all wrong, physics tells us that the reality is quite different, something completely different is actually going on, out there and in here.
Now, it’s all very well for someone like Einstein, or Niels Bohr, or Feynman, to come up with these ideas, as professional physicists, but what happens when this scientific worldview, this basically Cartesian worldview, is taught to us lesser mortals as part of the culture, and internalised as epistemology, and preached to us as ontology, and integrated into general social cosmology ?
This is where it gets really weird, a MOST extraordinary thing – because when I thought over what Lidia had told me, nowhere in the depiction and analysis is there anywhere for A HAPPY HEALTHY COMPLETE HUMAN BEING.
Isn’t that bizarre ? That human beings have come up with a teaching as to what the world is and what the totality of the Universe is, which does not even include the organism that WE ARE, AT ALL ?
I mean, that strikes me as exceptionally odd. Prior to Descartes, the cosmology was a sort of Divine Order, with the Heavens above and layers with angels and God at the pinnacle and so forth. And people were taught this, and their place in the social hierarchy of feudalism was essentially justified because the King was a sort of representative of God on Earth, and so on. So although we can scoff at the nonsense of it, at least at the time, if you were a peasant, you featured in the story.
If you were out in the fields with your ox and your plough and you were gazing at the distant rainbow and thinking about your dead grandfather and you heard the church bells peeling for a wedding in the village next door, all sorts of strange impressions could flicker through your mind, but basically you had a cosmology which placed God somewhere ‘up there’ and you ‘down here’ with a coherent pattern where your birth and living and death belonged with the landscape and the community and the larger reality.
Therefore, the map, the mental model ‘in here’, when projected and overlaid upon reality, had in it the human subject as its focal point, and because that’s what the human subject had been taught, a story was established featuring the ME.
But now, not only have they written God out, with Descartes and the Cartesian Paradigm of reality as the basis of modern science, but you’ve got a model, a cosmology, which has written US, as human beings, biological creatures, right out of the system altogether, as if they were not even involved !
And then people have internalised this model and taken it to be their own personal reality that they use to explain the world to themselves.
I wonder what that does for a person’s health ? I wonder what it does, when millions of people do something like that ?
The Christian Fundamentalists may be completely round the bend when it comes to LOGIC but maybe they just feel intuitively that what they are being offered by the people who argue against them, a worldview, a cosmology, which says NOTHING MEANS ANYTHING, and a worldview, a cosmology, which doesn’t have ANY PLACE where a happy healthy human, a biological human being, can even fit into it, is so sterile and horrible, that they intuitively reject it and are hostile to it ?
Because, if you look at anthropology or what Joseph Campbell said about myth, what a belief system provides for a tribal people is a safe mental refuge. When a person takes a mental excursion into fantasy and ponders the nature of their own life and identity, and the dream they had last night, and their relationships with the world around them and other folks, and the stars above and so forth, the whole purpose of the cosmology is to deliver them safely back unto THEMSELVES.
I mean, think of acid trips and ayauasca and mushrooms and vision quests and all that stuff, where you encounter visions of beings from other dimensions and the most mind-boggling experiences, the idea is to get back to start, square 1, more or less sane and intact.
The same applies to ordinary daydreams and fantasies and all our thinking about our ordinary experiences. How can we be sane and healthy, if our fundamental belief system does not even include a home base option anywhere within it ?
You know, who cares what the physics says. Primarily, we are human beings, biological animals, that cry when we are hurt and sad, and laugh when we are happy, and get sentimental about babies and kittens, and need clean water and food, etc. AND we need a meaningful Universe which has a place for US in it, with a STORY that makes sense as to why we exist…
You know, a story we can UNDERSTAND about who we are and what we are doing here.
At the moment, all these stories we are being told are crap because they are not accurate with the science, strictly speaking, since they can’t be; we can’t get any clear picture from the physicists as to the ultimate nature of all the quantum stuff and the Universe. In addition, these cultural stories are unsatisfactory at the human level when they LEAVE OUT the human being and pretend it’s all some sort of abstract empty machine.
What’s more, from what a large percentage of quantum physicists have plainly stated, you cannot leave the physicist out of the experiment because the observer EFFECTS the observation. Now, I recognize this is contentious, there is no consensus, and it’s not clear what this means. But !
So, what does a ‘good story’ look like ? Well, that’s hard… but I’m glad you asked.
I think this is a complicated and difficult problem, and here I am upon the Beach of Doom, with all of human history and culture, every idea that’s ever been recorded, washed up at my feet at the tide line, strewn and tangled and rotting and steaming…
Look at us, pitiful, confused Bonobos, asking ourselves questions we can’t answer, tearing ourselves and each other apart, trying to satisfy Maslow’s Hierarchy…
Is that what we are doing ? Well, the whistle has blown, the sirens are wailing, time is up, the NTE light is flashing, so there is not going to be some utopian Promised Land for the Bonobos to migrate to…
Xraymike was kind enough to point me to the definition of the word Humanistic:
1. A believer in the principles of humanism. 2. One who is concerned with the interests and welfare of humans.
“Humanism is a group of philosophies and ethical perspectives which emphasize the value and agency of human beings, individually and collectively, and generally prefers individual thought and evidence (rationalism, empiricism) over established doctrine or faith (fideism). The term humanism can be ambiguously diverse, and there has been a persistent confusion between several related uses of the term because different intellectual movements have identified with it over time.[1] In philosophy and social science, humanism refers to a perspective that affirms some notion of a “human nature” (contrasted with anti-humanism). etc…”
So let’s take that as a verbal anchorage.
I’d suggest that most human beings have a fundamental requirement, for their psychological, physiological, and social welfare, to understand ‘the world’ in a way that makes sense. So that, whenever they sit down and think things over, and run ideas through their head, they can confirm themselves and they can confirm ‘the world’ and feel okay.
Wouldn’t that be nice ? Look what we’ve got. It’s not THAT, is it.
Is it any surprise that some people want the Rapture or Alien abduction to get the hell out of this confusion ?
The epistemology that science teaches, following on from Descartes, has caused most of the damage to the biosphere over the last century or two, because nothing is sacred, everything is just dead stuff, in a dead machine, inhabited by ghostly meaningless meat robots, zeks, without any dignity or purpose of their own.
You marry that to Capitalism, an elite with power and greed as their motive, and give it to them as a tool, and hand them control of the Military, which was once meant to guard but gets turned into a predatory plundering machine.
Well. We are where we are. The lights will go out, one by one, and then a few million years of silence as the extremophiles have peace.
It could have been, might have been, a very different story, if we had all followed the example of, say, the Bishnois.
Alice Friedemann must be on the same wavelength as me. This subject of the proliferation of jellyfish caught my attention as well. Since she has done the legwork on this story, I will repost her essay below the following CBC Radio podcast with scientist Lisa-ann Gershwin:
“If jellyfish could wish for perfect conditions, these would include warming and turbid water, lack of predators and competitors, and any conditions that make it harder for other species to survive, like low oxygen or slightly more acidic water than usual. These are the very conditions we are creating at an alarming and increasing rate. And jellyfish are enjoying a renaissance like never before in history.” ~ Lisa-ann Gershwin
Alice Friedemann’s review of Stung!…
A book review of Lisa-ann Gershwin’s “Stung! On jellyfish blooms and the future of the ocean”
[ Xraymike79’s Note: The image above is purely for hyperbole. There are no jellyfish this size. The largest recorded jellyfish is the Lion’s mane jellyfish which can reach a diameter of 7 to 8 feet with tentacles 120 feet long. As Don Howe states below in the comments section: “The power of jellyfish is not in their size but in their vast numbers…”]
Move aside Steven King, jellyfish are worse than any of your demons, worse than any Grade-B monster that’s graced the silver screen. Unlike The Blob, which can be stopped by freezing, you can’t kill them. Not with chemical repellents or biocides or nets or electric shocks or introducing species that eat jellyfish like the striped sea slug. If you shoot, stab, slash, or chop off part of a jellyfish, it can regenerate lost body parts within two days. Not even the past 5 major extinction events which killed up to 90% of all life on earth, killed off the jellyfish.
Meanwhile they’re on a rampage, doing millions of dollars in damage clogging intakes of nuclear, coal, and desalination plants, killing millions of farmed fish, and destroying fishing nets with their sticky icky bodies.
The more we overfish, pollute, acidify and warm the ocean, create vast dead zones, and trawl ocean bottoms, the better the jellyfish do.
The oceans make the earth habitable for us. They generate most of the oxygen we breathe, stabilize temperatures, drive climate and weather, and absorb a third of the CO2 we’re emitting. Over 3 billion people depend on the oceans for their livelihoods; 2.6 billion depend on seafood as their main source of protein.
Most alarming of all, 40% of phytoplankton has died off globally since the 1950s – they’re not only at the base of the food chain, but they generate most of the oxygen we breathe, as well as absorb half of the carbon dioxide, and their increasing death rate will make the ocean get warmer even faster.
Why Jellyfish are taking over the world
Prolific, hard to kill, breed fast, and more – no wonder they’re so successful:
They’ve everywhere, spread around the world in ship ballast or sea currents.
Ubiquitous – from top to bottom of the ocean, from pole to pole, year-round.
Grow faster than other species to quickly take advantage of any food, and they’ll eat almost anything — copepods, fish eggs, larvae, flagellates. They eat past when they can keep consuming, spit food out, waste a great deal other creatures could have eaten. Even when they’re full, their tentacles keep capturing prey.
If there’s no food, jellyfish can consume their own body mass and get smaller and smaller until they find food again, and rapidly return to normal. Even when they grow smaller they can still reproduce.
Consume many times their body weight in high-value food but are of low-value themselves because they provide little energy, ounce for ounce, compared to the food they ate. So they have few predators.
When 2 weeks old they can lay 10,000 eggs a day that hatch 12-20 hours later
They reproduce many ways: massive orgies, fission, fusion, cloning, hermaphroditism, external fertilization, self-fertilization, copulation.
If they lose a body part, they can regenerate it within 2 days.
They are the “Last Man Standing” in eutrophication zones because they need less oxygen
Many species can tolerate any salinity level, from fresh water to salt water
They’ve survived ice ages, hothouse climates, all five mass extinctions, predators, competitors, and us.
Jellyfish in the oceans have been known to live over 10 years
Many of them avoid predators by long vertical migrations from the deep sea to the surface at night and back down again by daylight
They can wait a long time for the right conditions to bloom
Just as plants have seeds which can endure many years waiting for optimum conditions to grow, jellyfish have a seed-like state called a polyp that waits for good conditions, and can clone themselves to create armies of ‘seeds’ waiting to burst into jellyfish blooms seemingly overnight. Polyps don’t “grow up” to become jellyfish. They spawn what we think of as jellyfish – the medusa — which then mate sexually to produce polyps, which stick to rocks, shells, man-made structures, plastic, etc. Both the polyps and the medusa could be considered “immortal” – when a polyp dies it’s clones live on, and when the medusa form of jellyfish dies, it’s pieces turn back into polyps (though I wasn’t clear if all species or just some do this).
Jellyfish are at the top of the food chain
That seems so wrong– a primitive brainless blob? But jellyfish eat much larger clams, crabs, starfish, snails, and fast, smarter fish and squid.
They’re also at the top because not much wants to eat them.
Worse yet, they outcompete other sea life by devouring the eggs and larvae of species that would have grown up to eat jellyfish larvae. It’s a double whammy since these larvae never grow up, leaving a lot more food for jellyfish to consume. A jellyfish bloom can clear the water of all eggs, larvae, copepods, and small plankton in less than a day. This makes it almost impossible for some overfished species to make a comeback.
While the attention of everyone is turned towards the latest gun violence in America, the unprecedented flooding in Colorado speaks of a future of fire and flood which will cause untold damage and death as industrial civilization continues to employ its vast army of CO2-belching fossil fuel slaves. There’s no escaping climate chaos, whether you live on the coast or high atop a mountain in the middle of the country. The latest Colorado floods have reportedly damaged or destroyed 19,000 homes with 8 people confirmed dead so far and well over 1,000 persons unaccounted for as of today. Fracking wells are also leaking into the flooded waters.
You may be asking yourself how the Southwest is experiencing such floods when it has been in a mega-drought for the last quarter century. As the planet heats up from mankind’s greenhouse gases, evaporation increases. Higher temperatures effectively pump more energy into the atmosphere and intensify the hydrologic cycle of the planet. The moisture holding capacity of the atmosphere also increases with higher temperatures. Extremes of drought and flood are the end result, although it is believed by the end of the century that the effects of higher temperatures on evaporation are expected to outweigh precipitation, leading to drought becoming the more common climate condition. A hotter planet(milder winters and longer summers) also diminishes snowpack leading to less soil moisture and drier conditions which are at greater risk of drought, heat waves, and wild fires.
In Colorado, the recent floods were made worse by that state’s mega-fires which destroyed the plant life on the ground. The suppression of fires by man over the last century has also disrupted natural cycles, causing forests to become overgrown and dense. Drought-stressed trees have succumbed to bark beetle infestation and early snowmelt has fed the growth of underbrush to produce a tinderbox of fuel for monster infernos. A scorched landscape with no trees, bushes, and vegetation to hold in moisture allows the rainwater to simply flow unimpeded down the mountain slopes, quickly eroding the soil. The unparalleled amount of rainfall also overwhelms the Earth’s ability to absorb it. The graph below illustrates how remarkable the current flooding is. This graph is from one particular weather station in Boulder that has recorded daily precipitation over the last 120 years. Each red cross represents the amount of rainfall in a day and it is plotted according to how often that amount occurs over a given expanse of time from 1 to 10,000 years. Only a few measurements fall past the 10 year occurrence rate, while the amount of rain that fell one day this past week (120 millimeters or 4.8 inches) at this particular station is seen way above and beyond anything else recorded since 1893. Note that yesterday(Monday) Boulder Colorado hit 30.14 inches of annual rainfall which breaks the previous single year record set in 1995 of 29.93 inches. And the year is not yet over.
NOAA satellite image from the evening of September 11, 2013 showing the devastating storm system bearing down on Colorado:
A blocking pattern has set up over the western United States, drawing a conveyor belt of tropical moisture north from coastal Mexico. Blocking patterns form when the jet stream slows to a crawl, and weather patterns get stuck in place. When all that warm, wet air hit the Rocky Mountains, it had nowhere to go but up, pushed further skyward by the mountains themselves. By some measurements, the atmosphere at the time of the heaviest rains was among the most soaked it has ever been in Colorado…
…Why it will keep happening: Blocking patterns are fertile ground for extreme weather. A blocking pattern near Greenland was also to blame for steering Superstorm Sandy toward the east coast of the United States last fall. Persistent high pressure this year in the western United States has led to what is (so far) California’s driest year on record. That, in turn, fueled last month’s massive Rim Fire in Yosemite National Park, which grew to a size larger than New York City.
Big Thompson Canyon, Colorado Before (top) and After (bottom):
Historic, “unbelievable” rainfall in New Mexico on Thursday caused flooding in areas that typically have little to no flow at this time of year. An area in the Guadalupe Mountains received 11 inches in a 24-hour period. The state has been grappling with intense drought in 2013, and riverbeds that are usually dry have become treacherous. Carlsbad Caverns National Park closed on Thursday because of the flooding…
…Extreme rainfall events have become more frequent across the U.S. during the past several decades in part due to manmade global warming. Increasing air and ocean temperatures mean that the air is generally carrying more water vapor than it used to, and this moisture can be tapped by storm systems to yield rain or snow extremes. Trends in extreme precipitation events vary by region, though, and in general the biggest increases have taken place in the Midwest and Northeast. However, most parts of the U.S. have seen an increase in extreme precipitation events, according to the draft National Climate Assessment report that was released this past January. The report goes on to note that in the future, “increases in the frequency and intensity of extreme precipitation events are projected for most U.S. areas.
The global picture of weather disasters shows an upward trend according to Munich RE, one of the largest reinsurers in the world:
With all the evidence of climate chaos piling up daily, I’m having a hard time taking seriously a species that calls itself wise, yet worries more about things like erectile dysfunction and breast implants rather than the quickly fading habitability of planet Earth. We are blind to our own self-destruction.
In his hubris, mankind went about subduing, indexing, commodifing, and exploiting all of Earth. He paid very little heed to the consequences of the shrinking richness that once characterized the natural world. Everything had a price since money had become the sole criteria by which all things, animate and inanimate, were valued. From the anthropocentric perspective, if it didn’t serve people in some way or another, what good was it? If need be, man could use his superior intellect to fix or outright replace what he had permanently destroyed. “A better life through technology” became the law of the land. Just as with the accepted tenet of never-ending economic growth, there was the unquestioned belief of technological solutions for all manmade problems brought on by industrial civilization. Hence, bees dying from a chemically saturated environment could be genetically modified to survive in our toxic soup. Extinct flora and fauna could be brought back to life with bioengineering. Where we would put such resurrected organisms in a world overloaded with humans, other than in zoos or other tiny cutouts of artificial habitat, was a question never answered.
Man became so assured of himself and his technological abilities that he began to lose track of the steadily mounting environmental assaults promising to make Earth uninhabitable for all but a few heat-loving bacteria like thermophiles. In fact many denied outright that such dangers even existed. And those whose livelihood depended on maintaining business-as-usual were more than willing to pay public relations experts who could mold popular thought in favor of such a suicidal path. Most of the truly eco-aware humans, whose numbers were so small as to be inconsequential, spent all their time refuting the ignorance and propaganda of the masses, but to no avail. How could any root causes and solutions ever really be identified if the vast majority were kept at each other’s throats? The climate change deniers fought with the scientists; the capitalists fought with the environmentalists and steady state/degrowth alternative economists, the conspiracy theorists fought with the realists, and ad infinitum. Thus consumed with dissension the human species raced over the cliff of eco-apocalypse and human extinction.
She does not measure time in years, decades, or even centuries, but in millennia. She watches unamused by the tragicomedy of humankind. She is unmoved by the self-inflicted suffering and death that is and will be wrought by our own self-serving behavior. Gaia patiently awaits the extinction of man.
…The world was void,
The populous and the powerful was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless—
A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay.
The rivers, lakes and ocean all stood still,
And nothing stirr’d within their silent depths;
Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,
And their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropp’d
They slept on the abyss without a surge—
The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
The moon, their mistress, had expir’d before;
The winds were wither’d in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perish’d; Darkness had no need
Of aid from them—She was the Universe.”
The Middle East is on the frontline of the multi-pronged crisis of overpopulation, resource depletion, and climate change. Fault lines in that region are widening as climate change exacerbates crop-destroying droughts, peak oil starves economies, and stressed populations scramble to survive. Advanced industrialized countries are buffered from the same fate only temporarily by their military and economic might. The oil-cursed Middle East also suffers from being in the crosshairs of industrial civilization’s insatiable appetite for the black stuff. Since the peak of conventional oil in 2005, the industrial world has not only turned to harder to extract and environmentally damaging unconventional sources of oil, but has also ramped up military intervention in order to keep the energy flowing. Access to resources has always been an underlying factor in all wars, but as climate change, resource depletion, and social disintegration escalate, the grip on foreign energy deposits by western powers becomes increasingly tenuous. Climate Change multiplies threats. Militarism and climate change feed off and drive each other:
The war machine of the American Empire is the single largest consumer of fossil fuels on the planet.
Our priorities are overwhelmingly skewed toward militarism in order to maintain the unsustainable, while the real threat of climate change grows ever stronger:
In the meantime, the false hope of technology maintains the illusion that our current way of life is inalienable. The industrialized monoculture farming that feeds the masses will quickly fade as synthetic fertilizers become too expensive to artificially replenish nutrient-depleted soils. Pesticides and antibiotics are losing their effectiveness as natural selection breeds super weeds and drug-resistant pathogens. Fresh water is also being sacrificed for fracking, tar sands production, and mountaintop mining. We appear to be systematically destroying any basis for future civilizations as we burn through what is left. “Forests precede mankind; deserts follow.”
Severe land degradation is now affecting 168 countries across the world, according to new research released by the UN Desertification Convention (UNCCD).
The figure, based on submissions from countries to the UN, is a marked increase on the last analysis in the mid-1990s, which estimated 110 states were at risk.
In an economic analysis published last week the Convention also warns land degradation is now costing US$490 billion per year and wiping out an area three times the size of Switzerland on an annual basis. – link
No techno-fix chicanery will bring back the melting polar caps or stop the series of runaway feedbacks loops unleashed from industrial civilization’s fatal attraction to fossil fuels. Our eyes simply don’t appreciate the full scale of climatic change now underway, eroding mankind’s food production, infrastructure, and socio-economic stability, in addition to degrading nature’s ecological resilience and biological diversity, both of which underpin all of mankind’s activities. The megatons of greenhouse gases expelled into the atmosphere by industrial activity everyday are as invisible to humans as the mountains of toxic plastic waste filling up the world’s oceans. Out of sight, out of mind until the effects become too obvious to ignore and too late to change. Overpopulation continues unabated and is in fact encouraged by the imperatives of economic growth; the environmental pressures are ignored as resources are methodically stripped and depleted to unrecoverable levels.
Despite the ingenuity and intelligence of the human race, we appear subject to the same rudimentary biological urges of the lowest single-celled organism which, if given favorable conditions, will uncontrollably multiply its numbers deep into overshoot territory until its food source is exhausted, finally extinguishing itself in a mass die-off. Environmental laws and initiatives appear to be no more than slight speed bumps in our one-way road to extinction. All this talk about curbing GHG’s, “going green”, and “saving the planet” are mere window dressings for our motorized hearse. Nice accoutrements, but the destination is still a grave.
Collapse of Industrial Civilization 